Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/739

DRAMATIST.] 1732. He was the great-grandson of his namesake, the bishop of Peterborough ; and his father, Dr Denison Cumberland, became successively bishop of Clonfert and of Kilmore. His mother was Joanna, the youngest daughter of the great Bentley, and the heroine of John Byrom s once popular little eclogue, Colin and Phoebe. Of the great Master of Trinity his grandson has left a kindly account ; he afterwards collected all the pamphlets bearing on the Letters of P/ialaris controversy, and piously defended the reputation of his ancestor in a Letter to Bishop Lowth, who had called him " aut caprimulgus aut fossor." Cumberland was in his seventh year sent to the grammar- school at Bury St Edmunds , and he relates how, on the head-master Arthur Kinsman undertaking, in conversation with Bentley, to make the grandson as good a scholar as the grandfather himself, the latter retorted : " Pshaw, Arthur, how can that be, when I have forgot more than thou ever knewest 1 " Bentley died during his grandson s Bury school-days ; and in 1744 the boy, who, while rising to the head of his school, had already begun to " try his strength in several slight attempts towards the drama," was removed to Westminster, then at the height of its reputation under Dr Nicholls. Among his schoolfellows here were Warren Hastings, George Colman (the elder), Lloyd, and (though he doas not mention them as such) Churchill and Cowper. From Westminster Cumberland passed, in his fourteenth year, to the familiar Trinity, where at first he was, according to custom, left to study on his own account. Afterwards, however, under the advice of the master, Dr Smith, he applied himself closely to mathematics, and in 1750 he took his degree as tenth wrangler. His account of his degree examination, as well as that for a fellowship at his college (part of which he underwent in the " judges chamber," where he was born), is curious ; he was (by virtue of an alteration in the statutes) elected to his fellowship in the second year of his degree. Meanwhile his projects of work as a classical scholar had been interspersed with attempts at imitating Spenser whom, by his mother s advice, he " laid upon the shelf and a dramatic effort (unprinted) on the model of Mason s Elfrida, called Caractacus. He had hardly abandoned these pursuits in order to read for his fellowship, when he was offered the post of private secretary by the earl of Halifax, First Lord of Trade and Plantations in the duke of New castle s ministry. His family persuaded him to accept the office, to which he returned after his election as fellow. It left him abundant leisure for literary pursuits, which included the design of a poem in blank verse on India. He was fortunate enough to obtain a lay fellowship at Trinity, but this he not long afterwards resigned on his marriage in 1759 to Miss Elizabeth Ridge, to whom he lud paid his addresses on receiving through Lord Halifax " a small establishment as crown-agent for Nova Scotia." In 1761 he accompanied his patron (who had been appointed lord-lieutenant) to Ireland as Ulster secretary ; and in acknowledgment of his services was afterwards offered a baronetcy. By declining this he thinks he gave offence ; at all events, when in 1762 Halifax became secretary of state, Cumberland in vain applied for the post of under-secretary, and could only obtain the clerkship of reports at the Board of Trade under Lord Hillsborough. While he takes some credit to himself for his incorruptibility when in Ireland, he showed zeal for his friends, and obtained a bishopric for his father. On the accession to office of Lord George Gennaine (Sackville) in 1775, Cumberland was appointed secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, which post he held till the abolition of that board in 1782 by Burke s economical reform. Before this event he had, in 1780, been sent on a confi dential mission to Spain, to negotiate a separate treaty of 703 peace with that power ; but though he was well received by King Charles III. and his minister Floridablanca, the question of Gibraltar proved a stumbling-block, and the Gordon riots at home a most untoward occurrence. He was recalled in 1781, and was refused repayment of the expenses he had incurred, and for which only 1000 had been advanced to him. He thus found himself 4500 out of pocket ; in vain, he says, " I wearied the door of Lord North till his very servants drove me from it ; " his memorial remained unread or unnoticed either by the prime minister or by secretary Robinson, through whom the original promise had been made. Soon after this experience he lost his office, and had to retire on a compensation allowance of less than half-pay. He now took up his residence at Tunbridge Wells ; but during his last years he mostly lived in London, where he died May 7, 1811. Cumberland s literary productions are spread over the whole of his long life ; they are very numerous, but it is only by his contributions to the drama, and perhaps by his Memoirs, that he is likely to be remembered. In the latter, however, he dwells with more or less of paternal fondness on a great number of other productions. Among these should in the first instance be mentioned the collection of essays and other pieces entitled The Observer (2 vols., 1785 ; afterwards republished in 5 vols., and in 6, including a translation of The Clouds of Aristophanes). This collection found a place, as the author complacently points out, among The British Essayists. For the accounts given in The Observer of the Greek writers, especially the comic poets, Cumberland availed himself of Bentley s MSS. and annotated books in his possession ; his translations from the Greek fragments, which are not inelegant but lack closeness, are republished in Bailey s Comicwum Grcecorum (part i., 1840) and Hermesianactis, Archilochi, et Pratincs Fragmenta. Cumberland also produced Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain (2 vols., 1782) ; with a Cata logue of the King of Spain s Paintings (1787) ; two novels, Arundel (2 vols., 1789, a story in letters " hastily put together during a few idle weeks at Brighthelmstone ") and Henry (4 vols., 1795, a " diluted comedy " on the con struction and polishing of which he seems to have expended great care) ; and a religious epic, Calvary, or the Death of Christ, in 8 books (1792) ; and (as his last publication) a poem entitled Retrospection. He is also said to have been concerned in an epic, the Exodiad (with Sir James Bland Burges) and in John de Lancaster, a novel in 3 vols. Besides these he wrote the Letter to the Bishop of 0[xfor]d in vindication of Bentley; another to the Bishop of Llandaff on his proposal for equalizing the revenues of the Established Church (1783) ; a Character of Lord Sackville, whom in his Memoirs he vindicates from the stigma of cowardice ; and an anonymous pamphlet, Curtius rescued from the Gulf, against the redoubtable Dr Parr. He was also the author of a version of fifty of the Psalms of David ; of a tract on the evidences of Christianity ; and of other religious exercises in prose and verse, the former in cluding " as many sermons as would make a large volume, some of which have been delivered from the pulpits. Lastly, he edited a short-lived critical journal called The London Revieiv, conducted on a principle to which Cum berland doubtless attached high importance, that the articles should bear the names of the contributors. Cumberland s Memoirs, which he begun at the close of 1804 and concluded in September 1805, were published in 1806, and a supplement was afterwards added. This sufficiently ample narrative of his public and private life (which includes a long account of his Spanish mission) contains some interesting reminiscences of several persons of note, more especially Bubb Dodington, Single-Speech

Hamilton, and Lord George Sackville among politicians,