times pursued through several successive essays. They were written too at distant intervals of time, while Johnson's were produced by the necessity of stated and periodical labour within the space of two years.

From this comparison (honourable indeed to Cumberland, for with him alone can it be made, all our other essayists having been associated together in their respective labours,) two conclusions may be inferred; one, that Johnson possessed an extraordinary rapidity of conception, accompanied with a rapidity of execution as extraordinary: the other, that Cumberland, though he had, perhaps, no less rapidity of execution than Johnson, was far beneath him in that intellectual fruitfulness by which topics are not only elicited but afterwards pursued, and embellished with all the brightest ornaments of fancy, or enforced with all the weightiest arguments of reason.

The most conspicuous part of these papers, and that which Cumberland seems to have regarded as his happiest effort, is the inquiry instituted into the history of the Greek writers, particularly of the comic poets now lost. "I am vain enough," says he," to believe no such collection of the scattered extracts, anecdotes, and remains of those dramatists is any where else to be found;" and in another part of his Memoirs, he quotes, with manifest exultation, the following panegyric from the pen of Mr. Walpole, of Trinity College, Cambridge.

"Aliunde quoque haud exiguum ornamentum huic volumini accessit, siquidem Cumberlandius nostras amicè benevolèque permisit, ut versiones suas quorundam fragmentorum, exquisitas sane illas, mirúque elegantiá conditas et commendatas huc transferrem."

In writing these erudite papers, he was greatly assisted by the marginal annotations upon the authors by his grandfather Bentley, some of whose books he received from his uncle (Dr. Richard Bentley) and among them many of the writers whose works he afterwards illustrated in the Observer. That these essays, indeed, deserve every praise which so much diligence, learning, and skilful criticism can obtain, I will not deny; but they will oftener be commended than read.

It is deemed unlucky to stumble on the threshhold, but Cumberland has done so. I do not believe, indeed, that it would be possible to produce, from any writer of the last century, a paragraph so feebly involved as that with which the first number of the Observer commences. The reader wanders through it as in a maze; he finds himself at the end, at last, but wonders how he came there; he attempts to look back and disentangle the path he pursued, and beholds only inextricable confusion. I know nothing that resembles this initial paragraph, except it be some of the prolixly concatenated sentences of Gauden; but his involutions are amply redeemed by a richness

of imagination which scatters the brightest flowers over the palpable confusion.

The purport of his undertaking was, as he informs us," to tell his readers what he had observed of men and books in the most amusing manner he was able." This, indeed, was an unambitious claim, and to which I think he established a sufficient right in the progress of his labours.

Before delivering a general opinion upon this work, I wish to make some desultory observations upon particular passages, and in which I shall hope to consult the reader's pleasure and advantage.

Cumberland knew and had felt the advantages of being educated by a mother of more than ordinary literature; and it may therefore justly excite our wonder to find him ridiculing the possession, as well as the affectation, of knowledge in a female. Numbers five, six, and seven, are devoted to this purpose, and with as much success as the undertaking deserved. In Calliope it is the abuse of reading and intellectual pleasures which is exhibited, though the author's intention was evidently to render odious every female acquirement which aspired beyond those of domestic utility.

I have already animadverted, in the forty-first page of this work, upon that narrow policy which would exclude, from the fair regions of knowledge, one half of the rational creation, by reducing it to

such abject insignificance, that nothing but the instinctive appetites of the other half could rescue it from merited contempt and ignominy. By what fatality it is that men, who know the enjoyments of intellect, who know how much our moral nature is refined by the refinement of our minds, and who know, also, that mental superiority is the final scale of admeasurement by which all human excellence is adjusted, should be found so willing to depreciate that quality in the female sex which they so justly vaunt in themselves, I am unable to conjecture. Perhaps, indeed, it is the jealousy of dominion that influences them; and like some modern statesmen, who argue that men, to be governed, should be kept in salutary ignorance, they think they could not act the tyrant's part so easily as they now do, if their victims, with increased knowledge, had an increased consciousness of their own rights and privileges. From some such debased maxim they probably act, and the consequence is, that they are the first and most lamentable objects of their own oppression; upon them it recoils with that certainty of evil which it were well for mankind if every oppression produced upon its author.

It may justly provoke our indignation, however, to see Cumberland, who owed so much to the early tuition of a mother, distinguished above her sex by her intellectual attainments, and without which attainments her son must have wanted

those benefits he so feelingly commemorates in his Memoirs, striving, though ineffectually, to deride all intellectual pre-eminence in woman. His father was a bishop. Should we not feel something more than wonder if he had endeavoured, in any part of his writings, to traduce the dignities of the church, by exhibiting an episcopal coxcomb, and making the possession of a mitre the impediment to future kindness? Yet, what does he better, than tacitly traduce the acquirements of his mother, when he introduces a female pedant, with the intention to ridicule all learning in women, and exhibits her as forfeiting the hand of an intended husband, unless she burns her books, and engages never to quote a line of poetry while she lives?

The letter from this enlightened lover, where he disclaims his mistress because she reads, is written with a coarseness of argument which does not much assist the cause of ignorance. "No, no," he exclaims, in one part, "heaven defend me from a learned wife!" and in another he asks, "For God's sake what have women to do with learning?"

I will not waste my own and my reader's time, however, by combating such compendious arguments as these; but I will dismiss the subject with recounting the particulars of the lady's reformation. Finding she must either forego her husband or her books, she is made to renounce the latter, and after she is married, she gives the follow