other vacancy happening, he was translated to the see of Kilmore.

Meanwhile, Lord Halifax received the seals of Secretary of State, and Cumberland could not but expect some preferment. He had devoted ten years of his life to his lordship's service, receiving in return an income certainly not sufficient for the support of that appearance which the situation imposed upon him; and now that his patron had an opportunity of rewarding those years of assiduous attention, without any personal sacrifice, it could not be very presumptuous in Cumberland to suppose that his will would be second to his power. But he knew not a courtier's code of ethics. He had studied our moral duties in another school, and when he applied his reasonings to the actions of a minister of state, he found them useless; he found the simple notions of right and wrong too unadorned to captivate the hearts and minds of men, versed in the collusions of political science, and practised in the evasions of truth.

Lord Halifax had to name an under-secretary, and, passing over him who had the fairest and most apparent right to the nomination, he appointed a Mr. Sedgewicke to the situation: a person whose claims amounted only to one year's attendance upon Lord Halifax in Ireland, as his Master of the Horse, and some little proficiency perhaps in details not yet familiar to Cumberland. To him however the vacancy was given; and he stepped

into a station of honour and profit, by the mere aid of intrigue and subserviency to designs at which a better man would have spurned. When Cumberland tendered his services, as a matter of form, upon his lordship's appointment, he received this cool, brief, and repulsive answer-he was not fit for every situation. And wherein was his deficiency? Because he could not fluently discourse in French. Such was the ostensible reason; but the real one was so different that, as Cumberland justly observes, "had he possessed the elegance and perfection of Voltaire himself in that language, he would not have been a step nearer to the office in question."

Driven from what might be considered as his legitimate road of promotion, he turned aside and sought for indemnification in humbler paths. And here, I cannot justify his conduct. It was not dishonourable, but it was mean; it was not the course of a man perfectly high minded, who feels, with dignity, the contempt that is shewn him, and proves, by his actions, that it was unjustly bestowed. He retired from the employment of Lord Halifax, and condescended to apply for and accept, the very situation which his rival, Mr. Sedgewicke, had vacated. This was confirming that inferiority which Lord Halifax had asserted; and it betrayed, likewise, an unworthy desire of money, for surely no other motive could prompt him to a step so inconsistent with his own re

spectability. Nor was the salary, attached to the situation, such as could render its possession an object of desire to a man whose feelings of propriety were not in total slavery to his avarice: it was but two hundred pounds a-year, certainly not necessarily an income of importance to a man whose talents might always procure more than that without any degradation. I do not wonder, therefore, that when he mentioned his intention of applying for this situation, (which was that of Clerk of the Reports to the Board of Trade), to Lord Halifax, his lordship remonstrated with him upon the indignity, and hinted at the meanness of submitting to such an office, after the situation he had stood in with respect to him.

It had been no reply to this reproof had Cumberland answered "Why then does not your lordship provide for me more worthily?-Why do you not give me a station fitter for one who has served under you in a post of confidence and trust ?" This might have been a reproach of his lordship's dereliction, but no justification of Cumberland's. The action by which he sought to retrieve the loss he had sustained, was one which belonged solely to himself: it was not forced upon him by any injustice of others, nor by any considerations of necessity with regard to his own condition: he had lost something which might easily have been replaced by economy and industry in various paths of exertion but, submitting to be the successor of

him who had stepped into the vacancy he had a right to expect, and which he missed, from incapacity, was a proceeding altogether foreign from the feelings of a man whose self-reverence is founded upon a clear and distinct conception of what he owes to himself. I confess I wish Cumberland had acted just the reverse of what he did, and nobly disdained a compensation which he could not but ignobly receive.

Such was the termination of his intercourse with Lord Halifax; an intercourse which commenced auspiciously, but ended as court connexions commonly do, with disappointment and vexation. Had Cumberland been more obsequious, he had, perhaps, been more successful: and more obsequious he probably had been, but for a secret bias to literature which, wherever it exists, effectually controls every other passion, absorbs every other wish, and leaves its object no other desire but to signalise himself in the theatre which his imagination has adorned with the most profuse splendor. Eager to pursue the career of literary glory, which amused his fancy with its enticing forms, it is likely he was less zealous to court favour in her political haunts, satisfied if she bestowed enough to carry on the chief concerns of life, without demanding from him sacrifices that would enfeeble his pursuit of the renown he greatly coveted; and hence, perhaps, he quietly sat down in Mr. Sedgewicke's

place when capricious fortune had denied him a better.

Whatever resentment Cumberland may have felt at the moment when he was thus injuriously treated by Lord Halifax, all remembrance of it seems to have subsided, when he wrote his Memoirs, for the recollection of these events calls forth no revilings from his pen, no expressions of bitterness, nor any of those allowable censures which the contemplation of insincerity may be permitted to excite. Christian forbearance implies patience under every injury, and I hope it was from this motive only that Cumberland acted; but human nature is so apt to rebel, and those feelings which heaven itself has given us, which education developes, which society brings into action, and which individual honour is compelled to summon as its safeguard and testimony, concur so powerfully to overthrow that perfect humility and suffering which our Saviour so divinely taught and so divinely practised, that when I behold it acting without any alloy of human weakness, I own I am rather inclined to think it the guise of hypocrisy, which veils its resentments when they are ineffectual, rather than the language of a purely Christian meekness, which forgives as truly as it hopes to be forgiven. Not that I would insinuate this with regard to Cumberland, for I should abhor the man whose rancour neither the death of its object, nor the long lapse of years could subdue ;