and upon the alarm given by my wife who perfectly recognized his person, was only driven out of it by force. Again when I was in Paris, and about to sit down to dinner, a sallad was brought to me by the lacquey, who waited on me, which was given to him for me by a red-haired Dominican, whose person, according to his description, exactly tallied with that of the aforesaid monk; I dispatched my servant Camis in pursuit of him, but he had escaped, and my suspicion of the sallad being poisoned was confirmed by experiment on a dog.

"I shall only add that somewhere in Castile, I forget the place, but it was between Valladolid and Burgos, as I was sitting on a bench at the door of a house, where my Calasseros were giving water to the mules, I tendered my snuff box to a grave elderly man, who seemed of the better sort of Castilians, and who appeared to have thrown himself in my way, sitting down beside me as one who invited conversation. The stranger looked steadily in my face, and after a pause put his fingers in my box, and, taking a very small portion of my snuff between them, said to me, I am not afraid, Sir, of trusting myself to you, whom I know to be an Englishman, and a person, in whose honour I may

inveighing against England and her government; and when Cumberland entered his carriage he walked by the side of it, pertinaciously resisting his progress and anathematising the drivers if they dared to move onwards; nor did he quit his post, or cease from his vociferations, till they had passed through all the outposts and were in sight of Badajoz.

perfectly repose. But there is death concealed in many a man's snuff box, and I would seriously advise you on no account to take a single pinch from the box of any stranger, who may offer it to you; and if you have done that already, I sincerely hope no such consequences as I allude to will result from your want of caution.' I continued in conversation with this stranger for some time; I told him I had never before been apprised of the practices he had spoken of, and, being perfectly without suspicion, I might, or might not, have exposed myself to the danger, he was now so kind as to apprize me of, but I observed to him that however prudent it might be to guard myself against such evil practices in other countries, I should not expect to meet them in Castile, where the Spanish point of honour most decidedly prevailed. · Ah, Senor,' he replied, they may not all be Spaniards, whom you have chanced upon, or shall hereafter chance upon, in Castile.' When I asked him how this snuff operated on those who took it, his answer was, as I expected- On the brain.' I was not curious to enquire who this stranger was, as I paid little attention to his information at the time, though I confess it occurred to me, when after a few days I was seized with such agonies in my head, as deprived me of my senses: I merely give this anecdote, as it occurred; I draw no inferences from it."

There is enough of agreeable mystery in this account to serve a novel-writer for the basis of a terrible incident. How might he paint an insidious assassin lurking about to snare his victim with a pinch of snuff; and death entering at an avenue hitherto unused in fiction.

CHAP. XVIII.

Cumberland's forbearance in relating the treatment he received from the English government.-His MEMORIAL, addressed to LORD NORTH.-Its failure.-His warm remonstrances to Mr. SECRETARY ROBINSON.- Retires to Tunbridge.Celebrates that place in his MEMOIRS and in RETROSPECTION.-The pleasures of reading.The family which accompanied him to Tunbridge. -Publishes his ANECDOTES OF SPANISH PAINTERS.-Accused of attacking SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.-Examination of this charge. Brief history of painting in Spain.-His comedy of the WALLOONS acted.—His character of HENDERSON. The sneering scepticism of DAVIES reproved.

I HAVE dwelt much longer upon Cumberland's narrative of what occurred to him in Spain than it was, at first, my intention to do: nor should I have departed from that intention had I not become impressed with the idea that it formed a remarkable era in the life of a literary man, that it was distinguished by circumstances of a peculiar nature, and that Cumberland had been treated with a degree of injustice, by his employers, too flagrant to be passed over without some expression of abhorrence.

His own recital of this injustice is written without any acrimony. He tells of it as of a misfortune which befell him, but he does not vent reproaches

or insults against those who were the authors of that misfortune. He laments the loss which he sustained, and the privations which such a loss must force upon a man who means to live honestly in society; but he laments it with the sensibility of a wounded, not with the bitterness of a resentful, heart. This meekness, this charitable oblivion of so violent an injury, of an injury whose consequences extended to the last moment of his life, and under which he bent at the very moment when he wrote, deserves to be recorded with the highest approbation: it adds a lustre to his misfortune, and awakens the pity and veneration of those who contemplate a man nearly in his eightieth year, temperately recounting the adverse strokes of unmerited misfortune by which his proudest hopes of life were blighted.

With what injustice he seems to have been treated, and what claims he appears to have had upon the government, the following memorial will shew:

"To the Right Honourable Lord North,

&c. &c. &c.

"The humble Memorial of Richard Cumberland "Sheweth,

"That your Memorialist, in April 1780, received his Majesty's most secret and confidential orders and instructions to set out for the court of Spain in company with the Abbe Hussey, one of his Catholic Majesty's chaplains, for the