CUMBERLAND, a city of the United States, capital of Allegheny county, Maryland, on the north bank of the Potomac river, 179 miles west of Baltimore. It contains a court-house, a county prison, a market-house, and several handsome churches ; and as the western terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the seat of a railway junc tion, it enjoys excellent opportunities for trade. There are flour-mills and iron-furnaces in the neighbourhood ; and an extensive factory for the manufacture of steel rails is main tained by the Baltimore and Ohio railway company. A few miles to the west is the commencement of the great Cumberland coal region. Population in 1870, 8056.
CUMBERLAND, Richard (1632-1718), bishop of Peterborough, was the son of a respectable citizen of London, and was born in the parish of St Ann, near Aldersgate. He was educated in St Paul s school, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where in due time he took his degrees in arts, and obtained a fellowship. He took the degree of B. A. in 1653 ; and, having proceeded M.A. in 1656, he was next year incorporated to the same degree in the university of Oxford. For some time he applied himself to the study of physic ; and although he did not adhere to this profession, he retained his knowledge of anatomy and medicine. Payne informs us that he dis tinguished himself, whilst he was a fellow of tb.3 college, by the performance of his academical exercises. He went out batchelor of divinity at a publick commencement ; and tho it was hardly known that the same person performed those great exercises twice, yet such was the expectation he had raised, that he was afterwards sollicited to keep the act at another publick commencement for his doctor s degree." He took the degree of B. D. in 1663, and that of D.D. in 1680. Among his contemporaries and intimate friends were Dr Hezekiah Burton, Sir Samuel Moreland, who was distinguished as a mathematician, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who became keeper of the great seal, and Samuel Pepys.
To this academical connection he appears to have been in a great measure indebted for his subsequent advancement in the church. When Bridgeman was appointed lord keeper, he nominated Cumberland and Burton as his chaplains, nor did he afterwards neglect the interest of either. Cum berland s first preferment was the rectory of Brampton, in Northamptonshire, which was bestowed upon him in 1658 by Sir John Norwich. He then quitted the university, and went to reside on his benefice, where he zealously devoted himself to the duties of his sacred office, and to the prosecution of those abstruse studies to which he had long been addicted. In 1661 he was appointed one of the twelve preachers of the university. His character was very remote from that of a preferment-hunter ; and in this un ambitious retirement he might have spent the remainder of his life, if the lord keeper, who obtained his office in 1667, had not invited him to London, and soon afterwards bestowed upon him the rectory of Allhallows at Stamford. In his new situation he acquired new credit by the fidelity with which he discharged his important functions. In addition to his ordinary duties, he undertook the weekly lecture, and thus was obliged to preach thrice every week in the same church. This labour he constantly and assiduously performed, and in the mean time found sufficient leisure, as well as inclination, to prosecute his scientific and philological studies.
At the mature age of forty he published his earliest work, entitled De Legibus Naturce Disquisitio Pkilosopkica, in qua earum Forma, summa Capita, Ordo, Promulgatio, et Obligatio e Rerum Natura investigantur ; quin etiam Elementa Philosophies Hobbianoe, cum moralis turn civilis, considerantur et refutantur, London, 1672, 4to. It is dedicated to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and is prefaced by an Alloquium ad Lectorem," contributed by the authors friend Dr Burton. It appeared during the same year with Fuffendorfs De Jure Naturae et Gentium. This work of the English divine was highly commended in a subsequent publication of the German lawyer, and his weighty suffrage must have had the effect of making it known on the Con tinent. The book was reprinted at Liibeck in 1683, and again in 1694. It was likewise reprinted at Dublin. As the work was printed in London while the author was residing at Stamford, the first edition contains many typo graphical errors ; nor are they removed in the subsequent editions. Bentley afterwards undertook to revise the entire text, and, according ta his grandson s account, he most effectually performed this task ; but Barbeyrac, who had the use of the corrected copy, and who was a more competent judge of its value, entertained a less favourable opinion. This copy is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The author s family intended to publish a splendid edition of the work, but their laudable design was never executed.
Tyrrell, who was the grandson of Archbishop Uasher, and is himself well known as a writer on history and politics, digested Cumberland s doctrines into a new form, and published a considerable volume under the following title : A brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature, according to the Principles and Method laid down in the Reverend Dr Cumberland s (noiv Lord Bishop of Peterborough s) Latin, Treatise on that subject ; as also his Confutations of Mr Hobbs s Principles put into another method : ivith the Right Reverend Author s approbation, London, 1692, 8vo. Another edition appeared in 1701. A complete English version of the original work was published by John Maxwell, M.A., prebendary of Connor, under the title of A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, &c., London, 1727, 4to. A French translation was executed by Barbeyrac, and published at Amsterdam in 1744.
Having thus established a solid reputation, Dr Cumberland next prepared a work on a very different subject, An Essay towards the Recovery of the Jewish Measures and Weights, comprehending their Monies ; by help of ancient standards, compared with ours of England : use ful also to state many of those of tiie Greeks and Romans, and the Eastern Nations, London, 1686", 8vo. This work, which is dedicated to his friend Pepys, obtained a copious notice from Leclerc, and was translated into French.
About this period he was greatly depressed, like many other good men, by apprehensions respecting the growth of Popery ; but his fears were at length dispelled by the Revolution, which likewise brought along with it another material change in his circumstances. In the course of the year 1691, he went, according to his custom on a post-day, to read the newspaper at a coffee-house in Stamford, and there, to his great surprise, he read that the king had nominated Dr Cumberland to the bishopric of Peterborough. The face of the bishop elect was scarcely known at court, and he had resorted to none of the usual methods of advancing his temporal interest.
" Being then sixty years old," says his great-grandson, "he was with difficulty persuaded to accept the offer, when it came to him from authority. The persuasion of his friends, particularly Sir Orlando Bridgeman, at length overcame his repugnance ; and to that see, though very moderately endowed, he for ever after devoted himself, and resisted every offer of translation, though repeatedly made and earnestly recommended. To such of his friends as pressed an exchange upon him he was accustomed to nply, that Peterborough was his first espoused, and should be his only one ; and, in fact, according to his principles, no church revenue could enrich him ; for I have heard my father say that, at the end of every year, whatever overplus he found upon a minute inspection of his accounts was by him distributed to the poor, reserving only one small deposit of 25 in cash, found at his death in his bureau, with directions to employ it for the dis charge of his funeral expenses, a sum in his modest calculations fully sufficient to commit his body to the earth."
