‘The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs. Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in everything and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary—the black dog waits to share it; from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr. Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this? If I were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful female into the house.’
It is a melancholy picture, but the ‘cheerful female’ shoots a ray of light across the gloom. Everyone should add these two volumes to his library, and if he has not a library, let him begin making one with them.
RICHARD CUMBERLAND.
‘He 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 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. The 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 patronized by my contemporaries in the proportion of ten to one.’