impaired, by the effects of the breaking of a blood vessel, which no art could heal, every step that approached her, threw her into tremours, and it required careful preparation to enable her to support an interview with any of her children, who came at times to pay their duty to her." To a being thus debilitated by disease, death must have been a welcome event; nor could it be much otherwise than welcome to those whose duty it was to endure all the peevish and wearisome caprices of a mind broken down by infirmities.

During his abode at Tunbridge he was in the practice of paying annual visits to a Mrs. Bludworth, of Holt, near Winchester, and while there he sometimes amused himself with slight and trivial efforts of composition. These he has preserved in his Memoirs, but they have little merit. That entitled Affectation is the best,

When the terror of invasion was in its highest state of aggrandisement, and the people of England, with a promptitude of patriotism which did them immortal honour, rallied round their king and constitution, Cumberland was solicited by the inhabitants of Tunbridge to head them as volunteers, and to which solicitation he acceded. This situation he discharged with such general applause that when the volunteer system was discountenanced, and his corps dismissed, they voted him a sword by the hand of their Serjeant Major," as a tribute of their esteem for their beloved commander."

In the supplement to his Memoirs, which he published in 1806, to supply that barrenness of contemporary history which the tedious details of his Spanish mission had occasioned, he remonstrates with Mr. Hayley, who, in his life of Cowper, had attacked Cumberland for professing too great an admiration of Bentley's character. That Cumberland should have contemplated, with some enthusiasm, an ancestor so eminently endowed as Bentley, may surely be forgiven, for, of all errors, if it were one, it was the most venial. Upon this ground, therefore, Cumberland might have stood, and proudly maintained his right: but, when he censured Mr. Hayley for expressing his opinion of Bentley's qualities as a scholar and critic, he only made himself ridiculous, by shewing that he thought every man was to think of his grandfather with the same excess of fondness that he did.

This is as much as need be said of the matter, adding only that Cumberland is certainly superior to his antagonist in the elegance and mildness of his rebuke, and in the suavity of his language. I wish, however, that he had not confounded Cowper with his biographer, nor strove, while he was combating the one, to cast a shade of opprobrium upon the memory of the other. This was frivolous

resentment.

There is, in this supplement to his Memoirs, a pleasing accession of anecdote, but it is disfigured, like its preceding pages, by a prostitution of praise.

Cumberland knew not how to employ the language of commendation when speaking of his friends: every man who wrote a verse was a Milton, and every composer of a play was a Shakspeare. The lulling strains of his adulation soothe all alike; and to him might have been said what Dr. Johnson once replied to a lady who was servilely harrassing him with eulogies, Madam, before you praise me, consider what your praise is worth." Manly commendation, directed to manly attainments, is honourable to the giver and the receiver: but the friskings of a fawning applauder excite only contempt when interested, and only pity when the result of imbecility.

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It is curious, too, to remark upon what grounds Cumberland sometimes builds the foundations of his applause. He is absolutely convulsed with admiration when he tells that his friend, Sir James Bland Burges, wrote his poem of Richard Cœur de Lion, with more rapidity than Pope translated Homer: but I am afraid they who have formed the most accurate opinion of Sir James' genius will easily believe that he might have written it all in just that time which was requisite to commit it to paper. Yet Cumberland tells him that he writes like Homer: and then naturally wonders that the world has not estimated the merit of his "extraordinary poem." I have no objection, however, that he should be a second Homer, for Dr. Drake has told us that Cumberland was a second Milton.

To the real merits of Sir James Bland Burges, I hope I am as sensible as any man need be: but I feel more sorrow than offence when I see a respectable writer in danger of being transformed into a literary fop by the malignant influence of undeserved praise. Sir James will think he knows the origin of this opinion, and may wander into error perhaps if he would know the true one, he may wander through his own works. I hope I am incapable of visiting the offences of the man upon the author, as I know I am incapable of praising any man whom I do not think deserving of it: but I will own, that tenderness for a friend would teach me to suppress the opinion whose disclosure would hurt his feelings. Nay, an obligation less solemn than friendship, the remembrance of past courtesies, would impel me to the same forbearance: and Sir James may, therefore, guess why I have now told what I think. Had Johnson been my contemporary, and had he conducted himself towards me with an insincerity which a gentleman might blush at, I might have accused him of it, but I could not, without the charge of impotent malignity, have retaliated, by telling him of his imbecility as a writer. I now return to Cumberland.

It would be tedious to follow him through all the discursive pages of his supplement, for who wishes to know that Mr. Sharon Turner wrote a letter to him full of compliments, and that he is consequently one of the best writers, one of

the most learned antiquarians, and most enlightened scholars of his time," that the Earl of Dorchester flattered him with another letter, and that Lord Erskine refused to write him any letter? These things, and many like them, may surely be passed over, without any loss to the reader, or any reproach to myself. It may be mentioned, however, that for the melo-dramatic piece, which was represented at Drury-Lane theatre in commemoration of the illustrious Nelson's death, he received the present of a gold snuff-box;-and that the Lord Chamberlain refused his license to a more matured effort for the same purpose, which was to have been acted at Covent-Garden on the evening after his public funeral.

Cumberland seems to have shared, with Johnson, an antipathy to Gray. He calls him, in the first volume of his Memoirs, by no very cleanly metaphor, "the most costive of poets," alluding, I suppose, to the paucity of his production; and in his poem of Retrospection, he mentions him with a sort of contumelious pertness, where he parallels his ode on the death of Walpole's cat with the puny effusions of youthful witlings, whom injudicious admiration would cocker into great poets as Cumberland himself would some of his friends. This prejudice, however, against a man whose writings breathe all the genuine inspiration of poetry, is entitled to very little respect for it seems to have been enter