THE permission which your Royal Highness has granted me of inscribing to you the following Work, affords me an opportunity of publicly testifying those feelings which I have long cherished in private, and to the expression of which your Royal Highness has been no stranger. Perhaps, however, it is no less my duty than certainly it is my wish, that the world should know them also; for virtue is upheld, and the practice of benevolence diffused, by the contemplation of their existence in others.

A dedication is commonly the meanest of all intellectual productions, and, in proportion to the elevation of its object, seems to be the determination of the writer to degrade, at once, his patron and himself. It too frequently happens that it is written to win from the great, by adulation, what can seldom be expected from truth; or it labours with all the tumultuous phrases of exaggerated eulogy, to earn a pittance which rewards either falsehood or servility.

I stand, however, in neither situation. I will not flatter, for your Royal Highness would receive it, as unwillingly, as I should offer it. I have sought, indeed, the present occasion, merely that I might tell how much and how frequently I have been befriended by your Royal Highness in the course of my life, and how truly I cherish a just remembrance of your repeated

kindness.

To do this is surely allowable without the imputation of meanness. It is a debt which every man owes to society, to disclose the virtues of its members, and it is a debt which every man owes to his benefactor, to make him the offering of his gratitude.

Accept, as such an offering, This DediCATION, and permit me to subscribe myself, with unfeigned sincerity,

Sir,

Your Royal Highness's most obliged

And obedient Servant,

November 22, 1811.

WILLIAM MUDFORD.

PREFACE.

WHEN the Memoirs of Cumberland were published, I was forcibly impressed with their insufficiency in all that regarded the estimation of his literary character; and while I found in them all that could be wished about the man, I was conscious that whenever his death should happen, an ample and interesting opportunity would oc cur for the union of this personal history, with a minute enquiry into the pretensions of the author. In what way, however, I conceived this scheme might be best executed, may be easily known from the following pages, which I have endeavoured to make as interesting as I could. If I have failed, I will not seek to mitigate censure by an appeal to indulgence. b