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.’ 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 Athens’--of 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.’