BIB_ID
106483
Accession number
MA 9948
Creator
Cumberland, Richard, 1732-1811.
Display Date
Place not identified, 1807 April 1.
Description
1 item (3 pages, with address) ; 25.3 x 20.8 cm
Notes
Signed with his initials.
Cumberland gives the date of writing as "Wednesday." There is a postmark of April 1, 1807, which fell on a Wednesday, suggesting that the letter was written on that day.
No place of writing is given.
Address panel with postmarks: "Sir Ja B. Burges / Beauport / Battle / Sussex."
Removed from an extra-illustrated copy of James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin, for Charles Dilly, 1791); PML 9812-9815; volume IV, page 105.
Cumberland gives the date of writing as "Wednesday." There is a postmark of April 1, 1807, which fell on a Wednesday, suggesting that the letter was written on that day.
No place of writing is given.
Address panel with postmarks: "Sir Ja B. Burges / Beauport / Battle / Sussex."
Removed from an extra-illustrated copy of James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin, for Charles Dilly, 1791); PML 9812-9815; volume IV, page 105.
Summary
Wishing Burges success in an enterprise; commenting on the current political situation and speculating about Lord Melville's and Marquess Wellesley's prospects; saying that The Exodiad is not yet for sale in bookshops and he has not so far seen any advertisements; quoting from a letter by George Lackington criticizing a play or poem titled "Saul;" saying of Lackington: "So writes your Publisher, and who can write better? This young man, you see, has quick intuition, and is a formidable Critic;" mentioning that he will be dining tomorrow with Sharon Turner and "his Coterie of wits [...] Some perhaps may have dipt into our dish, but I rather doubt it;" telling Burges that he has also dined with the editors and patrons of the Edinburgh Review: "I suspect them to be cowards, and I did not spare them - tho' all in good humour over a glass of [Isaac] D'Israeli's good wine;" mentioning one reviewer in particular who has been particularly hostile to his Memoirs and saying that Lackington refuses to send a copy of The Exodiad to him: "He is about the shabbiest of all the shabby set of critics;" sending news of his daughter Marianne in a postscript.
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