[To eat mutton cold.] There is a certain resemblance between this character and Gray’s lines on himself written in 1761, beginning ‘Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune.’ (See Gosse’s Gray’s Works, 1884, i. 127.) But both Gray and Goldsmith may have been thinking of a line in the once popular song of Ally Croaker:—
Too dull for a wit, too grave for a joker.
[honest William,] i.e. William Burke (v. supra).
[Now breaking a jest, and now breaking a limb.] A note to the second edition says—‘The above Gentleman [Richard Burke, v. supra] having slightly fractured one of his arms and legs, at different times, the Doctor [i.e. Goldsmith] has rallied him on those accidents, as a kind of retributive justice for breaking his jests on other people.’
[Here Cumberland lies.] According to Boaden’s Life of Kemble, 1825, i. 438, Mrs. Piozzi rightly regarded this portrait as wholly ironical; and Bolton Corney, without much expenditure of acumen, discovers it to have been written in a spirit of persiflage. Nevertheless, Cumberland himself (Memoirs, 1807, i. 369) seems to have accepted it in good faith. Speaking of Goldsmith he says—I conclude my account of him with gratitude for the epitaph he bestowed on me in his poem called Retaliation.’ From the further details which he gives of the circumstances, it would appear that his own performance, of which he could recall but one line—
All mourn the poet, I lament the man—
was conceived in a less malicious spirit than those of the others, and had predisposed the sensitive bard in his favour. But no very genuine cordiality could be expected to exist between the rival authors of The West Indian and She Stoops to Conquer.
[And Comedy wonders at being so fine.] It is instructive here to transcribe Goldsmith’s serious opinion of the kind of work which Cumberland essayed:—‘A new species of Dramatic Composition has been introduced, under the name of Sentimental Comedy, in which the virtues of Private Life are exhibited, rather than the Vices exposed; and the Distresses rather than the Faults of Mankind, make our interest in the piece. . . . In these Plays almost all the Characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their Tin Money on the Stage, and though they want Humour, have abundance of Sentiment and Feeling. If they happen to have Faults or Foibles, the Spectator is taught not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts; so that Folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the Comedy aims at touching our Passions without the power of being truly pathetic.’ (Westminster Magazine, 1772, i. 5.) Cf. also the Preface to The Good Natur’d Man, where he ‘hopes that too much refinement will not banish humour and character from our’s, as it has already done from the French theatre. Indeed the French comedy is now become so very elevated and sentimental, that it has not only banished humour and Moliere from the stage, but it has banished all spectators too.’
[The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks.] Dr. John Douglas (v. supra) distinguished himself by his exposure of two of his countrymen, Archibald Bower, 1686–1766, who, being secretly a member of the Catholic Church, wrote a History of the Popes; and William Lauder 1710–1771, who attempted to prove Milton a plagiarist. Cf. Churchill’s Ghost, Bk. ii:—
By TRUTH inspir’d when Lauder’s spight
O’er MILTON cast the Veil of Night,
DOUGLAS arose, and thro’ the maze
Of intricate and winding ways,
Came where the subtle Traitor lay,
And dragg’d him trembling to the day.