Note 1172 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (continued 7)

Mr. Cumberland assures me, that he was always treated with great courtesy by Dr. Johnson, who, in his Letters to Mrs. Thrale, vol. ii. p. 68 thus speaks of that learned, ingenious, and accomplished gentleman: 'The want of company is an inconvenience: but Mr. Cumberland is a million.' BOSWELL. Northcote, according to Hazlitt (Conversations of Northcote, p. 275), said that Johnson and his friends 'never admitted C——[Cumberland] as one of the set; Sir Joshua did not invite him to dinner. If he had been in the room, Goldsmith would have flown out of it as if a dragon had been there. I remember Garrick once saying, "D—n his dish-clout face; his plays would never do, if it were not for my patching them up and acting in them."'