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eth,' I do not admit any superior pretensions it hath to be Sir Oracle from the fulness of the pocket." (No. 84.)

I have forborne here to put in italics the same circumlocutions and defects which I noticed in the former extract; nor shall I weary the reader by recapitulating it in what I may consider a better mode of construction. Such minuteness is not now necessary. It is evident, however, that to a sentence thus copiously diffused, there seems no necessary limit, except the termination of the paper itself, or the accidental division of a paragraph. It may be amusing to see how some of the writers, of the seventeenth century, excelled in this kind of harmony and clearness of style. The following example is from a man, of no mean note in his own or the present age.

"A second defect, much contributing to the public detriment, by the non-improvement of scholars when they are well trained in the university, and fit to be transplanted out of those nurseries, (that being set thinner they may spread wider, grow bigger, and bear much more fruit,) is the want of public care and patrociny to prefer and dispose of them so as may be most agreeable to their abilities; many times their modesty much curbs their activity, (like ears of corn and boughs of trees, the more loaden, the more hidden and dejected,) and being wholly destitute of such friends and relations as might put them forward,

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they have this to answer any that ask why they stand still till the ninth hour of the day, because no man hath hired them, or set them on work, or preferred them; besides this, the swarms or lesser fray of other meaner scholars, who have but a little tincture of learning in comparison, and who, like barnacles or Solerne geese, too soon drop off from the university, betaking themselves to country cures, according as their necessities compel them; these so forestal the markets of parochial livings and church preferments, gaining by their obsequiousness and adherencies, the favour and friendship of such patrons as have any thing worth acceptance in their dispose, that many other good scholars are left to superannuate in their solitudes, to be confined to their muses everlastingly, as if their ears had been bored through and fixed to the college gates or study doors: as Democritus, junior, most elegantly and pathetically deplores this dereliction of rare men in the university, which makes the muses melancholy, and depriving both merit and reward, and the public of that good which these men might do as master builders. in God's temple." (Bishop Gauden's Life of Hooker.)

When a man gets to the end of a sentence like this, he takes time to breathe, and consider whether he comprehends what he has been reading; he retraces the intricate confusion, and finds nothing to compensate for its obscurity, but the flow

ers of a rich imagination, which, though scattered about in quaint devices, refresh the mind and gratify the eye. No one, however, ever thought of praising such a style for its harmony or perspicuity.

I should not have pursued this inquiry into the defects of Cumberland's diction, had he not incautiously intimated his belief that it was faultless. When he expressed his opinion that it was a model which could not mislead; that it was simple, clear, and harmonious; and that it was neither inelegant nor unclassical, I thought it my duty to examine his pretensions, and to ascertain their validity. I have done so: and though I have found his practice greatly beneath his own opinion of its excellence, I am willing to believe him sincere, when he professed that his object had been, all his life, to “reform and purify his native language.” The task, however, was beyond his power. He has met the common fate of those who labour to effect simplicity of style: he is too often mean and colloquial, when he thinks he is writing with simplicity and elegance. The happy medium between that and turgidity is seldom attained.Cumberland certainly missed it.

Yet, though I should never venture to propose his compositions as a model for imitation, I am not unconscious that he has written, in general, with fluency and plainness. He seldom endeavours after ornaments; and I imagine it was because he

knew he could not reach them, for when he does

strive, it is rarely with success. His prose is equable and familiar, and seldom rises beyond a very ordinary level. I have examined it with a minuteness of verbal criticism to which I should have been tempted by no other motive than his assumption of such perfection as I knew it did not possess and I now close my remarks upon the Observer, with observing, that it has a fair claim to maintain its station among the embodied essayists of the country, and that the name of its author will be known to posterity rather by this than by any other of his productions.

CHAP. XX,

Cumberland's inconsistency in his own statements about himself.—An apt quotation from La FoxTAINE.-Observations upon the controversy between Mr. HAYLEY and Cumberland respecting the life of ROMNEY.-Produces the tragedy of the CARMELITE.-Mrs. SIDDONS and Mr. KEMBLE.—Examination of the CARMELITE.Cumberland commemorates his friendship for Sir JAMES BLAND BURGES, Mr. SHARP, and Mr. ROGERS.-Some advice to the latter gentleman on his poetical powers.-Cumberland's daughter declines the interference of these three gentlemen in arranging her father's posthumous papers.

THE inconsistencies into which Cumberland is sometimes betrayed, in speaking of himself, shew with how little certainty any man can hope to preserve the truth even with the most reverential regard for its sanctity. When we write of others, we are in danger of listening too willingly to the voice of envy which whispers in our ears, that censure is but justice; when we write of ourselves, we are exposed to the attacks of every passion, that can obscure the perception of truth and mislead the judgment. La Fontaine has introduced one of his tales with some lines of profound sagacity on this topic:

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