A

CRITICAL EXAMINATION

OF

THE WRITINGS

OF

RICHARD CUMBERLAND, Esq.

WITH AN

OCCASIONAL LITERARY INQUIRY INTO THE AGE
IN WHICH HE LIVED,

AND THE CONTEMPORARIES WITH WHOM HE FLOURISHED.

Also,

Memoirs of his Life.

AND

AN APPENDIX,

CONTAINING TWENTY-SIX OF HIS ORIGINAL LETTERS,
relating to a Transaction not mentioned in his own Memoirs.

BY WILLIAM MUDFORD.

A NEW AND IMPROVED EDITION,

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY CHARLES SQUIRE,
Furnival's-Inn-Court, Holborn,

FOR SHERWOOD, NEELY, AND JONES,
PATERNOSTER-ROW; AND J. ASPERNE, CORNHILL.

1812.

OHIO STATE

UNIVERSITY

DEDICATION.

ΤΟ

FIELD-MARSHAL HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE DUKE OF KENT,

&c. &c. &c.

SIR,

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.

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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.