His chief works are Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829-1833), Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, a dramatic poem, Traditionary Tales of the Peasantry, several novels (Paul Jones, Sir Michael Scott, Lord Roldan), the Maid of Elwar, a sort of epic romance, the Songs of Scotland (1825), Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years (1833), an edition of The Works of Robert Burns, with notes and a life containing a good deal of new material (1834), Biographical and Critical Dissertations affixed to Major’s Cabinet Gallery of Pictures, enA Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Sir David Wilkie, finished two days before his own decease, and published in 1843. An edition of his Poems and Songs was issued by his son, Peter Cunningham, in 1847.

CUNNINGHAM, Peter (1816-1869), topographical and antiquarian littérateur, was born in London, April 7, 1816. He was the son of the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham, and was educated at Christ’s Hospital. He led a singularly uneventful life; for at the age of eighteen he was appointed by Sir Robert Peel, in recognition of his father’s genius and reputation, to a junior clerkship in the audit office, and after twenty years’ faithful and efficient service he was promoted to a chief clerkship. This post he filled till 1860, when he retired from the public service. His literary career began before his official, and his first published work was The Life of Drummond of Hawthornden, with large selections from his poetical works. This volume appeared in 1833. His most important topographical work is the Handbook of London, the first edition of which was published in 2 vols, in 1849, and the second in 1 vol. in 1850. It bears a high character for fulness and accuracy of information, and is made particularly attractive by the intermingling of authentic anecdote and incident with the necessary details of names and dates. Among Cunningham’s other publications are,— Songs of England and Scotland (1835), Handbook of Westminster Abbey (1842), a Life of Inigo Jones for the old Shakespeare Society (1848), Modern London (1851), The Story of Nell Gwynn (1852), and a “Memoir of J. Μ. W. Turner,” prefixed to Burnett’s Turner and his Works (1852). In 1854 he edited, for Mr Murray’s “Library of British Classics,” the works of Oliver Goldsmith and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, with additional lives. He was a contributor to the Athenaeum, Thae Illustrated London News, Eraser's Magazine, and other periodicals. He was also engaged as collaborateur with Croker on a new edition of Pope’s works. He died at St Alban’s, May 18, 1869.

CUNNINGHAM, William (1805-1861), a Scottish theologian and ecclesiastic, was born at Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, on the 2d October 1805. After the usual course of study at the university of Edinburgh, in which he acquitted himself with distinction, he was licensed to preach in 1828. Two years afterwards he was ordained to a collegiate charge in Greenock, where he remained for three years, refusing during that time a presentation offered him to a parish in Glasgow. In 1834 he was transferred to the charge of Trinity College parish, Edinburgh. His removal thus coincided with the commencement of the period known in Scottish ecclesiastical history as the Ten Years’ Conflict, in which he was destined to take a leading share. In the stormy discussions and controversies which preceded the Disruption the weight and force of his intellect, the keenness of his logic, and his firm grasp of principle made him one of the most powerful advocates of the cause of spiritual independence; and he has been generally recognized as one of three to whom mainly the existence of the Free Church is due, the others being Chalmers and Candlish. On the formation of the Free Church in 1843 Cunningham was appointed professor of church history and divinity in the New College, Edinburgh, of which he became principal in 1847 in succession to Chalmers. His career as a professor was very successful, his controversial sympathies combined with his evident desire to bo rigidly impartial qualifying him to be an interesting delineator of the more stirring periods of church history, and a skilful disentangler of the knotty points in theological polemics. His logical faculty and his total lack of imagination perhaps made him too ready to seek to compress all spiritual truth within the rigid limits of intellectual forms. These qualities are reflected in two able works published posthumously in 1862, his Historic Theology in the Christian Church and his Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation. In 1859 the church marked its sense of obligation to him by appointing him moderator of the General Assembly. He had received the decree of DAE. from the university of Princeton in 1842. He died on the 14th December 1861. Though impulsive and unsparing and sometimes apparently a little unscrupulous in debate, Cunningham was like many great controversialists of his class distinguished for the amiability, simplicity, and integrity of his character. His intellectual rigidity was balanced by a considerable breadth of sympathy, as is evidenced by the fact that he was one of the founders of the Evangelical Alliance. A Lift of Cunningham by Rainy and Mackenzie appeared in 1871. A theological lectureship at the New College, Edinburgh, was endowed in 1862, to be known as the Cunningham lectureship.