CUMBERLAND, Richard.

£325 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Observer: Being a Collection of Moral, Literary and Familiar Essays. First edition of the first four volumes of Cumberland's Observer, comprising 125 essays. A fifth volume with a further 27 essays followed in 1790. "Although Cumberland will largely be remembered as a playwright, he was more than merely a man of letters. His novel Arundel (1789), written in epistolary form, begs comparison with Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Henry (1795) is an attempt to emulate Henry Fielding, while John de Lancaster (1809), published two years before Cumberland's death, is best left undescribed. Among Cumberland's more notable prose works is the Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, a product of a visit to Spain. When George Germaine (later Lord Sackville) became colonial secretary at the end of 1775, he made Cumberland secretary to the Board of Trade. Five years later Cumberland was sent to Spain to enter into secret negotiations with the intent to procure a separate treaty with England. After a stay of several months he returned to England without the desired results and discovered that he had spent some £4500 which was never repaid. With the abolition of the Board of Trade soon after his return, and with but half his salary as compensation, he retired to Tunbridge Wells where he remained until his death. His next prose work was in a more familiar genre, a periodical paper called The Observer which appeared in five volumes b

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