more willingly assent to some of those which she afterwards expresses.

"There is an absurd attempt in his Observer, to ridicule that immortal and matchless imaginary history, the Clarissa, which Dr. Johnson pronounced not only the first novel, but perhaps the first work in this language*.

"To the author of a little volume of very ingenious essays, published by Cadell in 1788, and entitled Variety, I gave two numbers, which exposed the false reasoning of that invidious tract in the Observer. This history, which the author of that work gives of himself in a huge quarto volume, contains a new attempt to tear the laurels from those glorious volumes. It has the effrontery to call their Grandison a nauseous pedant. And how Cumbey, as Johnson used to call him, writhes

born since Adam's time. How much less then could the little garden of Eden!" (Vol VI. p. 239). Really such "laboured nothings in so grave a style" deserve to be stigmatised.

Here I close this long note. I have expressed a very strong and unqualified disapprobation of Miss Seward's Letters, and I thought it but equit. able to advance some grounds for my censures. I cannot be certain that they will appear equally valid to others as to myself; but of this I am certain, that I am actuated by no sinister motive. Miss Seward I never saw ; with her I never corresponded; from her pen I have received neither censure nor praise. I read with an unprejudiced mind, and with an unprejudiced mind I have declared my sentiments. They who differ from me will think me perhaps unreasonably fastidious; let them think me sincere, and I shall be contented..

* When it suits this lady to corroborate her own sentiments by those of Dr. Johnson, how willingly she refers to him as an authority; on all other occasions her malignity towards him is no less conspicuous than it is con temptible.

under the fame of the young Roscius, and avows the mortification it cost him to see Master Betty, as in scorn he terms him, going to rehearsal in a coach that bore a ducal coronet!

"And, on my word, Cumbey slips his falcon at high game, in verse as well as in prose, since, with equal effrontery to his defamation of Richardson, does he speak of Gray, whom Dr. Beattie justly pronounced next to Milton in the strength and grandeur of his muse.

Then, with what acrimony does he resent Mr. Hayley's testimony to an opinion universal in the learned world, of Dr. Bentley as a critic in English poetry. On what foundation that opinion stands, let Bentley's ridiculous edition of Milton, with its heap of absurd notes and presumptuous alterations of the text, witness! Surely every author is free to speak his opinion of a deceased brother! If that opinion be unjust, let men of letters prove that injustice by reasons shewn; but for a descendant of an arraigned author to take up the matter with resentment, and make it a family quarrel, is ridiculous in the extreme. There are, however, very amusing things in this selfish quartogood characteristic portraits of Soame Jenyns, Foote, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Garrick; and poor Cumbey was vilely treated by our government concerning that Spanish expedition. The violation of its engagement to him was utterly dishonest and cruel, of which the official letters are proofs incontrovertible."

To some of the opinions contained in the preceding extract, I shall have occasion to recur in the progress of this work; but it is sufficiently proved by one part of it, that Cumberland's title to the original of Sheridan's portrait has been faithfully believed by many.

In the ensuing year (1770) Cumberland paid his annual visit to his father, and while there he projected, and partly composed, his comedy of the West Indian. The history of its production justifies my remarks upon the folly of that mode of study which Cumberland boasts having adopted when he wrote the Brothers. Instead of writing in the midst of children he now seated himself in a little closet in his father's mansion, unfurnished and out of use, with only one window, and no prospect from that window but a turf-stack, with which it was almost in contact.

This was now his plan but surely it was inconsistent with his former account, to declare, as he does at page 276 of his Memoirs, "that in all his hours of study it had been his object through life so to locate himself as to have little or nothing to distract his attention." I conceive there are few things more calculated to distract our attention than the babble of children, which he acknowledges he sometimes endured, while he was solicitous to exclude the cheering and unobtrusive beauties of nature from his view at such times, by "always avoiding pleasant prospects."

In this closet his mother occasionally visited him,

and animated him with her remarks upon the progress of his work, which went on felicitously, for every thing combined to render its author so. Removed from the bustle of office and its cares, from the intrusions of society and its temptations, and surrounded by his parents, sister, wife, and children, he beheld within his view all that a man can desire, whose views of happiness are founded upon a rational basis. Safe too from the malevolence of critics, and the competitions of rivalry, his mind was calm and concentrated to its purpose; and he declares that at no other period of his life did the same happy circumstances combine to cheer him in any of his literary labours.

In his poem of Retrospection he indulges in a pleasing vein of contemplation as he recals those moments of departed happiness, which he passed in the bosom of his family. It is short, and may be transcribed:

But come, Oh Memory, bring thy volume forth,

And let me see how many whiter days

In years long past thy calendar can shew.

Oh blest remembrances! ye now unfold,

And spread before me, scenes of young delight;
Stanwick's beloved mansion greets me now-
I feel a mother's welcome fond embrace;

I see, I see a sainted father smile,
List'ning indulgent to my school-boy tale→
Oh stay delicious vision! Vanish not

So suddenly, ye dear parental shades.

O leave not yet a son, who lov'd you ever,

Obey'd you living, and bewail'd you dead ;

Behold me now, how chang'd, how grey with years!

Stay then, and from my filial bosom draw

These thorns that never would have rankled here

Had I, like you my father, humbly been
The servant of my God, nor toil'd to earn
The unpaid wages of a thankless world.

Still, still by Retrospection's magic power,
Though threescore years and ten have interver.'d,
I'm wafted back to boyhood, and behold,
To mental clear as to my natʼral eye

The honour'd form of Bentley.-At his desk
Beside his garden window, deep in thought,
With books embay'd, the learn'd master sits:
Unaw'd I run to him: around my neck

He throws his arms; methinks e'en now I feel
Their pressure and his kiss upon my cheek :
And lo! at once the page of ancient lore,
That offers no amusement to my sight

Is shut, the golden chain of his bright thoughts

Is snapt without a murmur-palsey struck

And halting, see! he rises from his chair,

And spreads before me what his shelves can show
Of prints, to gratify an idle boy."

There is a tender melancholy in this passage which wins its way to the reader's heart. It exhibits such remembrances as every man feels, and feels with greater fervency, as the rude collisions of the world remind him of what he has lost.

If the memory of Cumberland were faithful, and that in writing his Memoirs he did not sometimes confound the notions of advanced life with what he conceived himself to have possessed when a younger man, it may be pronounced that he formed a very distinct and just conception of the province of a comic writer for the stage, when he himself meditated to assume that character. There is necessarily, however, some uncertainty attached