Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/153

 12 S. IV. MAY, 1918.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

147

on

Richard Cumberland, liis Life and Dramatic Works.

By Stanley Thomas Williams, Ph.D. (Oxford,

University Press, 5s. Qd. net.) THIS is a creditable specimen of the kind of biographical study with which, of late years, the Yale University Press has made us familiar. If it be too much to say that it attains the artistic symmetry which characterizes a thesis for a French Doctorat-fe-Lettres, it certainly does not fall short of those performances in a patience of research for which, were it not for this unhappy war, we should seek for a parallel beyond the Rhine. The author had little before him but the Cumberland ' Memoirs 'of 1806, the Mudford Life of 1812, and Miss Clementina Black's ' Cumber- land Letters ' of a century later ; yet during the three years he has been engaged on his task he has contrived to ransack a number of authorities of which the list takes up more than ten closely printed pages, and is itself a useful catalogue of dramatic 'literature. This is to approach the subject in that true spirit of thoroughness in- culcated by Mark Pattison, and Dr. Williams is to be congratulated on the result achieved. He has further equipped his volume with a lengthy bibliography and a sufficient index.

Cumberland's is a curious and complex per- sonality, and Fanny Burney may be forgiven for admitting that she found it difficult to reconcile Goldsmith's " Terence of England " with Sheri- dan's " Sir Fretful Plagiary." The reader will experience a similar hesitation when he contrasts the elegant and rather cynical young bureaucrat of Roinney's portrait with the powdered and hard-featured veteran playwright in a pigtail and cannon curls who figures in his later likeness. Cumberland, "by his ancestry, should have been predestined to a literary career. His mother, Joanna or " Jug " Bentley, was the second daughter of the

mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd pains Made Horace dull and humbled Milton's strains ; his father, a dignified ecclesiastic and Irish bishop.

Born in 1732, Cumberland was educated at Bury St. Edmunds, and afterwards at West- minster, where he had Cowper and " Vinny " Bourne for contemporaries. Then he went to Trinity College, Oxford, taking his B.A. degree in 1760, and proceeding Fellow in 1752. He subsequently became private secretary to Lord Halifax. This, after other Government posts, led in due course to his appointment in 1776 as permanent Secretary to the old Board of Trade, a post which he retained until 1781, when his office was abolished, and he retired with diminished means to Tunbridge Wells. But long before this time he had become conspicuous as a writer for the stage, having made his debut with a tragedy on ' The Banishment of Cicero.' This was followed by ' The Summer's Tale,' an essay in Comic Opera ; and henceforth, until his death in 1811, he continued to produce plays, reaching a formidable total of fifty-eight. Besides these, he wrote anonymous novels in the fashion of Fielding non passibus cequis; 'The Observer,' a collection of essays, some volumes on Spanish Art, and, in the last years of his life, his well-known 8 Memoirs.'

With not a few weaknesses, Cumberland had many excellent qualities. He was a scholar ; he had industry, energy, facility of composition, ingenuity in stagecraft everything, in short, but genius. One of his earliest plays. ' The West Indian,' 1771, is his best ; half a dozen others deserve honourable mention. He was long pro- minent on the eighteenth-century stage, and was the leading exponent of the popular Sentimental Drama imported from France, and ultimately dethroned by Goldsmith's ' She Stoops to Conquer!' His social and dramatic position brought him into relations with the circle of Johnson and Garrick ; and his long life was protracted to the days of Rogers, Moore, and Horace Smith. Dr. Williams has collected a large numberof anecdotes of both periods, which, with needful corrective comments, make his book aa unfailing repertory of social portraiture.

Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation. Compiled by G. G. Coulton. (Cambridge, University Press, 15s. net.)

STUDENTS of mediaeval life should be very grateful to Mr. Coulton for an anthology which puts before them characteristic samples of the period. Indeed, we can learn much more from Mr. Coulton 's extracts than from a wilderness of dry handbooks. The volume is well produced, in good, clear type, and the gatherer of it .is both learned and free from pedantry. His notes at the bottom of the page make hard words ea.sy and translate Latin. A large portion of the book consists of renderings from Latin or old French ; and there are some judicious abridg- ments of the extracts, so that the general reader as well as the learned can get without trouble a good idea of the life of his forefathers. The illustrations are well chosen and to the point, and the various sections are full of interest. We meet with the first English antiquary ; pilgrims starting from Winchelsea, then a sea- port ; fruitful beginnings of science in Roger Bacon ; writers hired for pay ; the gay youth of Froissart placed next to Lydgate's account of a Model Boy ; gallant knights and City vagrants ; fraudulent tradesmen and profiteers : and prices for meat and game which are astonishing reading to-day.

Those who have a special knowledge of the period, or wish to enlarge what they possess, will welcome Mr. Coulton's little introductions in small type, which supply references for further study and pertinent comments of his own. Under the section ' Rich and Poor,' for instance, notes put us in the way to learn about usury and Papal theories of finance.

The purchasing power of money in these early days was, of course, much greater than it is to-day. Mr. Coulton has worked out the pay of a writer of the ' Vitse Patrum ' at " Qd. a week plus board and lodging : an ordinary artisan's pay." Here and elsewhere he does not tell us what the money was worth, perhaps because it is not easy to make an accurate computation. And prices went up even in those days. We find a complaint about 1375 that Labour demanded five or six shillings then for what cost two in earlier times, and serving-men of the Cord- wainers in 1387 accused of forming a trade union, in which they were encouraged by a friar who promised them the support of the Pope.