"H

RICHARD CUMBERLAND

1894

E has written comedies at which we have cried and tragedies at which we have laughed; he has composed indecent novels and religious epics; he has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing his own life and the private history of his acquaintances." Of whom is this a portrait, and who is the limner? What are the names of the comedies and the tragedies and the novels thus highly recommended to the curious reader? These are questions, I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public interest.

The

The quotation is from a review in the Quarterly, written by Sir Walter Scott, of old Richard Cumberland's last novel, John de Lancaster, published in 1809, when its author, "the Terence of England," was well-nigh eighty years of age. passage is a fierce one, but Scott's good-nature was proof against everything but affectation. No man minded a bad novel less than the author of Guy Mannering and The Heart of Midlothian. I am certain he could have pulled Bishop Thirlwall through The Wide, Wide World, in the middle of which, for some unaccountable reason, that great novel-reading prelate stuck fast. But an author had only to pooh-pooh the public taste, to sneer at popularity, to discourse solemnly on his function as a teacher of his age and master of his craft, to make Sir Walter show his teeth, and his fangs

were formidable; and the storm of his wrath all the more tremendous because bursting from a clear sky.

I will quote a few words from the passage in John de Lancaster which made Scott so angry, and which he pronounced a doleful lamentation over the "praise and pudding which Cumberland alleges have been gobbled up by his contemporaries":

If in the course of my literary labours I had been less studious to adhere to nature and simplicity, I am perfectly convinced I should have stood higher in estimation with the purchasers of copyright, and probably have been read and patronised by my contemporaries in the proportion of

ten to one.

It seems a harmless kind of bleat after all, but it was enough to sting Scott to fury, and make him fall upon the old man in a manner somewhat too savage and tartarly. Some years later, and after Cumberland was dead, Sir Walter wrote a sketch of his life in the vein we are better accustomed to associate with the name of Scott.

Cumberland was a voluminous author, having written two epics, thirty-eight dramatic pieces, including a revised version of Timon of Athensof which Horace Walpole said, " he has caught the manners and diction of the original so exactly that I think it is full as bad a play as it was before he corrected it "a score or two of fugitive poetical compositions, including some verses to Dr. James, whose powders played almost as large a part in the lives of men of that time as Garrick himself, numerous prose publications and three novels, Arundel, Henry, and John de Lancaster. Of the novels, Henry is the one to which Sir Walter's epitaph is least inapplicable-but Cumberland

meant no harm. Were I to be discovered on Primrose Hill, or any other eminence, reading Henry, I should blush no deeper than if the book had been David Grieve.

Cumberland has, of course, no place in men's memories by virtue of his plays, poems, or novels. Even the catholic Chambers gives no extracts from Cumberland in the Encyclopedia. What keeps him for ever alive is-first, his place in Goldsmith's great poem, Retaliation; secondly, his memoirs, to which Sir Walter refers so unkindly; and thirdly, the tradition-the well-supported tradition-that he was the original Sir Fretful Plagiary.

On this last point we have the authority of Croker, and there is none better for anything disagreeable. Croker says he knew Cumberland well for the last dozen years of his life, and that to his last day he resembled Sir Fretful.

The Memoirs were first published in 1806, in a splendidly printed quarto. The author wanted money badly, and Lackington's house gave him £500 for his manuscript. It is an excellent book. I do not quarrel with Mr. Leslie Stephen's description of it in the National Dictionary of Biography: "A very loose book, dateless, inaccurate, but with interesting accounts of men of note." All I mean by excellent is excellent to read. The Memoirs touch upon many points of interest. Cumberland was born in the Master's Lodge, at Trinity, Cambridge, in the Judge's Chamber-a room hung round with portraits of "hanging judges" in their official robes, and where a great Anglican divine and preacher once told me he had passed a sleepless night, so scared was he by these sinful emblems

of human justice. There is an admirable account in Cumberland's Memoirs of his maternal grandfather, the famous Richard Bentley, and of the Vice-Master, Dr. Walker, fit to be read along with De Quincey's spirited essay on the same subject. Then the scene is shifted to Dublin Castle, where Cumberland was Ulster-Secretary when Halifax was Lord-Lieutenant, and Single-speech Hamilton had acquired by purchase (for a brief season) the brains of Edmund Burke. There is a wonderful sketch of Bubb Dodington and his villa "La Trappe," on the banks of the Thames, whither one fair evening Wedderburn brought Mrs. Haughton in a hackney-coach. You read of Dr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith, of Garrick and Foote, and participate in the bustle and malice of the playhouse. Unluckily, Cumberland was sent to Spain on a mission, and came home with a grievance. This part is dull, but in all other respects the Memoirs are good to read.

Cumberland's father, who became an Irish bishop, is depicted by his son as a most pleasing character; and no doubt of his having been so would ever have entered a head always disposed to think well of fathers had not my copy of the Memoirs been annotated throughout in the nervous, scholarly hand of a long-previous owner who, for some reason or another, hated the Cumberlands, the Whig clergy, and the Irish people with a hatred which found ample room and verge enough in the spacious margins of the Memoirs.

I print one only of these splenetic notes:

I forget whether I have noticed this elsewhere, therefore I will make sure. In the novel Arundel, Cumberland has

drawn an exact picture of himself as secretary to Halifax, and has made the father of the hero a clergyman and a keen electioneerer-the vilest character in fiction. The laborious exculpation of Parson Cumberland in these Memoirs does not wipe out the scandal of such a picture. In spite of all he says, we cannot help suspecting that Parson Cumberland and Joseph Arundel had a likeness. N.B.-In both novels (ie., Arundel and Henry) the portrait of a modern clergyman is too true. But it is strange that Cumberland, thus hankering after the Church, should have volunteered two such characters as Joseph Arundel and Claypole.

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Whispering tongues can poison truth," and a persistent annotator who writes a legible hand is not easily shaken off.

Perhaps the best story in the book is the one about which there is most doubt. I refer to the well-known and often-quoted account of the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, and of the famous band of claqueurs who early took their places, determined to see the play through. Cumberland tells the story with the irresistible verve of falsehood-of the early dinner at the "Shakespeare Tavern,' "where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps "; of the guests assembled, including Fitzherbert (who had committed suicide at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, who" was gifted by Nature with the most sonorous and at the same time the most contagious laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre could not drown it "; and on the story rolls.

The

It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but it is doubtful whether Cumberland was at it; and as for the proceedings at the theatre, others who