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MEMOIRS
OF
DOCTOR BURNEY.

MEMOIRS
OF
DOCTOR BURNEY,

ARRANGED
FROM HIS OWN MANUSCRIPTS, FROM FAMILY PAPERS, AND
FROM PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS,
BY
HIS DAUGHTER, MADAME d’ARBLAY.

“O could my feeble powers thy virtues trace,

By filial love each fear should be suppress’d;

The blush of incapacity I’d chace,

And stand—Recorder of Thy worth!—confess’d.”

Anonymous Dedication of Evelina, to Dr. Burney, in 1778.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. III.

LONDON:

EDWARD MOXON, 64, NEW BOND STREET.

1832.

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS,
BOUVERIE STREET.

MEMOIRS
OF
DOCTOR BURNEY.

1784.
DR. JOHNSON.

Towards the end of this year, Dr. Johnson began again to nearly monopolize the anxious friendship of Dr. Burney.

On the 16th of November, Dr. Johnson, in the carriage, and under the revering care of Mr. Windham, returned from Litchfield to the metropolis; after a fruitless attempt to recover his health by breathing again his natal air.

The very next day, he wrote the following note to St. Martin’s-street.

“To Dr. Burney.

“Mr. Johnson, who came home last night, sends his respects to dear Dr. Burney; and to all the dear Burneys, little and great.

“Bolt Court, 17th Nov. 1784.”

Dr. Burney hastened to this kind call immediately; but had the grief to find his honoured friend much weakened, and in great pain; though cheerful, and struggling to revive. All of the Doctor’s family who had had the honour of admission, hastened to him also; but chiefly his second daughter, who chiefly and peculiarly was always demanded.

She was received with his wonted, his never-failing partiality; and, as well as the Doctor, repeated her visits by every opportunity during the ensuing short three weeks of his earthly existence.

She will here copy, from the diary she sent to Boulogne, an account of what, eventually, though unsuspectedly, proved to be her last interview with this venerated friend.

To Mrs. Phillips.

25th Nov. 1784.—Our dear father lent me the carriage this morning for Bolt Court. You will easily conceive how gladly I seized the opportunity for making a longer visit than usual to my revered Dr. Johnson, whose health, since his return from Litchfield, has been deplorably deteriorated.

He was alone, and I had a more satisfactory and entertaining conversation with him than I have had for many months past. He was in better spirits, too, than I have seen him, except upon our first meeting, since he came back to Bolt Court.

He owned, nevertheless, that his nights were grievously restless and painful; and told me that he was going, by medical advice, to try what sleeping out of town might do for him. And then, with a smile, but a smile of more sadness than mirth!—he added: “I remember that my wife, when she was near her end, poor woman!—was also advised to sleep out of town: and when she was carried to the lodging that had been prepared for her, she complained that the staircase was in very bad condition; for the plaister was beaten off the walls in many places. ‘O!’ said the man of the house, ‘that’s nothing; it’s only the knocks against it of the coffins of the poor souls that have died in the lodging.’”

He forced a faint laugh at the man’s brutal honesty; but it was a laugh of ill-disguised, though checked, secret anguish.

I felt inexpressibly shocked, both by the perspective and retrospective view of this relation: but, desirous to confine my words to the literal story, I only exclaimed against the man’s unfeeling absurdity in making so unnecessary a confession.

“True!” he cried; “such a confession, to a person then mounting his stairs for the recovery of her health—or, rather, for the preservation of her life, contains, indeed, more absurdity than we can well lay our account to.”

We talked then of poor Mrs. Thrale—but only for a moment—for I saw him so greatly moved, and with such severity of displeasure, that I hastened to start another subject; and he solemnly enjoined me to mention that no more!

I gave him concisely the history of the Bristol milk-woman, who is at present zealously patronized by the benevolent Hannah More. I expressed my surprise at the reports generally in circulation, that the first authors that the milk-woman read, if not the only ones, were Milton and Young. “I find it difficult,” I added, “to conceive how Milton and Young could be the first authors with any reader. Could a child understand them? And grown persons, who have never read, are, in literature, children still.”

“Doubtless,” he answered. “But there is nothing so little comprehended as what is Genius. They give it to all, when it can be but a part. The milk-woman had surely begun with some ballad—Chevy Chace or the Children in the Wood. Genius is, in fact, knowing the use of tools. But there must be tools, or how use them? A man who has spent all his life in this room, will give a very poor account of what is contained in the next.”

“Certainly, sir; and yet there is such a thing as invention? Shakespeare could never have seen a Caliban?”

“No; but he had seen a man, and knew how to vary him to a monster. A person, who would draw a monstrous cow, must know first what a cow is commonly; or how can he tell that to give her an ass’s head, or an elephant’s tusk, will make her monstrous? Suppose you show me a man, who is a very expert carpenter, and that an admiring stander-by, looking at some of his works, exclaims: ‘O! He was born a carpenter!’ What would have become of that birth-right, if he had never seen any wood?”

Presently, dwelling on this idea, he went on. “Let two men, one with genius, the other with none, look together at an overturned waggon; he who has no genius will think of the waggon only as he then sees it; that is to say, overturned, and walk on: he who has genius will give it a glance of examination, that will paint it to his imagination such as it was previously to its being overturned; and when it was standing still; and when it was in motion; and when it was heavy loaded; and when it was empty: but both alike must see the waggon to think of it at all.”

The pleasure with which I listened to his illustration now animated him on; and he talked upon this milk-woman, and upon a once as famous shoe-maker; and then mounted his spirits and his subject to our immortal Shakespeare; flowing and glowing on, with as much wit and truth of criticism and judgment, as ever yet I have heard him display; but, alack-a-day, my Susan, I have no power to give you the participation so justly your due. My paper is filling; and I have no franks for doubling letters across the channel! But delightfully bright are his faculties, though the poor, infirm, shaken machine that contains them seems alarmingly giving way! And soon, exhilarated as he became by the pleasure of bestowing pleasure, I saw a palpable increase of suffering in the midst of his sallies; I offered, therefore, to go into the next room, there to wait for the carriage; an offer which, for the first time! he did not oppose; but taking, and most affectionately pressing, both my hands, “Be not,” he said, in a voice of even melting kindness and concern, “be not longer in coming again for my letting you go now!”

I eagerly assured him I would come the sooner, and was running off; but he called me back, and in a solemn voice, and a manner the most energetic, said: “Remember me in your prayers!”

How affecting, my dearest Susanna, such an injunction from Dr. Johnson! It almost—as once before—made me tremble, from surprise and emotion—surprise he could so honour me, and emotion that he should think himself so ill. I longed to ask him so to remember me! but he was too serious for any parleying, and I knew him too well for offering any disqualifying speeches: I merely, in a low voice, and, I am sure, a troubled accent, uttered an instant, and heart-felt assurance of obedience; and then, very heavily, indeed, in spirits, I left him. Great, good, and surpassing that he is, how short a time will he be our boast! I see he is going. This winter will never glide him on to a more genial season here. Elsewhere, who may hope a fairer? I now wish I had asked for his prayers! and perhaps, so encouraged, I ought: but I had not the presence of mind.

Melancholy was the rest of this year to Dr. Burney; and truly mournful to his daughter, who, from this last recorded meeting, felt redoubled anxiety both for the health and the sight of this illustrious invalid. But all accounts thenceforward discouraged her return to him, his pains daily becoming greater, and his weakness more oppressive: added to which obstacles, he was now, she was informed, almost constantly attended by a group of male friends.

Dr. Burney, however, resorted to Bolt Court every moment that he could tear from the imperious calls of his profession; and was instantly admitted; unless held back by insuperable impediments belonging to the malady. He might, indeed, from the kind regard of the sufferer, have seen him every day, by watching, like some other assiduous friends, particularly Messrs. Langton, Strahan, the Hooles, and Sastres, whole hours in the house to catch a favourable minute; but that, for Dr. Burney, was utterly impossible. His affectionate devoirs could only be received when he arrived at some interval of ease; and then the kind invalid constantly, and with tender pleasure gave him welcome.

The Memorialist was soon afterwards engaged on a visit to Norbury Park; but immediately upon her return to town, presented herself, according to her willing promise, at Bolt Court.

Frank Barber, the faithful negro, told her, with great sorrow, that his master was very bad indeed, though he did not keep his bed. The poor man would have shewn her up stairs. This she declined, desiring only that he would let the Doctor know that she had called to pay her respects to him, but would by no means disturb him, if he were not well enough to see her without inconvenience.

Mr. Straghan, the clergyman, was with him, Frank said, alone; and Mr. Straghan, in a few minutes, descended.

Dr. Johnson, he told her, was very ill indeed, but very much obliged to her for coming to him; and he had sent Mr. Straghan to thank her in his name, but to say that he was so very bad, and very weak, that he hoped she would excuse his not seeing her.

She was greatly disappointed; but, leaving a message of the most affectionate respect, acquiesced, and drove away; painfully certain how extremely ill, or how sorrowfully low he must be, to decline the sight of one whom so constantly, so partially, he had pressed, nay, adjured, “to come to him again and again.”

Fast, however, was approaching the time when he could so adjure her no more!

From her firm conviction of his almost boundless kindness to her, she was fearful now to importune or distress him, and forbore, for the moment, repeating her visits; leaving in Dr. Burney’s hands all propositions for their renewal. But Dr. Burney himself, not arriving at the propitious interval, unfortunately lost sight of the sufferer for nearly a week, though he sought it almost daily.

On Friday, the 10th of December, Mr. Seward brought to Dr. Burney the alarming intelligence from Frank Barber, that Dr. Warren had seen his master, and told him that he might take what opium he pleased for the alleviation of his pains.

Dr. Johnson instantly understood, and impressively thanked him, and then gravely took a last leave of him: after which, with the utmost kindness, as well as composure, he formally bid adieu to all his physicians.

Dr. Burney, in much affliction, hurried to Bolt Court; but the invalid seemed to be sleeping, and could not be spoken to till he should open his eyes. Mr. Straghan, the clergyman, gave, however, the welcome information, that the terror of death had now passed away; and that this excellent man no longer looked forward with dismay to his quick approaching end; but, on the contrary, with what he himself called the irradiation of hope.

This was, indeed, the greatest of consolations, at so awful a crisis, to his grieving friend; nevertheless, Dr. Burney was deeply depressed at the heavy and irreparable loss he was so soon to sustain; but he determined to make, at least, one more effort for a parting sight of his so long-honoured friend. And, on Saturday, the 11th December, to his unspeakable comfort, he arrived at Bolt Court just as the poor invalid was able to be visible; and he was immediately admitted.

Dr. Burney found him seated on a great chair, propt up by pillows, and perfectly tranquil. He affectionately took the Doctor’s hand, and kindly inquired after his health, and that of his family; and then, as evermore Dr. Johnson was wont to do, he separately and very particularly named and dwelt upon the Doctor’s second daughter; gently adding, “I hope Fanny did not take it amiss, that I did not see her that morning?—I was very bad indeed!”

Dr. Burney answered, that the word amiss could never be apropos to her; and least of all now, when he was so ill.

The Doctor ventured to stay about half an hour, which was partly spent in quiet discourse, partly in calm silence; the invalid always perfectly placid in looks and manner.

When the Doctor was retiring, Dr. Johnson again took his hand and encouraged him to call yet another time; and afterwards, when again he was departing, Dr. Johnson impressively said, though in a low voice, “Tell Fanny—to pray for me!” And then, still holding, or rather grasping, his hand, he made a prayer for himself, the most pious, humble, eloquent, and touching, Dr. Burney said, that mortal man could compose and utter. He concluded it with an amen! in which Dr. Burney fervently joined; and which was spontaneously echoed by all who were present.

This over, he brightened up, as if with revived spirits, and opened cheerfully into some general conversation; and when Dr. Burney, yet a third time, was taking his reluctant leave, something of his old arch look played upon his countenance as, smilingly he said, “Tell Fanny—I think I shall yet throw the ball at her again!”

A kindness so lively, following an injunction so penetrating, re-animated a hope of admission in the Memorialist; and, after church, on the ensuing morning, Sunday, the 12th of December, with the fullest approbation of Dr. Burney, she repaired once more to Bolt Court.

But grievously was she overset on hearing, at the door, that the Doctor again was worse, and could receive no one.

She summoned Frank Barber, and told him she had understood, from her father, that Dr. Johnson had meant to see her. Frank then, but in silence, conducted her to the parlour. She begged him merely to mention to the Doctor, that she had called with most earnest inquiries; but not to hint at any expectation of seeing him till he should be better.

Frank went up stairs; but did not return. A full hour was consumed in anxious waiting. She then saw Mr. Langton pass the parlour door, which she watchfully kept open, and ascend the stairs. She had not courage to stop or speak to him, and another hour lingered on in the same suspense.

But, at about four o’clock, Mr. Langton made his appearance in the parlour.

She took it for granted he came accidentally, but observed that, though he bowed, he forbore to speak; or even to look at her, and seemed in much disturbance.

Extremely alarmed, she durst not venture at any question; but Mrs. Davis,[1] who was there, uneasily asked, “How is Dr. Johnson now, Sir?”

“Going on to death very fast!” was the mournful reply.

The Memorialist, grievously shocked and overset by so hopeless a sentence, after an invitation so sprightly of only the preceding evening from the dying man himself, turned to the window to recover from so painful a disappointment.

“Has he taken any thing, Sir?” said Mrs. Davis.

“Nothing at all! We carried him some bread and milk; he refused it, and said, ‘The less the better!’”

Mrs. Davis then asked sundry other questions, from the answers to which it fully appeared that his faculties were perfect, and that his mind was quite composed.

This conversation lasted about a quarter of an hour, before the Memorialist had any suspicion that

Mr. Langton had entered the parlour purposely to speak to her, and with a message from Dr. Johnson:

But as soon as she could summon sufficient firmness to turn round, Mr. Langton solemnly said, “This poor man, I understand, Ma’am, from Frank, desired yesterday to see you.”

“My understanding, or hoping that, Sir, brought me hither to-day.”

“Poor man! ’tis a pity he did not know himself better; and that you should not have been spared this trouble.”

“Trouble?” she repeated; “I would come an hundred times to see Dr. Johnson the hundredth and first!”

“He begged me, Ma’am, to tell you that he hopes you will excuse him. He is very sorry, indeed, not to see you. But he desired me to come and speak to you for him myself, and to tell you, that he hopes you will excuse him; for he feels himself too weak for such an interview.”

Struck and touched to the very heart by so kind, though sorrowful a message, at a moment that seemed so awful, the Memorialist hastily expressed something like thanks to Mr. Langton, who was visibly affected, and, leaving her most affectionate respects, with every warmly kind wish she could half utter, she hurried back to her father’s coach.

The very next day, Monday, the 13th of December, Dr. Johnson expired—and without a groan. Expired, it is thought, in his sleep.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey; and a noble, almost colossal statue of him, in the high and chaste workmanship of Bacon, has been erected in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The pall-bearers were Mr. Burke, Mr. Windham, Sir Joseph Banks, Mr. Colman, Sir Charles Bunbury, and Mr. Langton.

Dr. Burney, with all who were in London of the Literary Club, attended the funeral. The Reverend Dr. Charles Burney also joined the procession.

1785.

This year, happily for Dr. Burney, re-opened with a new professional interest, that necessarily called him from the tributary sorrow with which the year 1784 had closed.

The engravings for the Commemoration of Handel were now finished; and a splendid copy of the work was prepared for the King. Lord Sandwich, as one of the chief Directors of the late festival, obligingly offered his services for taking the Doctor under his wing to present the book at the levee; but his Majesty gave Dr. Burney to understand, through Mr. Nicolai, that he would receive it, at a private audience, in his library.

This was an honour most gratifying to Dr. Burney, who returned from his interview at the palace, in an elevation of pleasure that he communicated to his family, with the social confidence that made the charm of his domestic character.

ROYAL AUDIENCE.

He had found their Majesties together, without any attendants or any state, in the library; where he presented both to the King and to the Queen a copy of his Commemoration.

They had the appearance of being in a serene tête à tête, that bore every mark of frank and cheerful intercourse. His reception was the most gracious; and they both seemed eager to look at his offerings, which they instantly opened and examined.

“You have made, Dr. Burney,” said his Majesty, “a much more considerable book of this Commemoration than I had expected; or, perhaps, than you had expected yourself?”

“Yes, Sire,” he answered; “the subject grew upon me as I proceeded, and a continual accumulation of materials rendered it almost daily more interesting.”

His Majesty then detailed his opinion of the various performers; and said that one thing only had discredited the business, and that was the inharmonious manner in which one of the bass singers had sung his part; which had really been more like a man groaning in a fit of the cholic, than singing an air.

The Doctor laughingly agreed that such sort of execution certainly more resembled a convulsive noise, proceeding from some one in torture, than any species of harmony; and that, therefore, as he could not speak of that singer favourably in his account, he had been wholly silent on his subject; as had been his practice in other similar instances.

The Queen seemed perfectly to understand, and much to approve, the motive for this mild method of treating want of abilities and powers to please, where the will was good, and where the labour had been gratuitous.

The King expressed much admiration that the full fortes of so vast a band, in accompanying the singers, had never been too loud, even for a single voice; when it might so naturally have been expected that the accompaniments even of the softest pianos, in such plenitude, would have been overpowering to all vocal solos. He had talked, he said, both with musical people and with philosophers upon the subject; but none of them could assign a reason, or account for so astonishing a fact.

Something, then, bringing forth the name of Shakespeare, the Doctor mentioned a translation of his plays by Professor Eichenberg. The King, laughing, exclaimed: “The Germans translate Shakespeare! why we don’t understand him ourselves: how should foreigners?”

The Queen replied, that she thought Eichenberg had rendered the soliloquies very exactly.

“Aye,” answered the King, “that is because, in those serious speeches, there are none of those puns, quibbles, and peculiar idioms of Shakespeare and his times, for which there are no equivalents in other languages.”

The Doctor then begged permission to return his most humble thanks to his Majesty, for the hints with which the work had been honoured during its compilation. The King bowed; and their Majesties both re-opened their books to look at the engravings; when the King, remarking to several of them the signature of E. F. Burney,[2] said: “All your family are geniuses, Dr. Burney. Your daughter—”

“O! your daughter,” cried the Queen, lifting up one of her hands, “is a very extraordinary genius, indeed!”

“And is it true,” said the King, eagerly, “that you never saw Evelina before it was printed?”

“Nor even till long after it was published;” answered the Doctor. This excited a curiosity for the details that led, from question to question, to almost all the history that has here been narrated; and which seemed so much to amuse their Majesties, that they never changed the theme during the rest of a long audience. And, probably, the parental pleasure obviously caused by their condescension, involuntarily augmented its exertions. Certainly it sent home the flattered father as full of personal gratitude as of happy loyalty.

ROYAL SOCIETY OF MUSICIANS.

Speedily after this interview, Dr. Burney had the great professional satisfaction and honour to announce officially to the Society of Musicians, at a general meeting convened for that purpose, that their Majesties had consented to become Patron and Patroness of the institution; which might thenceforth be styled The Royal Society of Musicians.

This honourable and most desirable distinction had been obtained, at the instance of the Committee of Assistants, by the influence of Dr. Burney with Lord Sandwich; who brought it to bear through that of the Earl[3] of Exeter and the Duke of Montagu with the King.

The speech of Dr. Burney, as Chairman of the Committee, both before and after the petition which he drew up to their Majesties upon this occasion; as well as the address of thanks by which its success was followed, was neat, appropriate, and unostentatious; but, from that same abstemious propriety, they offer nothing new or striking for publication.

MADEMOISELLE PARADIS.

Dr. Burney bestowed, also, in the opening part of this year, a portion of his time and his thoughts to a purpose of benevolence that may almost be called pious.

Mademoiselle Paradis, a young German, equally distinguished by her talents and her misfortunes, was strongly recommended to the Doctor, by his Vienna correspondents, as an object at once of admiration and of charity.

When only two years old, she had been suddenly deprived of sight by a paralytic stroke, or palsy of the optic nerves. Great compassion was excited by this calamity; and every method was essayed that could be devised for restoring to her the visible light of heaven, with the fair view of earth and her fellow creatures; but all was unavailing. At seven years of age, however, she began to listen with such ardent attention to the music that she heard in the church, that it suggested to her parents the idea of having her taught to play on the piano-forte; and, soon afterwards, to sing. In three or four years time, she was able to accompany herself on the organ in the stabat mater of Pergolese; of which she sung the first soprano part in the church of St. Augustin, at Vienna, in the presence of the Empress Queen, Maria Theresa, with such sweetness and pathos, that her Imperial Majesty, touched with her performance and misfortune, settled upon her a handsome pension.

She then pursued her musical studies under the care of Kozeluch; who composed many admirable lessons for her use. But, on the death of the Empress Queen, the pension of Mademoiselle Paradis was withdrawn, indiscriminately, and inconsiderately, as it was a charity, with all other pensions that had been granted by her Imperial Majesty.

In 1784, Mademoiselle Paradis quitted Vienna, with her mother, in order to travel; and, after visiting the principal courts and cities of Germany, she arrived at Paris, where she received every possible mark of approbation. She then brought letters to England from persons of the first rank, to her Majesty, Queen Charlotte; to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales;[4] to the Imperial Minister, Count Kageneck; to Lord Stormont;[5] and to other powerful patrons; as well as to the principal musical professors in London.

Dr. Burney exerted all his influence to obtain for her some new benefactors. He invited her to his house, where he gave a concert that caused her to be heard and seen by those who were best able to aid as well as judge: and to render this concert the more piquant, he asked to it our own celebrated blind musician, the worthy Mr. Stanley; who was extremely pleased to meet her, and took great interest in her fate.

Dr. Burney translated, or rather imitated, into English, a cantata that had been written by her own blind countryman and friend, M. Pfeffel of Vienna; and set to music by her master, M. Kozeluch. This cantata contains a poetical, yet faithful history of her life and sorrows; and could not but prove affecting to whoever heard it performed by herself.

Dr. Burney took measures for having this narratory effusion set before our Queen Charlotte, both in its vernacular and its adopted tongue; and her Majesty, to whom charity never supplicated in vain, humanely cheered and revived the blind minstrel with essential tokens of royal liberality. No efforts, however, succeeded in forming any establishment for her in London; though there is reason to believe that the state of her finances was considerably amended by her expedition.

The following is the simple and plaintive cantata, which, with a brief account of her life and situation, Dr. Burney printed and dispersed, at his own expense, in her service.

CANTATA.

Written in German for Mademoiselle Paradis, by her blind friend M. Pfeffel, of Colmar, and set to music by her musicmaster, M. Leopold Kozeluch, of Vienna, 11th November, 1784.

IMITATED BY DR. BURNEY.

“The new born insect sporting in the sun,

Is the true semblance of my infant state,

When ev’ry prize for which life’s race is run

Was hidden from me by malignant fate.

“Instant destruction quench’d each visual ray,

No mother’s tears, no objects were reveal’d!

Extinguish’d was the glorious lamp of day,

And ev’ry work of God at once conceal’d!

“Where am I plunged? with trembling voice I cried,

Ah! why this premature, this sudden night!

What from my view a parent’s looks can hide,

Those looks more cheering than celestial light!

“Vain are affliction’s sobs, or piercing cries;

The fatal mischief baffles all relief!

The healing art no succour can devise,

Nor balm extract from briny tears and grief!

“How should I wander through the gloomy maze,

Or hear the black monotony of woe,

Did not maternal kindness gild my days,

And guide my devious footsteps to and fro!

“Upon a festival designed

To praise the Father of mankind,

When joining in the lofty theme,

I tried to hymn the great Supreme,

A rustling sound of wings I hear,

Follow’d by accents sweet and clear,

Such as from inspiration flow

When Haydn’s fire and fancy glow.

“‘I am the genius of that gentle art

Which soothes the sorrows of mankind,

And to my faithful votaries impart

Extatic joys the most refin’d.

“‘On earth, each bard sublime my power displays;

Divine Cecilia was my own;

In heav’n each saint and seraph breathes my lays

In praises round th’ eternal throne.

“‘To thee, afflicted maid,

I come with friendly aid,

To put despair to flight,

And cheer thy endless night.’

“Then, gently leading to the new-made lyre,

He plac’d my fingers on the speaking keys;

‘With these (he cries) thou listening crowds shalt fire,

And rapture teach on every heart to seize.’

“Elastic force my nerves new brac’d,

And from my voice new accents flow;

My soul new pleasures learn’d to taste,

And sound’s sweet power alleviates woe.

“Theresa! great in goodness as in power,

Whose fav’rite use of boundless sway,

Was benefits on all to shower,

And wipe the tear of wretchedness away;

“When first my hand and voice essay’d,

Sweet Pergolesi’s pious strains,

Her pitying goodness she displayed,

To cherish and reward my pains.

“But now, alas! this friend to woe,

This benefactress is no more!

And though my eyes no light bestow

They’ll long with tears her loss deplore!

“Yet still where’er my footsteps bend,

My helpless state has found a friend.

“How sweet the pity of the good!

How grateful is their praise!

How every sorrow is subdued,

When they applaud my lays!

“The illustrious patrons I have found,

Whose approbation warms my heart,

Excite a wish that every sound

Seraphic rapture could impart.

“The wreathes my feeble talents share,

The balmy solace friends employ,

Lifting the soul above despair,

Convert calamity to joy.”

HOUSE-BREAKING.

In this same spring, a very serious misfortune befel Dr. Burney, which, though not of the affecting cast that had lately tainted his happiness, severely attacked his worldly comforts.

Early one morning, and before he was risen, Mrs. Burney’s maid, rushing vehemently into the bedroom, screamed out: “Oh, Sir! Robbers! Robbers! the house is broke open!”

A wrapping gown and slippers brought the Doctor down stairs in a moment; when he found that the bureau of Mrs. Burney, in the dining parlour, had been forced open; and saw upon the table three packets of mingled gold and silver, which seemed to have been put into three divisions for a triple booty; but which were left, it was supposed, upon some sudden alarm, while the robbers were in the act of distribution.

After securing and rejoicing in what so fortunately had been saved from seizure, Dr. Burney repaired to his study; but no abandoned pillage met his gratulations there! his own bureau had been visited with equal rapacity, though left with less precipitancy; and he soon discovered that he had been purloined of upwards of £300.

He sent instantly for an officer of the Police, who unhesitatingly pronounced that the leader, at least, of the burglary, must have been a former domestic; this was decided, from remarking that he had gone straight forward to the two bureaus, which were the only depositories of money; while sundry cabinets and commodes, to the right and to the left, had been passed unransacked.

The entrance into the house had been effected through the area; and a kitchen window was still open, at the foot of which, upon the sand on the floor, the print of a man’s shoe was so perfect, that the police-officer drew its circumference with great exactitude; picking up, at the same time, a button that had been squeezed off from a coat, by the forced passage.

Dr. Burney had recently parted with a man-servant of whom he had much reason to think ill, though none had occurred to make him believed a house-breaker. This man was immediately inquired for; but he had quitted the lodgings to which he had retired upon losing his place; and had acquainted no one whither he was gone.

The officers of the police, however, with their usual ferretting routine of dexterity, soon traced the suspected runaway to Hastings; where he had arrived to embark in a fishing vessel for France; but he had found none ready, and was waiting for a fair wind.

When the police-officer, having intimation that he was gone to an inn for some refreshment, entered the kitchen where he was taking some bread and cheese, he got up so softly, while the officer, not to alarm him, had turned round to give some directions to a waiter, that he slid unheard out of the kitchen by an opposite door: and, quickly as the officer missed him, he was sought for in vain; not a trace of his footsteps was to be seen; though the inward guilt manifested by such an evasion redoubled the vigilance of pursuit.

The fugitive was soon, however, discerned, on the top of a high brick wall, running along its edge in the midst of the most frightful danger, with a courage that, in any better cause, would have been worthy of admiration.

The policeman, now, composedly left him to his race and his defeat; satisfied that no asylum awaited him at the end of the wall, and that he must thence drop, without further resistance, into captivity.

Cruel for Dr. Burney is what remains of this narration: the runaway was seized, and brought to the public office, where a true bill was found for his trial, as he could give no reason for his flight; and as the button picked up in the area exactly suited a wanting one in a coat discovered to be in his possession. His shoe, also, precisely fitted the drawing on the kitchen floor. But though this circumstantial evidence was so strong as to bring to all the magistrates a conviction of his guilt that they scrupled not to avow, it was only circumstantial; it was not positive. He had taken nothing but cash; a single bank note might have been brought home to him with proof; but to coin, who could swear? The magistrates, therefore, were compelled to discharge, though they would not utter the word acquit, the prisoner; and the Doctor had the mortification to witness in the court the repayment of upwards of fifty guineas to the felon, that had been found upon him at Hastings. The rest of the three hundred pounds must have been secured by the accomplices; or buried in some place of concealment.

But Dr. Burney, however aggrieved and injured by this affair, was always foremost to subscribe to the liberal maxim of the law, that it is better to acquit ten criminals, than to condemn one innocent man. He resigned himself, therefore, submissively, however little pleased, to the laws of his noble country, ever ready to consider, like Pope,

“All partial evil universal good.”

Would it be just, could it be right, to leave unqualified to the grief of his friends, and to the rage of the murmurers against destiny, a blight such as this to the industry and the welfare of Dr. Burney; and not seek to soften the concern of the kind, and not aim at mitigating the asperity of the declaimers, by opening a fairer point of view for the termination of this event, if fact and fair reality can supply colours for so revivifying a change of scenery?

Surely such a retention, if not exacted by discretion or delicacy, would be graceless. A secret, therefore, of more than forty-seven years’ standing, and known at this moment to no living being but this Memorialist, ought now, in honour, in justice, and in gratitude, to be laid open to the surviving friends of Dr. Burney.

About a month after this treacherous depredation had filled the Doctor and his house with dismay, a lady of high rank, fortune, and independence, well known in the family, mysteriously summoned this Memorialist to a private room, for a tête à tête, in St. Martin’s-street.

As soon as they were alone, she scrutinizingly examined that no one was within hearing on the other side of either of the doors leading into the apartment; and then solemnly said that she came to demand a little secret service.

The Memorialist protested herself most ready to meet her request; but that was insufficient: the lady insisted upon a formal and positive promise, that what she should ask should be done; yet that her name in the transaction should never be divulged.

There seemed something so little reasonable in a desire for so unqualified an engagement upon a subject unknown, that the Memorialist, disturbed, hesitated and hung back.

The lady was palpably hurt; and, dropping a low curtsey, with a supercilious half smile, and a brief, but civil, “Good morrow, ma’am!” was proudly stalking out of the room; when, shocked to offend her, the Memorialist besought her patience; and then frankly asked, how she could promise what she was in the dark whether she could perform?

The lady, unbending her furrowed brow, replied, “I’ll tell you how, ma’am: you must either say, I believe you to be an honest woman, and I’ll trust you; or, I believe you to be no better than you should be, and I’ll have nothing to do with you.”

An alternative such as this could hardly be called an alternative: the promise was given.

The smile now of pleasure, almost of triumph, that succeeded to that of satire, which had almost amounted to scorn, nearly recompenced the hazarded trust; which, soon afterwards, was even more than repaid by the sincerest admiration.

The lady, taking a thick letter-case from a capacious and well-furnished part of the female habiliment of other days, yclept a pocket, produced a small parcel, and said, “Do me the favour, Ma’am, to slip this trifle into the Doctor’s bureau the first time you see him open it; and just say, ‘Sir, this is bank notes for three hundred pounds, instead of what that rogue robbed you of. But you must ask no questions; and you must not stare, Sir, for it’s from a friend that will never be known. So don’t be over curious; for it’s a friend who will never take it back, if you fret yourself to the bone. So please, Sir, to do what you please with it. Either use it, or put it behind the fire, whichever you think the most sensible.’ And then, if he should say, ‘Pray, Miss, who gave you that impertinent message for me?’ you will get into no jeopardy, for you can answer that you are bound head and foot to hold your tongue; and then, being a man of honour, he will hold his. Don’t you think so, Ma’am?”

The Memorialist, heartily laughing, but in great perturbation lest the Doctor should be hurt or displeased, would fain have resisted this commission; but the lady, peremptorily saying a promise was a promise, which no person under a vagabond; but more especially a person of honour, writing books, could break, would listen to no appeal.

She had been, she protested, on the point of non compos ever since that rogue had played the Doctor such a knavish trick, as picking his bureau to get at his cash; in thinking how much richer she, who had neither child nor chick, nor any particular great talents, was than she ought to be; while a man who was so much a greater scholar, and with such a fry of young ones at his heels, all of them such a set of geniuses, was suddenly made so much poorer, for no offence, only that rogue’s knavishness. And she could not get back into her right senses upon the accident, she said, till she had hit upon this scheme: for knowing Dr. Burney to be a very punctilious man, like most of the book-writers, who were always rather odd, she was aware she could not make him accept such a thing in a quiet way, however it might be his due in conscience; only by some cunning device that he could not get the better of.

Expostulation was vain; and the matter was arranged exactly according to her injunctions.

Ultimately, however, when the deed was so confirmed as to be irrevocable, the Memorialist obtained her leave to make known its author; though under the most absolute charge of secrecy for all around; which was strictly observed; notwithstanding all the resistance of the astonished Doctor, whom she forbade ever to name it, either to herself, she said, or Co., under pain of never speaking to him again.

All peculiar obstacles, however, having now passed away, justice seems to demand the recital of this extraordinary little anecdote in the history of Dr. Burney.

Those who still remember a daughter of the Earl of Thanet, who was widow of Sir William Duncan, will recognize, without difficulty, in this narration, the generosity, spirit, and good humour, with the uncultivated, ungrammatical, and incoherent dialect; and the comic, but arbitrary manner; of the indescribably diverting and grotesque, though munificent and nobly liberal, Lady Mary Duncan.

MRS. VESEY.

The singular, and, in another way, equally quaint and original, as well as truly Irish, Mrs. Vesey, no sooner heard of Dr. Burney’s misfortune, than she sent for an ingenious carpenter, to whom she communicated a desire to have a private drawer constructed in a private apartment, for the concealment and preservation of her cash from any fraudulent servant.

Accordingly, within the wainscot of her dressing room, this was effected; and, when done, she rang for her principal domestics; and, after recounting to them the great evil that had happened to poor Dr. Burney; and bemoaning that he had not taken a similar precaution, she charged them, in a low voice, never to touch such a part of the wall, lest they should press upon the spring of the private drawer, in which she was going to hide her gold and bank notes.

MRS. PHILLIPS.

A beam, however, of softest bosom happiness, soon after this disaster, lightened, almost dispersed, the cares of Dr. Burney. His Susanna, called back, with her husband and family, to England, by some change of affairs, suddenly returned from Boulogne—and returned beyond expectation, beyond probability, beyond all things earthly, save Hope—if Hope, indeed,—that sun-mark of all which lights on to futurity! can be denominated earthly—recruited in health, and restored to his wishes, as well as to his arms, and to her country and her friends. So small a change of climate had been salubrious, and in so short a space of time had proved renovating.

This smiling and propitious event, happily led the Doctor to yet further acquaintance with the incomparable Mr. Locke and his family; as the recovered invalid was now settled, with her husband and children, in the picturesque village of Mickleham, just at the foot of Norbury Park; and within reach of the habitual enjoyment of its exquisite society.

MADAME DE GENLIS.

In the summer of this year, 1785, came over from France the celebrated Comtesse de Genlis. Dr. Burney and his second daughter were almost immediately invited, at the express desire of the Countess, to meet, and pass a day with her, at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. His niece, Miss Palmer,[6] Sir Abraham and Lady Hume, Lord Palmerston, and some others, were of the party.

Madame de Genlis must then have been about thirty-five years of age; but the whole of her appearance was nearly ten years younger. Her face, without positive beauty, had the most winning agreeability; her figure was remarkably elegant, her attire was chastly simple: her air was reserved, and her demeanour was dignified. Her language had the same flowing perspicuity, and animated variety, by which it is marked in the best of her works; and her discourse was full of intelligence, yet wholly free from presumption or obtrusion. Dr. Burney was forcibly struck with her, and his daughter was enchanted.

Almost as numerous as her works, and almost as diversified, were the characters which had preceded this celebrated lady to England. None, however, of the calumnious sort had reached the ears of the Doctor previously to this meeting; and though some had buzzed about these of the Memorialist, they were vague; and she had willingly, from the charm of such superior talents, believed them unfounded; even before the witchery of personal partiality drove them wholly from the field: for from her sight, her manners, and her conversation, not an idea could elicit that was not instinctively in her favour.

Unconstrained, therefore, was the impulsive regard with which this illustrious foreigner inspired both; and which, gently, but pointedly, it was her evident aim to increase. She made a visit the next day to the Memorialist, whose society she sought with a flattering earnestness and a spirited grace that, coupled with her rare attractions, made a straightforward and most animating conquest of her charmed votary.

Madame de Genlis had already been at Windsor, where, through the medium of Madame de la Fìte, she had been honoured with a private audience of the Queen: and the energetic respect with which she spoke of her Majesty, was one of the strongest incentives to the loyal heart of Dr. Burney for encouraging this rising connexion.

Madame de Genlis had presented, she said, to the Queen the sacred dramas which she had dedicated to her Serene Highness the Duchess of Orleans; adding, that she had brought over only two copies of that work, of which the second was destined for Mademoiselle Burney! to whom, with a billet of elegance nearly heightened into expressions of friendship, it was shortly conveyed.

The Memorialist was at a loss how to make acknowledgments for this obliging offering, as she would have held any return in kind to savour rather of vanity than of gratitude. Dr. Burney, however, relieved her embarrassment, by permitting her to be the bearer of his own History of Music, as far as it had then been published. This Madame de Genlis received with infinite grace and pleasure; for while capable of treating luminously almost every subject that occurred, she had an air, a look, a smile, that gave consequence, transiently, to every thing she said or did.

She had then by her side, and fondly under her wing, a little girl whom she called Pamela,[7] who was most attractively lovely, and whom she had imbibed with a species of enthusiasm for the Memorialist, so potent and so eccentric, that when, during the visit at Sir Joshua Reynolds’, Madame de Genlis said, “Pamela, voilà Mademoiselle Burney!” the animated little person rushed hastily forward, and prostrated herself upon one knee before the astonished, almost confounded object of her notice; who, though covered with a confusion half distressing, half ridiculous, observed in every motion and attitude of the really enchanting little creature, a picturesque beauty of effect, and a magic allurement in her fine cast up eyes, that she could not but wish to see perpetuated by Sir Joshua.

On the day that Dr. Burney left his card in Portland-place, for a parting visit to Madame de Genlis, previously to her quitting London, he left there, also, the Memorialist; who, by appointment, was to pass the morning with that lady. This same witching little being was then capitally aiding and abetting in a preconcerted manoeuvre, with which Madame de Genlis not a little surprised her guest. This was by detaining her, through a thousand varying contrivances, all for a while unsuspected, in a particular position; while a painter, whom Madame de Genlis mentioned as being with her by chance, and who appeared to be amusing himself with sketching some fancies of his own, was clandestinely taking a portrait of the visitor.

However flattered by the desire of its possession in so celebrated a personage, that visitor had already, and decidedly, refused sitting for it, not alone to Madame de Genlis, but to various other kind demanders, from a rooted dislike of being exhibited. And when she discovered what was going forward, much vexed and disconcerted, she would have quitted her seat, and fled the premises: but the adroit little charmer had again recourse to her graceful prostration; and, again casting up her beautifully picturesque eyes, pleaded the cause and wishes of Madame de Genlis, whom she called Maman, with an eloquence and a pathos so singular and so captivating, that the Memorialist, though she would not sit quietly still, nor voluntarily favour the painter’s artifice, could only have put in practice a peremptory and determined flight, by trampling upon the urgent, clinging, impassioned little suppliant.

This was the last day’s intercourse of Madame de Genlis with Dr. Burney and the Memorialist. Circumstances, soon afterwards, suddenly parted them; and circumstances never again brought them together.

MR. BURKE.

This brilliant new acquaintance offered, in its short duration, a pleasing interlude for the occasional leisure of Dr. Burney, which more than ever required some fresh supply, as Mr. Burke now was entirely lost to him; and to all but his own political set, through the absorption of his tumultuous accusations against Mr. Hastings; by which his whole existence became sacrificed to Parliamentary contentions.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, however, not less faithfully than pleasantly, still kept his high and honoured post of intimacy with Dr. Burney. And Mrs. Delany maintained hers, with a sweetness of mental attraction that magnetized languor from infirmity, and deterioration of intellect from decay of years.

MRS. DELANY.

The society which assembled at that lady’s mansion was elegant and high bred, yet entertaining and diversified. As Mrs. Delany chose to sustain her own house, that she might associate without constraint with her own family, the generous Duchess of Portland would not make a point of persuading her to sojourn at Whitehall; preferring the sacrifice of her own ease and comfort, in quitting that noble residence nearly every evening, to lessening those of her tenderly loved companion.

And here her good sense repaid the goodness of her heart; for she saw, from time to time, without formality, introduction, or even the etiquettes of condescension, sundry persons moving in a less exalted sphere than her own, yet who, as she was a spirited observer of life and manners, afforded an agreeable variety in the current intercourse of the day: and from any thing inelegantly inferior, Mrs. Delany, from her rank in the world, and still more from her good principles and good taste, was inviolably exempt.

Many of the most favoured of this peculiar assemblage had already passed away, before Dr. Burney had been honoured with admission. Amongst those yet remaining, who belonged equally to both these ladies, were, the Countess of Bute, wife to the early favourite of his Majesty, George the Third, and the famous Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s daughter; a person of first-rate understanding, and possessing a large share of the ready wit, freed from the keen sarcasm and dauntless spirit of raillery of her renowned mother.

And she was occasionally accompanied by Lady Louisa Stuart, her accomplished daughter; who inherited only the better part, namely, sense, taste, and amiability, from any of her progenitors.

The Countess of Bristol, still a strikingly fine woman, and, though no longer young, still pleasingly interesting; with her engaging and charming daughter, Lady Louisa Harvey,[8] not seldom formed the party.

The “high-bred, elegant Boscawen,” the everyway honourable widow of the gallant Admiral, was peculiarly a favourite of Mrs. Delany, for equal excellence in character, conduct, and abilities.

The old Earl of Guilford, high in all the wit, spirit, and politeness that he transmitted to his favoured and numerous race, was always gladly welcomed.

Lady Wallingford, the unhappy widow of a gaming Lord, and the ruined daughter, though born heiress of the richest speculator of Europe, the famous South Sea Law, was at this time reduced to aid her existence by being a pensioner of her feeling friend, Mrs. Delany! by whom this unfortunate, but very respectable lady, was always distinguished with assiduous attention, both from her misfortunes and the obligations under which they forced her to labour. She was extremely well bred, though mournfully taciturn. She was uniformly habited in black silk, and in full dress; wearing a hoop, long ruffles, a winged cap, and all the stately formality of attire of the times, that even then were past; which, however, in its ceremonial, seemed suited with the rank to which she had risen; and in its gloom to the distress into which she had fallen.

Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Chapone, from time to time, spent and enlightened a day with this inestimable Mrs. Delany; who was connected more intimately still with Mrs. Montague.

The celebrated Horace Walpole was a frequent visitor, from possessing enough of genuine taste to delight in Mrs. Delany, and of spirit and fashion for paying his court to the Duchess Dowager of Portland. He was enchanted, also, to recreate his quaint humour by mingling occasionally with persons who, from being little known to him, excited his ever busy curiosity; which was restlessly seeking fresh food, with a devouring voracity that made it ever freshly required. And it was observed, that Mr. Walpole was nowhere more agreeable or more brilliant than in St. James’s Place; where he was polite and gay, though irrepressibly sarcastic; and good-humoured and entertaining, though always covertly epigrammatical.

Owen Cambridge and Soame Jenyns appeared, also, in this society; and were as fully capable to appreciate the excellences of Mrs. Delany, as she, in return, was to enjoy their playful wit, and well-seasoned raillery.

The elegant, polished Mr. Smelt, was peculiarly suited both to the taste and the situation of Mrs. Delany; with the first there was congeniality of mind; with the second, there was the similarity of each being a chosen, though untitled favourite of both King and Queen.

Mr. and Mrs. Locke were latterly added to this set; which they were truly formed to draw to a climax of social perfection.

But a lamented, though not personal or family event, which occurred at the end of this summer, must here be recorded, with some detail of circumstance; as it proved, in its consequences, by no means unimportant to the history of Dr. Burney.

The venerable Mrs. Delany was suddenly bereft of the right noble friend who was the delight of her life, the Duchess Dowager of Portland. That honoured and honourable lady had quitted town for her dowry mansion of Bulstrode Park. Thither she had just most courteously invited this Memorialist; who had spent with her Grace and her beloved friend, at the fine dwelling of the former at Whitehall, nearly the last evening of their sojourn in town, to arrange this intended summer junction. A letter of Mrs. Delany’s dictation had afterwards followed to St. Martin’s-street, fixing a day on which a carriage, consigned by her Grace to Mrs. Delany’s service, was to fetch the new visitor. But, on the succeeding morning, a far different epistle, written by the Amanuensis of Mrs. Delany, brought the mournful counter-tidings of the seizure, illness, and decease, of the valuable, generous, and charming mistress of Bulstrode Park.

Mrs. Delany, as soon as possible, was removed back to St. James’s Place; in a grief the most touchingly profound, though the most edifyingly resigned.

This was a loss for which, as Mrs. Delany was fifteen years the senior, no human calculation had prepared; and what other has the human Mathematician? Her condition in life, therefore, as well as her heart, was assailed by this privation; and however inferior to the latter was the former consideration, the conflict of afflicted feelings with discomfitted affairs, could not but be doubly oppressive: for though from the Duchess no pecuniary loan was accepted by Mrs. Delany, unnumbered were the little auxiliaries to domestic economy which her Grace found means to convey to St. James’s Place.

But now, even the house in that place, though already small for the splendid persons who frequently sought there to pay their respects to the Duchess, as well as to Mrs. Delany, became too expensive for her means of supporting its establishment.

The friendship of the high-minded Duchess for Mrs. Delany had been an honour to herself and to her sex, in its refinement as well as in its liberality. Her superior rank she held as a bauble, her superior wealth as dross, save as they might be made subservient towards equalizing in condition the chosen companion, with whom in affection all was already parallel.

To see them together, offered a view of human excellence delightful to contemplate. They endeared existence to each other, and only what was participated seemed to be enjoyed by either. And they each possessed so much understanding, cultivation, taste, and spirit, that their mutual desire to procure and to give pleasure to each other, operated not less as a spur to their improvement, even at this late period of life, than as a delight to their affections. In sentiment and opinion their converse had the most unrestrained openness; but in manner, a superior respect in Mrs. Delany was never to be vanquished by the utmost equalizing efforts of the Duchess: it was a respect of the heart, grafted upon that of the old school; and every struggle to dislodge it only proved, by its failure, the unshakeable firmness of its basis. The Duchess, therefore, was forced to content herself with wearing an easy cheerfulness of freedom, that flung off all appearance of seeming aware of this reverence; but which she accompanied with a cherishing delicacy, that made her watchful of every turn of countenance, every modulation of voice, and every movement or gesture, that might indicate any species of desire for something new, altered, or any way attainable for the advantage or pleasure of the friend whom she most loved to honour.

What a blank was a breach such as this of an intercourse so tender, and at an age so advanced! Religion alone could make it supportable; and to that alone can be attributed the patient sweetness with which Mrs. Delany met every consolation that could be offered to her by her still existing ties, Lady Bute, Lady Bristol, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Sandford, &c. &c. &c.

But most eager amongst them, from the energy of her attachment, forth rushed her latest, newest, and last chosen friend, who, in another day or two, would have been at her side, on the very moment of this heavy deprivation. Fearfully, nevertheless, she came, every other consoler having priority of almost every species to plead for preference: but those chords of unison, which in sympathy alone include every claim, discarding, as dissonance, whatever would break in upon their harmony, had here struck from heart to heart with responsive tenderness; and what of merit preponderated in the scales of one, was balanced into fair equilibrium by venerating devotion in the other.

Upon first receiving the melancholy intelligence of the broken-up meeting at Bulstrode Park, Dr. Burney had taken his much-grieved daughter with him to Chesington; where, with all its bereavements, he repaired, to go on with his History; but, with a kindness which always led him to participate in the calls of affection, he no sooner learned that her presence would be acceptable to Mrs. Delany, than he spared his amanuensis from his side and his work, and instantly lent her his carriage to convey her back to town, and to the house of that afflicted lady; whose tenderly open-armed, though tearful reception, was as gratifying to the feelings of her deeply-attached guest, as the grief that she witnessed was saddening.

The Doctor permitted her now to take up her abode in this house of mourning; where she had the heart-felt satisfaction to find herself not only soothing to the admirable friend, by whom so late in life, but so warmly in love, she had been taken to the bosom; but empowered to relieve some of her cares by being intrusted to overlook, examine, and read to her letters and manuscripts of every description; and to select, destroy, or arrange the long-hoarded mass. She even began revising and continuing a manuscript memoir of the early days of Mrs. Delany; but, as it could be proceeded with only in moments of unbroken tête à tête, it never was finished.

Meanwhile, when the tidings of the death of the Duchess Dowager of Portland reached their Majesties, their first thought, after their immediate grief at her departure, was of Mrs. Delany; and when they found that the Duchess, from a natural expectation of being herself the longest liver, had taken no measures to soften off the worldly part, at least, of this separation, the King, with most benevolent munificence, resolved to supply the deficiency which a failure of foresight alone, he was sure, had occasioned in a friend of such anxious fondness. He completely, therefore, and even minutely fitted up for Mrs. Delany a house at Windsor, near the Castle; and settled a pension of three hundred pounds a-year upon her for life; to enable her to still keep her house in town, that she might repair thither every winter, for the pleasure of enjoying the society of her old friends.

The grateful heart of Mrs. Delany overflowed at her eyes at marks so attentive, as well as beneficent, of kindness and goodness in her Sovereigns; for well she felt convinced that the Queen had a mental share and influence in these royal offerings.

To Windsor, thus invited, Mrs. Delany now went; and this Memorialist, lightened of a thousand apprehensions by this cheer to the feelings of her honoured friend, returned to Dr. Burney, in Surrey. A letter speedily followed her, with an account that the good King himself, having issued orders to be apprized when Mrs. Delany entered the town of Windsor, had repaired to her newly allotted house, there, in person, to give her welcome. Overcome by such condescension, she flung herself upon her knees before him, to express a sense of his graciousness for which she could find no words.

Their Majesties almost immediately visited her in person; an honour which they frequently repeated: and they condescendingly sent to her, alternately, all their royal daughters. And, as soon as she was recovered from her fatigues, they invited her to their evening concerts at the Upper Lodge, in which, at that time, they sojourned.[9]

MRS. DELANY.

The time is now come to open upon the circumstances which will lead, ere long, to the cause of a seeming episode in these memoirs.

Dr. Burney was soon informed that the Queen had deigned to inquire of Mrs. Delany, why she had not brought her friend, Miss Burney, to her new home? an inquiry that was instantly followed by an invitation that hastened, of course, the person in question to St. Albans’-street, Windsor.

Here she found her venerable friend in the full solace of as much contentment as her recent severe personal loss, and her advanced period of life, could well admit. And, oftentimes, far nearer to mortal happiness is such contentment in the aged, than is suspected, or believed, by assuming and presuming youth; who frequently take upon trust—or upon poetry—their capability of superior enjoyment for its possession. She was honoured by all who approached her; she was loved by all with whom she associated. Her very dependence was made independent by the delicacy with which it left her completely mistress of her actions and her abode. Her Sovereigns unbent from their state to bestow upon her graciousness and favour: and the youthful object of her dearest affections[10] was fostered, with their full permission, under her wing.

And, would it not seem senseless ingratitude, or puerile affectation, not to acknowledge, that the gracious encouragement with which they urged to her side the singularly elected friend of her later years, bore a share, and not a small one, in contributing to the serenity of her mind, and the pleasantness of her social life?

THE KING AND QUEEN.

In a week or two after the arrival of the new visitant, she was surprised into the presence of the King, by a sudden, unannounced, and unexpected entrance of his Majesty, one evening, into the drawing-room of Mrs. Delany; where, however, the confusion occasioned by his unlooked-for appearance speedily, nay blithely, subsided, from the suavity of his manners, the impressive benevolence of his countenance, and the cheering gaiety of his discourse. Fear could no more exist where goodness of heart was so predominant, than respect could fail where dignity of rank was so pre-eminent; and, ere many minutes had elapsed, Mrs. Delany had the soft satisfaction not only of seeing the first tremors of her favoured friend pass insensibly away, but of observing them to be supplanted by ease, nay, delight, from the mild yet lively graciousness with which she was drawn into conversation by his Majesty.

The Queen, a few days later, made an entry with almost as little preparation; save that the King, though he had not announced, had preceded her; and that the chairman’s knock at the door had excited some suspicion of her approach; while the King, who came on foot, and quite alone, had only rung at the bell; each of them palpably showing a condescending intention to avoid creating a panic in the new guest; as well as to obviate, what repeatedly had happened when they arrived without these precautions, a timid escape.

To describe what the Queen was in this interview, would be to pourtray grace, sprightliness, sweetness, and spirit, embodied in one frame. And each of these Sovereigns, while bestowing all their decided attentions upon their venerable and admirable hostess, deigned to display the most favourable disposition towards her new visitor; the whole of their manner, and the whole tenor of their discourse denoting a curious desire to develop, if traceable, the peculiarities which had impelled that small person, almost whether she would or not, into public notice.

The pleasure with which Dr. Burney received the details now transmitted to him, of the favour with which his daughter was viewed at Windsor, made a marked period of parental satisfaction in his life: and these accounts, with some others on a similar topic of a more recent date, were placed amongst hoards to which he had the most frequent recourse for recreation in his latter years.

The incidents, indeed, leading to this so honourable distinction were singular almost to romance. This daughter, from a shyness of disposition the most fearful, as well as from her native obscurity, would have been the last, in the common course of things, to have had the smallest chance of attracting royal notice; but the eccentricity of her opening adventure into life had excited the very curiosity which its scheme meant to render abortive; and these august personages beheld her with an evident wish of making some acquaintance with her character. They saw her, also, under the auspices of a lady whom they had almost singled out from amongst womankind as an object worthy of their private friendship; and whose animated regard for her, they knew, had set aloof all distance of years, and all recency of intercourse.

These were circumstances to exile common form and royal disciplinarianism from these great personages; and to give to them the smiling front and unbent brow of their fair native, not majestically acquired, physiognomies. And the impulsive effect of such urbanity was facilitating their purpose to its happy, honoured object; who found herself, as if by enchantment, in this august presence, without the panic of being summoned, or the awe of being presented. Nothing was chilled by ceremonial, nothing was stiffened by etiquette, nothing belonging to the formulæ of royalty kept up stately distance. No lady in waiting exhibited the Queen; no equerry pointed out the King; the reverence of the heart sufficed to impede any forgetfulness of their rank; and the courtesy of their own unaffected hilarity diffused ease, spirit, and pleasure all around.

The King, insatiably curious to become still more minutely master of the history of the publication of Evelina, was pointed, though sportive, in question to bring forth that result. The Queen, still more desirous to develop the author than the book, was arch and intelligent in converse, to draw out her general sentiments and opinions; and both were so gently, yet so gaily, encouraging, that not to have met their benignant openness with frank vivacity, must rather have been insensibility than timidity.

They appeared themselves to enjoy the novelty of so domestic an evening visit, which, it is believed, was unknown to their practice till they had settled Mrs. Delany in a private house of their own presentation at Windsor. Comfortably here they now took their tea, which was brought to them by Miss Port; Mrs. Delany, to whom that office belonged, being too infirm for its performance; and they stayed on, in lively, easy, and pleasant conversation, abandoning cards, concert, and court circle, for the whole evening. And still, when, very late, they made their exit, they seemed reluctantly to depart.

Mrs. Delany was elevated with grateful pleasure; her devoted guest was delighted, astonished, enchanted; and Dr. Burney, with the highest vivacity, read her narrative of this visit; with other nearly similar scenes that followed it, during a three weeks’ residence at Windsor; to almost all his confidential friends.

WARREN HASTINGS.

The far, and but too deeply, widely, and unfortunately famed Warren Hastings was now amongst the persons of high renown, who courteously sought the acquaintance of Dr. Burney.

The tremendous attack upon the character and conduct of Governor Hastings, which terminated, through his own dauntless appeal for justice, in the memorable trial at Westminster Hall, hung then suspended over his head: and, as Mr. Burke was his principal accuser, it would strongly have prejudiced the Doctor against the accused, had not some of the most respectable connexions of the Governor, who had known him through the successive series of his several governments, and through the whole display of his almost unprecedented power, been particularly of the Doctor’s acquaintance; and these all agreed, that the uniform tenor of the actions of Mr. Hastings, while he was Governor General of India, spoke humanity, moderation, and liberality.

His demeanour and converse were perfectly corroboratory with this praise; and he appeared to Dr. Burney to be one of the greatest men then living as a public character; while as a private man, his gentleness, candour, and openness of discourse, made him one of the most pleasing. He talked with the utmost frankness upon his situation and affairs; and with a perfect reliance of victory over his enemies, from a fearless consciousness of probity and honour.

That Mr. Burke, the high-minded Mr. Burke, with a zeal nearly frantic in the belief of popular rumours, could so impetuously, so wildly, so imperiously be his prosecutor, was a true grief to the Doctor; and seemed an enigma inexplicable.

But Mr. Burke, with all the depth and sagacity of the rarest wisdom where he had time for consideration, and opportunity for research, had still not only the ardour, but the irreflection of ingenuous juvenile credulity, where tales of horror, of cruelty, or of woe, were placed before him with a cry for redress.

Dr. Burney was painfully and doubly disturbed at this terrific trial, through his esteem and admiration for both parties; and he kept as aloof from the scene of action during the whole of its Trojan endurance, as he would have done from a bull fight, to which both antagonists had been mercilessly exposed. For though, through his transcendent merit, joined to a longer and more grateful connexion, he had an infinitely warmer personal regard for Mr. Burke, he held Mr. Hastings, in this case, to be innocent, and, consequently, injured: on him, therefore, every wish of victory devolved; yet so high was the reliance of the Doctor on the character of intentional integrity in the prosecutor, that he always beheld him as a man under a generous, however fanatical delusion of avenging imputed wrongs; and he forgave what he could not justify.[11]

STRAWBERRY HILL.

Few amongst those who, at this period, honoured Dr. Burney with an increasing desire of intimacy, stood higher in fashionable celebrity than Horace Walpole,[12] and his civilities to the father were ever more accompanied by an at least equal portion of distinction for his daughter; with whom, after numerous invitations that circumstances had rendered ineffective, the Doctor, in 1786, had the pleasure of making a visit of some days to Strawberry Hill.

Mr. Walpole paid them the high and well understood compliment of receiving them without other company. No man less needed auxiliaries for the entertainment of his guests, when he was himself in good humour and good spirits. He had a fund of anecdote that could provide food for conversation without any assistance from the news of the day, or the state of the elements: and he had wit and general knowledge to have supplied their place, had his memory been of that volatile description that retained no former occurrence, either of his own or of his neighbour, to relate. He was scrupulously, and even elaborately well-bred; fearing, perhaps, from his conscious turn to sarcasm, that if he suffered himself to be unguarded, he might utter expressions more amusing to be recounted aside, than agreeable to be received in front. He was a witty, sarcastic, ingenious, deeply-thinking, highly-cultivated, quaint, though evermore gallant and romantic, though very mundane, old bachelor of other days.

But his external obligations to nature were by no means upon a par with those which he owed to her mentally: his eyes were inexpressive; and his countenance, when not worked upon by his elocution, was of the same description; at least in these his latter days.

Strawberry Hill was now exhibited to the utmost advantage. All that was peculiar, especially the most valuable of his pictures, he had the politeness to point out to his guests himself; and not unfrequently, from the deep shade in which some of his antique portraits were placed; and the lone sort of look of the unusually shaped apartments in which they were hung, striking recollections were brought to their minds of his Gothic story of the Castle of Otranto.

He shewed them, also, with marked pleasure, the very vase immortalized by Gray, into which the pensive, but rapacious Selima had glided to her own destruction, whilst grasping at that of her golden prey. On the outside of the vase Mr. Walpole had had labelled,

“’Twas on THIS lofty vase’s side.”

He accompanied them to the picturesque villa already mentioned, which had been graced by the residence of Lady Di. Beauclerk; but which, having lost that fair possessor, was now destined for two successors in the highly-talented Miss Berrys; of whom he was anticipating with delight the expected arrival from Italy. After displaying the elegant apartments, pictures, decorations, and beautiful grounds and views; all which, to speak in his own manner, had a sort of well-bred as well as gay and recreative appearance, he conducted them to a small but charming octagon room, which was ornamented in every panel by designs taken from his own tragedy of the Mysterious Mother, and executed by the accomplished Lady Di.

Dr. Burney beheld them with the admiration that could not but be excited by the skill, sensibility, and refined expression of that eminent lady artist: and the pleasure of his admiration happily escaped the alloy by which it would have been adulterated, had he previously read the horrific tragedy whence the subject had been chosen; a tragedy that seems written upon a plan as revolting to probability as to nature; and that violates good taste as forcibly as good feeling. It seems written, indeed, as if in epigrammatic scorn of the horrors of the Greek drama, by giving birth to conceptions equally terrific, and yet more appalling.

In the evening, Mr. Walpole favoured them with producing several, and opening some of his numerous repositories of hoarded manuscripts; and he pointed to a peculiar caravan, or strong box, that he meant to leave to his great nephew, Lord Waldegrave; with an injunction that it should not be unlocked for a certain number of years, perhaps thirty, after the death of Mr. Walpole; by which time, he probably calculated, that all then living, who might be hurt by its contents, would be above,—or beneath them.

He read several picked out and extremely clever letters of Madame du Deffand,[13] of whom he recounted a multiplicity of pleasant histories; and he introduced to them her favourite little lap-dog, which he fondled and cherished, fed by his side, and made his constant companion. There was no appearance of the roughness with which he had treated its mistress, in his treatment of the little animal; to whom, perhaps, he paid his court in secret penitence, as l’amende honorable for his harshness to its bequeather.

Horace Walpole was amongst those whose character, as far as it was apparent, had contradictory qualities so difficult to reconcile one with another, as to make its development, from mere general observation, superficial and unsatisfactory. And Strawberry Hill itself, with all its chequered and interesting varieties of detail, had a something in its whole of monotony, that cast, insensibly, over its visitors, an indefinable species of secret constraint; and made cheerfulness rather the effect of effort than the spring of pleasure; by keeping more within bounds than belongs to their buoyant love of liberty, those light, airy, darting, bursts of unsought gaiety, yclept animal spirits.

Nevertheless, the evenings of this visit were spent delightfully—they were given up to literature, and to entertaining, critical, ludicrous, or anecdotical conversation. Dr. Burney was nearly as full fraught as Mr. Walpole with all that could supply materials of this genus; and Mr. Walpole had so much taste for his society, that he was wont to say, when Dr. Burney was running off, after a rapid call in Berkeley-square, “Are you going already, Dr. Burney?—Very well, sir! but remember you owe me a visit!”

The pleasure, however, which his urbanity and unwearied exertions evidently bestowed upon his present guests, seemed to kindle in his mind a reciprocity of sensation that warmed him into an increase of kindness; and urged the most impressive desire of retaining them for a lengthened visit. He left no flattery of persuasion, and no bribery of promised entertainment untried to allure their compliance. The daughter was most willing: and the father was not less so; but his time was irremediably portioned out, and no change was in his power.

Mr. Walpole looked seriously surprised as well as chagrined at the failure of his eloquence and his temptations: though soon recovering his usual tone, he turned off his vexation with his characteristic pleasantry, by uncovering a large portfolio, and telling them that it contained a collection of all the portraits that were extant, of every person mentioned in the Letters of Madame de Sevigné; “and if you will not stay at least another day,” he said, patting the portfolio with an air of menace, “you shan’t see one drop of them!”

Highly pleased and gratified, they came away with a positive engagement for a quick return; but an event was soon to take place which shewed, as usual, the nullity of any engagement for the future of Man to his fellow.

MR. STANLEY.

In May, 1786, died that wonderful blind musician, and truly worthy man, Mr. Stanley, who had long been in a declining; state of health, but who was much lamented by all with whom he had lived in any intimacy.

Once more, a vacancy opened to Dr. Burney of the highest post of honour in his profession, that of Master of the King’s Band; a post which in earlier life he had been promised, and of which the disappointment had caused him the most cruel chagrin.

He had now to renew his application. The Chamberlain was changed; and whether the successor to Lord Hertford had received, as any part of the bequests of his predecessor, the history of the violated rights of Dr. Burney, remained to be tried.

MR. SMELT.

Dr. Burney was himself persuaded, from the favour shewn to him by the King, relative to the Commemoration of Handel, that his best chance was with his Majesty in person: and with this notion and hope, he waited upon his amiable friend Mr. Smelt, to consult with him upon what course to pursue.

Mr. Smelt counselled him to go instantly to Windsor; not to address the King, but to be seen by him. “Take your daughter in your hand,” he said, “and walk in the evening upon the terrace. Your appearing there at this time, the King will instantly understand; and he has feelings so good and so quick, that he is much more likely to be touched by a hint of that delicate sort, than by any direct application. But—take your daughter in your hand.”

Mr. Smelt had probably heard, from Mrs. Delany, the graciousness with which that daughter had been signalized; and the Doctor determined implicitly to follow this advice.

MRS. DELANY.

Fortunately, to encourage and enliven the little expedition, just before the post-chaise stopped at the door, a letter from Mrs. Delany, written by Miss Port, warmly pressing for a renewal of the visit of the daughter, with an intimation, that it was asked by the Queen’s express desire, came, through a private conveyance, from Windsor.

Arrived at Windsor, Dr. Burney drove to the house of Dr. Lind, after first depositing his companion at that of Mrs. Delany. With joy inexpressible that companion flew into the kind open arms of the most venerable of women, from whom her reception had all the liveliness of pleasant surprise, added to its unfading affection. They spent the rest of the morning together, and chiefly in the closet of Mrs. Delany; who, to her revering friend, unbosomed all her cares and sorrows, with a soft and touching unreserve, that could not but more and more endear her to one who took a share in all her griefs, as quick and sensitive as if they had been her own.

And many were the solicitudes of this feeling and most generous lady, though, at her great age, it might have been hoped that such would have been spared her; but her primitive sensibility was unimpaired, and the difficulties or misfortunes of all with whom she was connected, were felt as if personal. Her beloved great niece was still with her, and was her first comfort and delight; but too young and inexperienced to enter into her cares. These, however, though not their cause, had been perceived by the penetrating Queen; who had then condescended to counsel this valued lady to press for another visit “from her new friend and favourite; who seemed,” she deigned to say, “peculiarly suited to sooth her anxieties:” a gracious partiality, which Mrs. Delany related as of good omen to the present application.

WINDSOR TERRACE.

When the hour came for the evening walk on the Terrace, Dr. Burney took the arm of Dr. Lind; and Mrs. Delany consigned his daughter to the charge of Lady Louisa Clayton, a sister of Lady Charlotte Finch, Governess of the Princesses.

All the Royal Family were already on the Terrace. The King and Queen, and the Prince of Mecklenburgh, her Majesty’s brother, walked together; followed by a procession of the six lovely young Princesses, and some of the Princes; exhibiting a gay and striking appearance of one of the finest families in the world. Everywhere as they advanced, the crowd drew back against the walls on each side, making a double hedge for their passage: after which, the mass re-united behind, to follow.

When the King and Queen approached towards the party of Lady Louisa Clayton, her ladyship most kindly placed by her own side the Memorialist; without which attention she had been certainly unnoticed; for the moment their Majesties were in sight, she instinctively looked down, and drew her hat over her face. The courage with which their graciousness had invested her in the interviews at Mrs. Delany’s, where she was seen by them through their own courtesy, and at their own desire, all failed her here; where she came with personal, or, rather, filial views, and felt terrified lest they might appear to be presumptuous.

The Doctor was annoyed by the same feeling; and looked so conscious and embarrassed, that though he attained the honour of a bow from the King, and a curtsey from the Queen, every time they passed him, he involuntarily hung back, without the smallest attempt at even looking for further notice. Thus, and almost laughably, each of them, after coming so far merely with the hope of being recognized, might have gone back to their cells, without raising a surmise that they had ever quitted them, but for the considerate kindness of Lady Louisa Clayton; who, in taking under her own wing the Memorialist, gave her a post of honour too conspicuous to be unremarked.

And, as soon as the Queen had stopped, and spoken to Lady Louisa in general terms, her Majesty, in a whisper, demanded, “Who is with you, Lady Louisa?” And when Lady Louisa answered: “Miss Burney, Ma’am;” her Majesty smilingly stepped nearer, with gentle and condescending inquiries.

The King, then, having finished his discourse with some other party, repeated the same question to Lady Louisa; and, having received the same answer, immediately addressed himself to the Memorialist, to ask whether she were come to Windsor to make any stay?

“No, Sir; not now.”

“I was sure,” cried the Queen, “she was not come to stay, by seeing her father, who has so little time.”

“And when shall you come again,” said the King, “to Windsor?”

“Very soon—I hope, Sir!”

“And—and—and—” added he, half-laughing, and hesitating significantly, while he flourished his hand and fingers as if wielding a pen; “pray—how goes on—the Muse?”

To this she only answered by laughing also; but he would not be so evaded, and repeated the interrogatory. She then replied, “Not at all, Sir!”

“No?—but why?—why not?”

“I am—afraid, Sir!” she stammered.

“And why?” repeated he, surprised: “Of what are you afraid?—of what?—”

Ashamed, however gratified, at the implied civility of this surprise, she answered something so hesitatingly and indistinctly, that he could not hear—or, at least, understand her; though he had bent his head to a level with her hat from the beginning of the little conference; and after another such question or two, with no greater satisfaction of reply—for she knew not how to treat so personal a subject in such full Congress—he smiled very good-humouredly, as if suddenly recollecting her father’s account of the shyness of her Muse, and walked on: the Queen, wearing a smile of the same expression, by his side.

This exceeding condescension was truly reviving to Dr. Burney; but it was all of good that repaid his journey and his effort. The place which he sought with so many motives to expect, and for which his rank in his profession so conclusively entitled him, he was informed, a few days afterwards, had been given away instantly upon the death of Mr. Stanley, without any consultation with his Majesty; and, it was generally surmised, much to his Majesty’s displeasure.

SIR WILLIAM PARSONS.

But not, however, against the successful rival, Mr. Parsons, afterwards Sir William, was this displeasure directed: he was wholly blameless, not only in this superseding promotion, but in the tenor of his life at large. He might even be uninformed of Dr. Burney’s prior claims. And such, in fact, was Dr. Burney’s belief.

The ensuing paragraph, which appears to have been written in Italy, and is copied from a manuscript memorandum book of Dr. Burney’s, will demonstrate the early and liberal kindness of the Doctor towards Mr. Parsons.

“RINALDO DI CAPUA,

“An old and excellent composer, now out of fashion, with whom I was made acquainted by Mr. Morrison, has very singular notions about all invention being at an end in music; asserting that composers only repeat themselves and each other. And that, as to modulation, it is only in the second part of songs (a da capo) [Pg 79] that it is attempted, merely to frighten the hearer back to the first. It seems, he adds, as if these second parts were made by the valet-de-chambre of the Maestro di Capella. I recommended him to Mr. Parsons, who consulted me about a master at Rome, after he had been at a conservatoriò at Naples, where he learned, he said, nothing. Rinaldo, an admirable as well as fanciful musician, but deemed to be passé, could afford to give him more time than if in full employment; and for but little money. Mr. Parsons solicited me, likewise, to prevail on Santarelli to favour him with a few lessons in singing; which, at my request, he did, without fee or reward; for he had long ceased teaching da professore, except his charming Eléve, La Signorina Battoni.”

The Doctor, it is true, could not then foresee the personal competition he was accelerating; but neither his equity nor his generosity were warped by the after discovery: all of injustice, if any there were in the nomination, hung upon the patron, not the candidate.

MR. SMELT.

Very shortly after this most undeserved disappointment, the Memorialist—who must still, perforce, mingle, partially, something of her own memoirs with those of her father, with which, at this period, they were indispensably linked—met, by his own immediate request, Mr. Smelt, at the house of Mrs. Delany, who was then at her London dwelling, in St. James’s Place.

He expressed the most obliging concern at the precipitancy of the Lord Chamberlain, who had disposed, he said, of the place before he knew the King’s pleasure; and Mr. Smelt scrupled not to confess that his Majesty’s own intentions had by no means been fulfilled.

As soon in the evening as all visitors were gone, and only himself and the Memorialist remained with Mrs. Delany, Mr. Smelt glided, with a gentleness and delicacy that accompanied all his proceedings, into the subject that had led him to demand this interview. And this was no other than the offer of a place to the Memorialist in the private establishment of the Queen.

Her surprise was considerable; though by no means what she would have felt had such an offer not been preceded by the most singular graciousness. Nevertheless, a mark of personal favour so unsolicited, so unthought of, could not but greatly move her: and the moment of disappointment and chagrin to her father at which it occurred; with the expressive tone and manner in which it was announced by Mr. Smelt, brought it close to her heart, as an intended and benevolent mark of goodness to her father himself, that might publicly manifest how little their Majesties had been consulted, when Dr. Burney had again so unfairly been set aside.

But while these were the ideas that on the first moment awakened the most grateful sensations towards their Majesties, others, far less exhilarating, broke into their vivacity before they had even found utterance. A morbid stroke of sickly apprehension struck upon her mind with forebodings of separation from her father, her family, her friends; a separation which, when there is neither distress to enforce, nor ambition to stimulate a change, can have one only equivalent, or inducement, for an affectionate female; namely, a home of her own with a chosen partner; and even then, the filial sunderment, where there is filial tenderness, is a pungent drawback to all new scenes of life.

Nevertheless, she was fully sensible that here, though there was not that potent call to bosom feelings, there was honour the most gratifying in a choice so perfectly spontaneous; and favour amounting to kindness, from a quarter whence such condescension could not but elevate with pleasure, as well as charm and penetrate with gratitude and respect.

Still—the separation,—for the residence was to be invariably at the Palace;—the total change of life; the relinquishing the brilliant intellectual circle into which she had been so flatteringly invited—

She hesitated—she breathed hard—she could not attempt to speak—

But she was with those to whom speech is not indispensable for discourse; who could reciprocate ideas without uttering or hearing a syllable; and to whose penetrating acumen words are the bonds, but not the revealers of thoughts.

They saw, and understood her conflict; and by their own silence shewed that they respected hers, and its latent cause.

And when, after a long pause, ashamed of their patience, she would have expressed her sense of its kindness, they would not hear her apology. “Do not hurry your spirits in your answer, my dear Miss Burney,” said Mrs. Delany; “pray take your own time: Mr. Smelt, I am sure, will wait it.”

“Certainly he will,” said Mr. Smelt; “he can wait it even till to-morrow morning; for he is not to give his answer till to-morrow noon.”

“Take then the night, my dear Miss Burney,” cried Mrs. Delany, in a tone of the softest sympathy, “for deliberation; that you may think every thing over, and not be hurried; and let us all three meet here again to-morrow morning at breakfast.”

“How good you both are!” the Memorialist was faintly uttering, when what was her surprise to hear Mr. Smelt, who, with a smile, interrupted her, say: “I have no claim to such a panegyric! I should ill execute the commission with which I have been entrusted, if I embarrassed Miss Burney; for the great personage, from whom I hold it, permitted my speaking first to Miss Burney alone, without consulting even Dr. Burney; that she might form her own unbiassed determination.”

Where now was the hesitation, the incertitude, the irresolution of the Memorialist? Where the severity of her conflict, the pang of her sundering wishes? All were suddenly dissolved by overwhelming astonishment, and melted by respectful gratitude: and to the decision of Dr. Burney all now was willingly, and with resolute and cheerful acquiescence, referred.

Dr. Burney felt honoured, felt elated, felt proud of a mark so gracious, so unexpected, of personal partiality to his daughter; but felt it, perforce, with the same drawbacks to entire happiness that so strongly had balanced its pleasure with herself. Yet his high sense of such singular condescension, and his hope of the worldly advantage to which it might possibly lead; joined to the inherent loyalty that rendered a wish of his Sovereign a law to him, checked his disturbance ere it amounted to hesitation. Mutually, therefore, resigned to a parting from so honourable a call, they embraced in tearful unison of sentiment; and, with the warmest feelings of heart-felt and most respectful—though not unsighing—devotion, Dr. Burney hastened to Mr. Smelt, with their unitedly grateful and obedient acceptance of the offer which her Majesty had deigned to transmit to them through his kind and liberal medium.

THE QUEEN.

Dr. Burney now became nearly absorbed by this interesting crisis in the life of his second daughter; of which, however, the results, not the details, belong to these Memoirs.

She was summoned almost immediately to Windsor, though only, at first, to the house of Mrs. Delany; in whose presence, as the Doctor learned from her letters, this Memorialist was called to the honour of an interview of more than two hours with her Majesty. Not, however, for the purpose of arranging the particulars of her destination. The penetrating Queen, who soon, no doubt, perceived a degree of agitation which could not be quite controlled in so new, so unexpected a position, with a delicacy the most winning put that subject quite aside; and discoursed solely, during the whole long audience, upon general or literary matters.

“I know well,” continued the letter to the Doctor, “how my kind father will rejoice at so generous an opening; especially when I tell him that, in parting, she condescended, and in the softest manner, to say, ‘I am sure, Miss Burney, we shall suit one another very well!’ And then, turning to Mrs. Delany, she added, ‘I was led to think of Miss Burney first by her books—then by seeing her—and then by always hearing how she was loved by her friends—but chiefly, and over all, by your regard for her.’”

The Doctor was then further informed, through Mrs. Delany, that the office of his daughter was to be that of an immediate attendant upon her Majesty, designated in the Court Calendar by the name of Keeper of the Robes.

His sense of the voluntary favour and good opinion shown by the Queen in this election, made now nearly the first pleasure of his life; yet not superior, even if equal, was, or could be, either his satisfaction or the gratitude of his daughter, to the pleasure of Mrs. Delany, at this approximating residence of a favourite whom she most partially loved, and by whom she knew herself to be most tenderly revered.

The business thus fixed, though unannounced, as Mrs. Haggerdorn, the predecessor, still held her place, the Doctor again, for a few weeks, received back his daughter; whom he found, like himself, extremely gratified that her office consisted entirely in attendance upon so kind and generous a Queen: though he could not but smile a little, upon learning that its duties exacted constant readiness to assist at her Majesty’s toilette: not from any pragmatical disdain of dress—on the contrary, dress had its full share of his admiration, when he saw it in harmony with the person, the class, and the time of life of its exhibitor. But its charms and its capabilities, he was well aware, had engaged no part of his daughter’s reflections; what she knew of it was accidental, caught and forgotten with the same facility; and conducing, consequently, to no system or knowledge that might lead to any eminence of judgment for inventing or directing ornamental personal drapery. And she was as utterly unacquainted with the value of jewelry, as she was unused to its wear and care.

The Queen, however, he considered, as she made no inquiry, and delivered no charge, was probably determined to take her chance; well knowing she had others more initiated about her to supply such deficiencies. It appeared to him, indeed, that far from seeking, she waived all obstacles; anxious, upon this occasion, at least, where the services were to be peculiarly personal, to make and abide by a choice exclusively her own; and in which no common routine of chamberlain etiquette should interfere.

And, ere long, he had the inexpressible comfort to be informed that so changed, through the partial graciousness of the Queen to the Memorialist, was the place from that which had been Mrs. Haggerdorn’s; so lightened and so simplified, that, in fact, the nominal new Keeper of the Robes had no robes in her keeping; that the difficulties with respect to jewelry, laces, and court habiliments, and the other routine business belonging to the dress manufactory, appertained to her colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg; and that the manual labours and cares devolved upon the Wardrobe-women; while from herself all that officially was required was assiduous attention, unremitting readiness for every summons to the dressing-room, not unfrequent long readings, and perpetual sojourn at the palace.

KEEPER OF THE ROBES.

Not till within a few days of the departure of Mrs. Haggerdorn for Germany, there to enjoy, in her own country and family, the fruits of her faithful services, was the vacation of her place made public; when, to avoid troublesome canvassings, Dr. Burney was commissioned to announce in the newspapers her successor.

Open preparations were then made for a removal to Windsor; and a general leave-taking of the Memorialist with her family and friends ensued.

Not, indeed, a leave-taking of that mournful cast which belongs to great distance, or decided absence; distance here was trifling, and absence merely precarious; yet was it a leave-taking that could not be gay, though it ought not to be sad. It was a parting from all habitual or voluntary intercourse with natal home, and bosom friends; since she could only at stated hours receive even her nearest of kin in her apartments; and no appointment could be hazarded for abroad, that the duties of office did not make liable to be broken.

These restrictions, nevertheless, as they were official, Dr. Burney was satisfied could cause no offence to her connexions: and with regard to her own privations, they were redeemed by so much personal favour and condescension, that they called not for more philosophy than is almost regularly demanded, by the universal equipoise of good and evil, in all sublunary changes.

General satisfaction and universal wishing joy ensued from all around to Dr. Burney; who had the great pleasure of seeing that this disposal of his second daughter was spread far and wide through the kingdom, and even beyond its watery bounds, so far as so small an individual could excite any interest, with one accord of approbation.

But the chief notice of this transaction that charmed Dr. Burney, a notice which he hailed with equal pride and delight, was from Mr. Burke; to whom it was no sooner made known, than he hastened in person to St. Martin’s-street with his warm gratulations; and, upon missing both father and daughter, he entered the parlour, to write upon a card that he picked from a bracket, these flattering words:

“Mr. Burke,

“To congratulate upon the Honour done by
“The Queen to Miss Burney,—
“And to Herself.”

WINDSOR.

The 17th of July, 1786, was the day appointed by the Queen for the entrance into her Majesty’s establishment of Dr. Burney’s second daughter.

Mrs. Ord, the worthy and zealous friend of Dr. Burney and his family, who, with even maternal affection, had long delighted to place the Memorialist by the side of her own and most amiable daughter, in chaperoning them to assemblies, or large societies; insisted upon resigning her kind adoption at the very place where it must necessarily cease, by being herself the convoy of the new Robe-keeper to Windsor. Dr. Burney, therefore, made his own carriage follow that of Mrs. Ord merely as a baggage-waggon, and to bring him afterwards back to town; as Mrs. Ord meant to travel on from Windsor to Bath.

The serene kindness of this excellent lady, who was enchanted at this appointment, kept up the gaiety of Dr. Burney to an height with his satisfaction, by banishing all discourse upon the only drawbacks to his contentment; immediate parting, and permanent separation from under his roof.

To their no small surprise, they did not find Mrs. Delany at home; but her lovely great niece[14] flew out, with juvenile joy, to hail the approaching residence of the Memorialist so near to the habitation of her aunt.

Mrs. Ord soon took leave, to proceed on her journey to Bath. Cordial and cheering was her congratulatory shake of the hand with Dr. Burney; but when she came to the quitting embrace with the new Windsor resident, an involuntary check to her pleasure, at sight of the disturbed air of its object, started into her eyes, and ran down her cheeks. But though thus sensible to foregoing an almost continual intercourse with a fondly favourite companion, her native equanimity of disposition soon resumed its steadiness; for sensibility, though now and then the excursive guest of sudden emotion, is soon chased for something wiser, at least, if not better, when it comes not in contact with habitual sympathies. She uttered, therefore, her kind wishes, and auspicious auguries of royal favour, with the usual firmness of her calm temperament; and then, with cheerful satisfaction, repaired to her carriage.

Mrs. Delany appeared shortly afterwards, and received her guests with an ardour as animated as that of her little niece, and nearly as youthful. Sensibility here was the characteristic of the composition. Untamed by age, unexhausted by calamity, it still crimsoned her pale cheeks, still brightened, or dimmed her soft eyes, as sorrow or as joy touched her still sensitive heart.

Delightful to Dr. Burney was the sight of her expansive pleasure; delightful and congenial. His own ever airy spirits caught the gay infection. He saw in it a gentle solace to every private care of his daughter, and an augmentation of every enjoyment: while the view of such blithe and pure hilarity, in beings so beloved and so revered, could not but mitigate the fears, the doubts, the fond regrets that waive over every experimental change of life to a reflecting mind.

To Mrs. Delany,—her time of life, her heart-rending recent loss of the friend most dear to her upon earth, and the tender affection she had conceived for the Memorialist considered—this appointment, which brought immediately and constantly within her reach, a person, whom she knew to be attached to her by the warmest ties of love and veneration, seemed an event too romantic for reality; and almost she thought it, she said, a dream.

The absence of Mrs. Delany had been occasioned by the honour of taking an airing with her Majesty; to whom intelligence was immediately conveyed of the arrival of the new attendant; which as immediately was followed by a command for that attendant to mount the hill forthwith to the Queen’s Lodge.

An abridged account of the rest of this day’s transaction will be copied from a letter of Dr. Burney,

“To Lemuel Smelt, Esq.

---

“When the summons from the Queen arrived, Mrs. Delany, who most kindly persuaded me to remain a day or two at Windsor, to see my daughter installed in her new office, persuaded me to walk with her to the Lodge. The weather was very fine, and the distance next to nothing. The approach, nevertheless, was so formidable to the poor new Robe-keeper, that I feared she [Pg 94] would not be able to get thither. She turned pale, her lips quivered, and she found herself so faint, that it was with the utmost difficulty she reached the portico; whence we were shewn immediately, by one of the pages, to her stated apartment.

“This seizure was by no means from any panic at advancing to the presence of her Majesty, for that she already knew to be all gentleness and benignity; it was but the aggregate of her feelings in quitting her family and her friends; with whom she had ever lived in the most perfect harmony, and of whose cordial affection she was gratefully convinced.

“She had scarcely a moment to indulge in these reflections, ere she was conducted, by a page, to her Majesty; from whose sight she returned to me in a quarter of an hour, quite revived; and relieved and rejoiced me past measure by saying, that the Queen’s reception had been so gracious, or rather so kind, as to have had the effect of a potent cordial; a cordial, dear Sir, of which, you may imagine, I had my full portion.

---

“After dining the next day at Mrs. Delany’s, and walking in the evening upon the terrace, where I received congratulatory compliments from various friends I there met; and where I was honoured with the gracious notice of their Majesties, and nearly a quarter of an hour’s conversation; I called, in my way back to Mrs. Delany, upon my daughter in her new abode; and had the happiness to find her in recruiting spirits, and much pleased and flattered by all that had passed during the course of the day. And when, the following noon, I called again to take leave ere I returned to town, I heard that she had received visits and civilities from the whole female household at present resident at Windsor. She likes her apartments extremely. Her sitting [Pg 95] room, which is large and pleasant, is upon the lawn before the lodge, and has in full view, but at a commodious distance, the walk that leads to the terrace, which, of course, is gay and thronged with company; yet never noisy, nor riotously crowded.

“I left her with the most comforting hope that her spirits will be soon entirely restored; for the condescending goodness of her Majesty is so sweet and gracious, that she is quite penetrated with reverence and gratitude. And I have since had a completely satisfactory letter from her, in which she says, ‘I have been told frightful stories of the precipices and brambles I shall find in my paths in a residence at court; but my road, on the contrary, only grows smoother and smoother; so that, if precipices and brambles there may be to encounter, they have not, at least, jutted forth to terrify me on the onset: I therefore hope that they will not occur till I am so well aware of their danger, that I shall know how to step aside without tumbling from one, or being torn by the other.’

“But that which most has touched the new Robe-keeper, is the delicacy with which her Royal Mistress, during the first three or four days, forbore to call her into office, though she called her into presence. It was merely as if she had been a visitor; and one for whom the Queen deigned herself to furnish topics of conversation; an elegance so engaging, that it enabled the noviciate to glide into her office gradually, and without fright or embarrassment.

“The Princesses, also, every one of the lovely six, come occasionally, upon various small pretences, to her apartment, with a sweetness of speech and manner that seems almost eager to shew her favour. The little Princess Amelia is brought often by her nurse,[15] at her own playful desire.

[Pg 96]

“I should make my letter of an unreasonable length, even, dear Sir, to you, if I were to enumerate all the flattering and encouraging things that have come to my knowledge, not from the household only, but from many others; all uniting to tell me, that no one speaks of this appointment without pleasure and approbation. The Bishop of Salisbury[16] said this to me aloud on the terrace, the first evening; and my daughter was much gratified by such episcopal approvance. The Bishop added that his brother, Lord Barrington, declared there never was any thing of the sort more peculiarly judicious than this choice. I mention these circumstances in hopes of exculpating you, dear Sir, in some measure, for your kind partialities upon this event; and I will frankly add, that though I have had the good fortune to marry to my own contentment three of my daughters, I never gave one of them away with the pride or the pleasure I experienced in my gift of last Monday.”

Dr. Burney now felt perfectly, nay thankfully, at ease, as to the lot of his second daughter; who was distinguished in her new abode by the most noble benignity, and addressed even with elegance by all of the royal race who honoured her with any notice; a graciousness which, to Dr. Burney, in whose composition loyalty bore a most conspicuous sway, produced an even exulting delight.

His correspondence with the new Robe-keeper was active, lively, incessant; and he had no greater pleasure than in perusing and answering her letters from Windsor Lodge.

As soon as it was in his power to steal a few days from his business and from London, he accepted an invitation from Mrs. Delany to pass them in her abode, by the express permission, or rather with the lively approbation of the King and Queen; without which Mrs. Delany held it utterly unbecoming to receive any guests in the house of private, but royal hospitality, which they had consigned to her use.

The Queen, on this occasion, as on others that were similar, gave orders that Dr. Burney should be requested to dine at the Lodge with his daughter; to whom devolved, in the then absence of her coadjutrix, Mrs. Schwellenberg, the office of doing the honours of a very magnificent table. And that daughter had the happiness, at this time, to engage for meeting her father, two of the first characters for virtue, purity, and elegance, that she had ever known,—the exemplary Mr. Smelt, and the nearly incomparable Mrs. Delany. There were, also, some other agreeable people; but the spirited Dr. Burney was the principal object: and he enjoyed himself from the gay feelings of his contentment, as much as by the company he was enjoyed.

In the evening, when the party adjourned from the dining-room to the parlour of the Robe-keeper, how high was the gratification of Dr. Burney to see the King enter the apartment; and to see that, though professedly it was to do honour to years and virtue, in fetching Mrs. Delany himself to the Queen; which was very generally his benevolent custom; he now superadded to that goodness the design of according an audience to Dr. Burney; for when Mrs. Delany was preparing to attend his Majesty, he, smilingly, made her re-seat herself, with his usual benign consideration for her time of life; and then courteously entered into conversation with the happy Dr. Burney.

He opened upon musical matters, with the most animated wish to hear the sentiments of the Doctor, and to communicate his own; and the Doctor, enchanted, was more than ready, was eager to meet these condescending advances.

No one at all accustomed to Court etiquette could have seen him without smiling: he was so totally unimpressed with the modes which, even in private, are observed in the royal presence, that he moved, spoke, and walked about the room without constraint; nay, he even debated with the King precisely with the same frankness that he would have used with any other gentleman, whom he had accidentally met in society.

Nevertheless, a certain flutter of spirits which always accompanies royal interviews that are infrequent, even with those who are least awed by them, took from him that self-possession which, in new, or uncommon cases, teaches us how to get through difficulties of form, by watching the manoeuvres of our neighbours. Elated by the openness and benignity of his Majesty, he seemed in a sort of honest enchantment that drove from his mind all thought of ceremonial; though in his usual commerce with the world, he was scrupulously observant of all customary attentions. But now, on the contrary, he pursued every topic that was started till he had satisfied himself by saying all that belonged to it; and he started any topic that occurred to him, whether the King appeared to be ready for another, or not; and while the rest of the party, retreating towards the wainscot, formed a distant and respectful circle, in which the King, approaching separately and individually those whom he meant to address, was alone wont to move, the Doctor, quite unconsciously, came forward into the circle himself; and, wholly bent upon pursuing whatever theme was begun, either followed the King when he turned away, or came onward to meet his steps when he inclined them towards some other person; with an earnestness irrepressible to go on with his own subject; and to retain to himself the attention and the eyes—which never looked adverse to him—of the sweet-tempered monarch.

This vivacity and this nature evidently amused the King, whose candour and good sense always distinguished an ignorance of the routine of forms, from the ill manners or ill-will of disrespect.

The Queen, also, with a grace all her own towards those whom she deigned to wish to please, honoured her Robe-keeper’s apartment with her presence on the following evening, by accompanying thither the King; with the same sweetness of benevolence of seeking Mrs. Delany, in granting an audience to Dr. Burney.

No one better understood conversation than the Queen, or appreciated conversers with better judgment: gaily, therefore, she drew out, and truly enjoyed, the flowing, unpracticed, yet always informing discourse of Dr. Burney.

DR. HERSCHEL.[17]

One morning of this excursion was dedicated to the famous Herschel, whom Dr. Burney visited at Slough; whither he carried his daughter, to see, and to take a walk through the immense new telescope of Herschel’s own construction. Already from another very large, though, in comparison with this, very diminutive one, Dr. Herschel said he had discovered 1500 universes! The moon, too, which, at that moment, was his favourite object, had afforded him two volcanos; and his own planet, or the Georgium Sidus, had favoured him with two satellites.

Dr. Burney, who had a passionate inclination for astronomy, had a double tie to admiration and regard for Dr. Herschel, who, both practically and theoretically, was, also, an excellent musician. They had much likewise in common of suavity of disposition; and they conversed together with a pleasure that led, eventually, to much after-intercourse.

The accomplished and amiable Mr. Smelt joined them here by appointment; as did, afterwards, the erudite, poetical, and elegant Dr. Hurd, Bishop of Worcester, and author of the Marks of Imitation; whose fine features, fine expression, and fine manners made him styled by Mr. Smelt “The Beauty of Holiness;” and who was accompanied by the learned Dr. Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury.

Miss Herschel, the celebrated comet-searcher, and one of the most truly modest, or rather humble, of human beings, having sat up all night at her eccentric vocation, was now, much to their regret, mocking the day-beams in sound repose.

In similar visits to his daughter, Dr. Burney had again and again the high honour and happiness of being indulged with long, lively, and most agreeable conversations with his Majesty; who, himself a perfectly natural man, had a true taste for what, in a court—or, in truth, out of one—is so rarely to be met with,—an unsophisticated character.

And thus, congenial with his principles, and flattering to his taste, softly, gaily, salubriously, began for Dr. Burney the new career of his second daughter. It was a stream of happiness, now gliding on gently with the serenity of enjoyment for the present; now rapidly flowing faster with the aspiring velocity of hope for the future.

MRS. DELANY.

What a reverse to this beaming sunshine was floating in the air! A second year was yet incomplete, when a cloud intercepted the bright rays that had almost revivified Dr. Burney, by suddenly and for ever closing from his view the inestimable, the exemplary, the venerated friend of his daughter, Mrs. Delany; for sudden was this mortal eclipse, though, at her great age, it could never be unexpected.

And yet, it was not the death of age that carried her hence; no shattering preparatory warning, either corporeally debilitating, or intellectually decaying, had raised that alarm which teaches the waning value, as well as duration, of life; and makes grief in the survivors blush at its selfishness; and regret appear nearly a crime. Her eyes alone had failed, and those not totally. Nor even was her general frame, though enfeebled, wholly deprived of its elastic powers. She was still upright; her air and carriage were full of dignity; all her motions were graceful; and her gestures, when she was animated, had a vivacity almost sportive. Her exquisitely susceptible soul, at every strong emotion, still mantled in her cheeks: and her spirits, to the last, retained their innocent gaiety; her conversation its balmy tone of sympathy; and her manners, their soft and resistless attraction; while her piety was at once the most fervent, yet most humble.

The immediate cause of her death was an inflammation of the chest, brought on by a cold. Skill and care were unavailing for this world; and she, though she accepted, sought them not; her pious spirit had been long and cheerfully, though not impatiently, prepared for another—a better!

She seemed, indeed, to grieve at leaving her darling young niece; and a generous sorrow touched her kind and tender heart for the deep sadness with which she knew she must be mourned, almost incessantly mourned, by her latest adopted, but not least loved friend; to whom she left, by her faithful Astley, this affecting message: “Tell her—when I am gone—for I know how she will miss me!—tell her how much comfort she must always feel, in reflecting how mightily my latter days have been soothed by her!” Words of such heart-melting tenderness, that they consoled at once, and redoubled the survivor’s grief.

Dr. Burney was amongst the last persons that she mentioned; and with a kindness the most touching; but the latest name that, on the night of her death, she pronounced to this Memorialist, was that of the King; to whom she sent her most grateful duty, with a petition that he would deign to accept her humble bequest of what she thought the least worthless amongst her paintings, and what he most had approved.

When faintly, but most impressively, she had articulated this message, she spoke a word of fondness to her sorrowing niece; and murmured a gentle, a tender “Good night!” to her afflicted friend; and then, with evident intent to compose her mind to pious meditation, she turned away her head; uttering, though with closed eyes, but a cheerful smile upon her lips; “And now—I’ll go to sleep!—”

This was not more than a quarter of an hour ere, to all human perception, that sleep became eternal![18]

GEORGE THE THIRD.

Such was the cloud that obscured the spring horizon of Dr. Burney in 1788; but which, severely as it damped and saddened him, was but as a point in a general mass, save from his kind grief for his heart-afflicted daughter, compared with the effect produced upon him by the appalling hurricane that afterwards ensued; though there, he himself was but as a point, and scarcely that, in the vast mass of general woe and universal disorder, of which that fatal storm was the precursor.

The war of all the elements, when their strife darts with lightnings, and hurls with thunder, that seem threatening destruction all around, is peace, is calm, is tameness and sameness, to that which was caused by the first sudden breaking out of a malady nameless, but tremendous, terrific, but unknown, in the King—that father of his people, that friend of human kind.

To mourn here was but the nation’s lot; daily to rise in the most anxious expectation; nightly to go to rest in the most fearful dismay, was but the universal fate, from the highest peer to the lowest peasant of Great Britain. With one heart the whole empire seemed to beat for his sufferings; and to unite with one voice in supplication for his recovery.

This malady, however, so baleful in itself, so affrighting in its concomitants, so agitating in its effects, is now become not a page but a volume of history. All recurrence to it here would, therefore, be superfluous; especially as Dr. Burney, though amongst the most poignantly interested in its progress, from the loyalty of his character joined to the situation of his daughter, had no intelligence upon the subject but such as was public: for the Memorialist received the commands of her Majesty, immediately upon the breaking out of alarm, not to touch upon this calamity in a single letter sent from the Lodge, even to her father: an order which she strictly obeyed, till, first, the evil had become publicly known, and, next, was worn away.

This event, then, is foreign to all domestic memoirs; and to such as are political, Dr. Burney’s can have no pretensions. It will rapidly, therefore, be passed over, in consonance with the intentions of the Doctor, manifested by an entire omission of any intervening memorandums, from his grief at the illness, to his joy at the recovery of his Sovereign; a joy which, however diversified by the endless shadings of multitudinous circumstances, was almost universally felt by all ranks, all classes, all ages; and hailed by a chorus of sympathy, that resounded in songs of thanksgiving and triumph throughout the British empire.

The Heavens then,—as far as the Heavens with the transitory events of living man may be assimilated—once again were clear, transparent, and bright with lustre to every loyal heart in the King’s dominions. The royal sufferer, renovated in health, mental and corporeal, re-instated in his exalted functions, and restored to the benediction of his family, the exercise of his virtues, and the enjoyment of his beneficence; suddenly emerged from an enveloping darkness of mystery and seclusion, to an unexampled eclât of popularity; reverberating from every voice, beating in every heart; streaming from every eye, to hail his sight, wherever even a glimpse of him could be caught, with a joy that seemed to shed over his presence a radiance celestial.

Who, in the fair front of humble individual rejoicers, stood more prominent in vivacity of exultation than Dr. Burney? whose whole soul had been nearly monopolized by the alternating passions of fear, hope, pity, or horror, successively awakened by the changeful rumours that coloured, or discoloured, all intelligence during the illness.

WINDSOR.

And yet—though joy flew to his bosom with such exalting delight, when that joy had spent its first effervescence; when, exhausted by its own eager ebullition, it subsided into quiet thankfulness—did Dr. Burney find himself in the same state of self-gratulation at the position of his daughter, as before that blight which bereaved her of Mrs. Delany? did he experience the same vivid glow of pleasure in her destination, that he had felt previously to that tremendous national tempest that had shaken the palace, and shattered all its dwellers, through terror, watchfulness, and sorrow?

Alas, no! the charm was broken, the curtain was dropt! the scene was changed by unlooked-for contingencies; and a catastrophe of calamity seemed menacing his peace, that was precisely the reverse of all that the opening of this part of his life’s drama had appeared to augur of felicity.

The health of his daughter fell visibly into decay; her looks were alarmingly altered; her strength was daily enfeebling; and the native vivacity of her character and spirits was palpably sinking from premature internal debility.

Nevertheless, not the first, nor even the twentieth, was Dr. Burney to remark this change. Natively unsuspicious of evil, the pleasure with which his sight always lighted up the countenance of his daughter, kept him long in ignorance of the threatening decline which, to almost all others who beheld her, was apparent. But when her family and friends perceived his delusion, they conceived it to be more kind to give him timely alarm, than to leave him to make the discovery himself—perhaps too late. They agreed, therefore, after various consultations, to point out to him the aspect of danger.

This indeed, was a blight to close, in sickly mists, the most brilliant avenues of his parental ambition. It was a shock of the deepest disappointment, that the one amongst his progeny on whom fortune had seemed most to smile, should be threatened with lingering dissolution, through the very channel in which she appeared to be gliding to honour and favour; and that he, her hope-beguiled parent, must now, at all mundane risks, snatch her away from every mundane advantage; or incur the perilous chance of weeping over her precipitated grave.

Yet, where such seemed the alternative, there could be no hesitation: the tender parent took place of the provident friend, and his decision was immediate to recal the invalid from all higher worldly aspirations to her retired natal home.

The gratitude of his daughter at this paternal tenderness rose to her eyes, in her then weakened state, with constant tears every time it occurred to her mind; for well she knew how many a gay hope, and glowing fond idea, must be sacrificed by so retrograde a measure.

Medical aid was, however, called in; but no prescription was efficacious: no further room, therefore, was left for demur, and with the sanction, or rather by the direction of her kind father, she addressed a letter to the Queen—having first besought and obtained her Majesty’s leave for taking so direct a course.

In this letter, the Memorialist unreservedly represented the altered state of her health; with the fears of her father that her constitution would be utterly undermined, unless it could be restored by retirement from all official exertions. She supplicated, therefore, her Majesty’s permission to give in her resignation, with her humblest acknowledgments for all the extraordinary goodness that had been shown to her; the remembrance of which would be ever gratefully and indelibly engraven on her heart.

Scarcely with more reluctance was this letter delivered than it was received; and as painful to Dr. Burney were the conflicting scenes that followed this step, as had been the apprehensions by which it had been produced. The Queen was moved even to tears at the prospect of losing a faithful attendant, whom she had considered as consecrated to her for life; and on whose attachment she had the firmest reliance: and the reluctance with which she turned from the separation led to modifying propositions, so condescendingly urgent, that the plan of retreat was soon nearly melted away from grateful devotion.

To withstand any kindness is ungenial to all feeling; to withstand that which a Sovereign deigns to display is revolting to the orders of society. The last person upon earth was Dr. Burney for such a species of offence; from week, therefore, to week, and from month to month, this uncertain state of things continued, and his daughter kept to her post; though, from the view of her changed appearance, there was almost an outcry in their own little world at such continual delay.

In no common manner, indeed, was Dr. Burney beset to adhere to his purpose; he was invoked, conjured, nay, exhorted, by calls and supplications from the most distinguished of his friends, which, however gratifying to his parental feelings, were distressful to his loyal ideas from his conviction that the gracious wish of detention sprung from a belief that the restoration of the invalid might be effected without relinquishing her place.

MR. BOSWELL.

And while thus poignantly he was disturbed by this conflict, his daughter became accidentally informed of plans that were in secret agitation to goad his resolves. Mr. Boswell, about this time, guided by M. de Gaiffardiere, crossed and intercepted her passage, one Sunday morning, from the Windsor cathedral to the Queen’s lodge.

Mr. Boswell had visited Windsor to solicit the King’s leave, which graciously had been granted, for publishing Dr. Johnson’s dialogue with his Majesty.

Almost forcibly stopping her in her path, though making her an obsequious, or rather a theatrical, bow, “I am happy,” he cried, “to find you, Madam, for I was told you were lost! closed in the unscalable walls of a royal convent. But let me tell you, Madam!” assuming his highest tone of mock-heroic, “it won’t do! You must come forth, Madam! You must abscond from your princely monastery, and come forth! You were not born to be immured, like a tabby cat, Madam, in yon august cell! We want you in the world. And we are told you are very ill. But we can’t spare you.—Besides, Madam, I want your Johnson’s letters for my book!”

Then, stopping at once himself and his hearer, by spreading abroad both his arms, in starting suddenly before her, he energetically added, “For the book, Madam! the first book in the universe!”

Swelling, then, with internal gratulation, yet involuntarily half-laughing, from good-humouredly catching the infection of the impulse which his unrestrained self-complacency excited in his listener, he significantly paused; but the next minute, with double emphasis, and strong, even comic gesticulation, he went on: “I have every thing else! every thing that can be named, of every sort, and class, and description, to show the great man in all his bearings!—every thing,—except his letters to you! But I have nothing of that kind. I look for it all from you! It is necessary to complete my portrait. It will be the First Book in the whole universe, Madam! There’s nothing like it—” again half-laughing, yet speaking more and more forcibly; “There never was,—and there never will be!—So give me your letters, and I’ll place them with the hand of a master!”

She made some sportive reply, to hurry away from his urgency; but he pursued her quite to the Lodge; acting the whole way so as to make gazers of all whom they encountered, and a laughing observer of M. de Gaiffardiere. “You must come forth, Madam!” he vociferated; “this monastic life won’t do. You must come forth! We are resolved to a man,—we, The Club, Madam! ay, the club, Madam! are resolved to a man, that Dr. Burney shall have no rest—poor gentleman!—till he scale the walls of your august convent, to burn your veil, and carry you off.”

At the iron gate opening into the lawn, not daring to force his uninvited steps any farther, he seriously and formally again stopped her, and, with a look and voice that indicated—don’t imagine I am trifling!—solemnly confirmed to her a rumour which already had reached her ears, that Mr. Windham, whom she knew to be foremost in this chivalrous cabal against the patience of Dr. Burney, was modelling a plan for inducing the members of the Literary Club to address a round-robin to the Doctor, to recall his daughter to the world.

“And the whole matter was puissantly discussed,” added Mr. Boswell, “at the club, Madam, at the last meeting— Charles Fox in the chair.”

The alarm of this intimation sufficed, however, to save the Doctor from so disconcerting an honour; for the next time that the invalid, who, though palpably waning away, was seldom confined to the house, went to Westminster Hall during the trial of Mr. Hastings, and was joined by Mr. Windham, she entreated that liberal friend to relinquish his too kind purpose; assuring him that such a violent measure was unnecessary, since all, however slowly, was progressive towards her making the essay so kindly desired for her health, of change of air and life.

Mr. Windham, at first, persisted that nothing short of a round-robin would decisively re-urge Dr. Burney to his “almost blunted purpose.” But when, with equal truth and gratitude, she seriously told him that his own personal influence had already, in this most intricate difficulty, been persuasively powerful, he exclaimed, with his ever animated elegance, “Then I have not lived in vain!” and acquiesced.

WINDSOR.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, and all the Burkes, were potent accomplices in this kind and singular conspiracy; which, at last, was suddenly superseded by so obviously a dilapidated state of health in its object, as to admit of no further procrastination; and this uncommon struggle at length ended by the entrance at Windsor of a successor to the invalid, in July, 1791; when, though with nearly as much regret as eagerness, Dr. Burney fetched his daughter from the palace; to which, exactly five years previously, he had conveyed her with unmixed delight.

It is here a duty—a fair and a willing one—to mention, that in an audience of leave-taking to which the Memorialist was admitted just before her departure, the Queen had the gracious munificence to insist that half the salary annexed to the resigned office should be retained: and when the Memorialist, from fullness of heart, and the surprise of gratitude, would have declined, though with the warmest and most respectful acknowledgments, a remuneration to which she had never looked forward, the Queen, without listening to her resistance, deigned to express the softest regret that it was not convenient to her to do more.[19]

All of ill health, fatigue, or suffering, that had worked the necessity for this parting, was now, at this moment of its final operation, sunk in tender gratitude, or lost in the sorrow of leave-taking; and the Memorialist could difficultly articulate, in retiring, a single sentence of her regret or her attachment: while the Queen, the condescending Queen, with weeping eyes, laid her fair hand upon the arm of the Memorialist, repeatedly and gently wishing her happy—“well, and happy!” And all the Princesses were graciously demonstrative of a concern nearly amounting to emotion, in pronouncing their adieus. Even the King, the benign King himself, coming up to her, with an evident intention to wish her well, as he entered the apartment that she was quitting, wore an aspect of so much pity for her broken health, that, utterly overpowered by the commiserating expression of his benevolent countenance, she was obliged, instead of murmuring her thanks, and curtseying her farewell, abruptly to turn from him to an adjoining window, to hide a grateful sensibility of his goodness that she could neither subdue, nor venture to manifest.

A minute or two he deigned to wait in silence her resumption of self-command, that he might speak to her; but finding she could not enough recover to look round, he moved silently, and not very fast, away; taking with him a fervency of prayers and blessings that issued from the heart’s core of his humblest, but most grateful subject.

No one, not even the bitterest of his political enemies, could have passed five years under the roof of his Majesty George the Third, and have seen him, whether overwhelmed by the most baneful of calamities, or brightened by the most unexampled popularity, always, through every vicissitude, save in the immediate paroxysms of his malady, himself unchanged, in zeal for his people; in tender affection for his family; and in the kindliest benevolence for all his household—without looking up to him with equal reverence and attachment, as a being of the most stainless intentional purity both in principle and in conduct.

1791.

Arrived again at the natal home, Dr. Burney welcomed back his daughter with the most cheering tenderness. All the family,—and in the same line in partial affection,—Mr. and Mrs. Locke, hastened to hail and propitiate her return; and congratulatory hopes and wishes for the speedy restoration of her health poured in upon the Doctor from all quarters.

But chiefly Mrs. Crewe, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Messrs. Windham, Horace Walpole, and Seward, started forward, by visits or by letters, upon this restitution, with greetings almost tumultuous; so imbued had been their minds with the belief that change of scene and change of life, alone could retard a change more fatal.

MR. BURKE.

Mr. Burke was at Beaconsfield; and joined not, therefore, in the kind participation which the Doctor might else have hoped for, on the re-appearance of his invalid daughter in those enlightening circles of which Mr. Burke, now, was the unrivalled first ornament.

It may here be right, perhaps, as well as interesting, to note, since it can be done upon proof, the kindness of heart and liberality of Mr. Burke, even in politics, when not combatted by the turbulence and excitement of public contention. Too noble, indeed, was his genuine character, too great, too grand, for any warp so offensive to mental liberty, as that of seeking to subject the opinions of his friends to his own.

This truth will be amply illustrated by the following letter, written in answer to some apology from Dr. Burney, for withholding his vote, at a Westminster Election, from the friend and the party that were canvassed for in person by Mr. Burke.

“To Dr. Burney.

“My Dear Sir,—I give you my sincere thanks for your desire to satisfy my mind relative to your conduct in this exigency. I am well acquainted with your principles and sentiments, and know that every thing good is to be expected from both. * * * God forbid that worthy men, situated as you are, should be made sacrifices to the minuter part of politics, when we are far from able to assure ourselves that the higher parts can be made to answer the good ends we have in view! You have little or no obligations to me; but if you had as many as I really wish it were in my power—as it is certainly in my desire—to lay upon you, I hope you do not think me capable of conferring them, in order to subject your mind, or your affairs, to a painful and mischievous servitude. I know that your sentiments will always outrun the demands of your friends; and that you want rather to be restrained in the excess of what is right, than to be stimulated to a languid and insufficient exertion.” * *

The rest of this letter, so striking, yet so calm in its enlarged political humanity—is not comprehensible, no copy of the letter to which it was a reply having been found. But the following copy of the answer of Dr. Burney to the above letter of Mr. Burke, is still extant.

“To the Right Hon. Edmund Burke.

“The manner, dear Sir, in which you have kindly relieved my mind is a new obligation, for which I am utterly unable to express my gratitude. * * * You have not only removed my fears of incurring your censure, but have put me in humour with my own proceeding: and somebody has truly said, that the worst quarrel a man can have is with himself. Indeed, I was so circumstanced in the late exigency, that I was unable to satisfy my feelings by any mode of action, or of quiescence, in my power: but you have reasoned in so enlarged and liberal a manner on the subject, that, great as I thought the trial during my mental conflict, you have so nearly transformed the evil into good, as to make me almost rejoice in the occasion that has given birth to such a letter as that with which you have honoured me. Your delicacy, dear Sir, in refraining from the least hint or allusion that could be construed into a wish that I should go with you in the late struggle, though you had a fair claim upon me,[20] redoubles my desire to give you some voluntary testimony of the great respect and regard with which I have the honour to be,” &c. &c. &c.

Dr. Burney at this time resided entirely at Chelsea College; and he found this sojourn so perfectly to his taste, that, though obliged, some years afterwards, by official arrangements, to remove from the ground floor to nearly the highest range of rooms in that lofty edifice, he never wished to change the place of his abode.

The distance from town was just sufficient to avoid its bustle, its smoke, its dust, and its noise; yet not enough to impede any evening engagement, as it was not above an hour’s walk, and consequently half an hour’s drive from Piccadilly. Operas, concerts, conversaziones, were all within reach of his time, when without obstruction from his health. And Chelsea air is even proverbially salubrious, Doctors Arbuthnot, Sloane, Mede, Cadogan, Farquar, &c., having given it medical celebrity in making it their chosen residence.

He had also the pleasure, in the College itself, of some very agreeable, hospitable, and respectable neighbours; to all of whom he was an acquisition equally valuable and valued. And which to the taste and pursuits of a man of letters was still more important, he found here safe, lofty, and well fitted-up chambers, that were spacious and ready for the accommodation of his books. Here, therefore, and completely to his satisfaction, he placed his learned, classical, scientific, and miscellaneous library.

Solaced, nevertheless, as was now his anxiety for his invalid daughter, he was not at rest. She looked ill, weak, and languid; and the danger was clearly not over.

She, too, with all the delight her affections experienced, felt her heart involuntarily saddened by quitting their Majesties and the Princesses: and the final marks of their benign favour upon parting with her, cast a shade of melancholy over her retreat from their presence, dejecting—though not amounting to regret.

So deplorably, indeed, was her health injured, that successive changes of air were medicinally advised for her to Dr. Burney; and her maternally zealous friend, Mrs. Ord, most kindly proposed taking charge of the execution of that prescription. A tour to the west was undertaken; the Bath waters were successfully tried: and, after passing nearly four months in gentle travelling, the good Mrs. Ord delivered the invalid to her family, nearly re-established.

The paternal affection which greeted this double restoration, to her health and her home, gave her, then, a happiness which vivified both. The Doctor allowed her the indulgence of living almost wholly in his study; they read together, wrote together, compared notes, communicated projects, and diversified each other’s employment; and his kindness, enlivened by her late danger and difficulties, was more marked, and more precious to her than ever.

THE KING, QUEEN, AND PRINCESSES.

It has been thought necessary to say so much, first upon the appointment in the Queen’s establishment of the Doctor’s second daughter, and next upon her resignation; from the honours to the Doctor in which both these events were entwined, that there now seems a call for a few more last lines upon the subject; which the Memorialist, with the sincerest sense—and perhaps pride!—of gratitude and respect, is anxious to impart.

She had no sooner made known that her western tour was finished, than she was summoned to the Palace, where her Majesty deigned to receive her with the highest grace of condescension; and to keep her in animated discourse, with the same noble trust in her faithful attachment, that had uniformly marked every conference during her royal residence. Each of the amiable Princesses honoured her with a separate interview; vying with each other in kindly lively expressions upon her restored looks and appearance: and the King, the gracious King himself, vouchsafed, with an air the most benevolent, not alone of goodness, but even of pleasure, to inquire after her health, to rejoice in its improvement, and to declare, condescendingly, repeatedly to declare, how glad he was to see her again. He even made her stand under a lustre, that he might examine her countenance, before he pronounced himself satisfied with her recovery.

And, from that time forward, upon her every subsequent admission, the graciousness of her reception bounded with the blandest joy from her own heart to that of the Doctor.

The Queen, full of sense, penetration, and judgment, easily saw that she had preserved a true and devoted adherent, though she had lost a servant. The Princesses, with the impulsive confidence of innocence, had faith in an attachment which they could not but be conscious their own amiability had inspired: and the King, with the purest innate probity of character, possessed a tact, which the quickest parts sometimes fail to bestow, of a straightforward discernment to distinguish fidelity from profession.

And thus, after conflicts and chagrins of which he had deeply felt the severity, and by the harass of which he still remained shaken; the Doctor finally attained the lasting consolation of seeing that the motives, which had urged him to withdraw his daughter from the royal roof, were perfectly understood; and that she had forfeited no favour; but, on the contrary, had left behind her a graciously benignant—he might almost venture to believe friend, in her condescending Royal Mistress; and in each of their Royal Highnesses, nay, even in the King himself, a most august and animated well-wisher.

And this persuasion, such was the anxious loyalty of the Doctor’s principles, was essential rather than reviving to his happiness.

HISTORY OF MUSIC.

Not to break into the little history which mentally, during the last five years, had almost absorbed Dr. Burney, no mention has been made of a personal event of as much moment to his peace as to his fame; namely, the publication, in 1789, of the third volume of his History of Music; nor that, before the end of the same year, he had the brain-relieving satisfaction of completing his long impending work, by bringing out the fourth and last volume.

All the details, whether thorny or flowery, of the progress to this conclusion, were unknown, in their passage, to the Memorialist; whose intricate situation and disordered health chased, from every paternal interview, all subjects that had not reference to her precarious position.

Unnarrated, however, and undescribed, it will not be difficult to imagine the load of care, thought, and anxiety that were now removed from the nearly overburthened historian.

It seemed to him a sort of regeneration to feel freedom restored to his reflections, and liberty to his use of time, by arriving at the close of this literary labour; which, though in its origin voluntary, had of late become heavily fatiguing, because shackled by an engagement, and therefore obligatory.

His first feelings upon this relief he has expressed, with his characteristic pleasantry, in a letter to Mr. Repton, the successor to Capability Brown, and cotemporary and brother rival park-embellisher with Uvedale Price and Gally Knight.

“Did you ever see, dear Sir,” says the Doctor in this letter, “a child, when musing over his playthings, with seeming quiet sobriety, give an involuntary jump from the mere ebullition of animal spirits? a few nights ago, when I had just sent the last copy of the last chapter of the last volume of my Work to the compositor, I caught myself in the fact; and, if you were here, I would exhibit to you how I jumped for joy at the thought of an enterprise being terminated, that had been thirty years in meditation, and twenty in writing and printing; and for which I had previously taxed every amusement and social enjoyment; and even, in order to gain more time, had drawn deeply upon my sinking fund—Sleep.”

1791.

The life of Dr. Burney was now almost equally distributed in literary, professional, and amical divisions.

In literature, his time, ostensibly, was become his own; but never was time less so than when put into his own hands; for his eagerness was without either curb or limit to devote it to some new pursuit. And scarcely had that elastic bound of renovated youth, of which he speaks to Mr. Repton, been capered, than a fresh, yet voluntary occupation, drove his newly-restored leisure away, and opened a course of bookish and critical toil, that soon seized again upon every spare moment. This was constituting himself a member amongst the Monthly Reviewers, under the editorship of the worthy Mr. Griffith.

Of the articles which were Dr. Burney’s, no list has been found; and probably none was kept. The ardour of sincerity in pointing out faults and failures, is so apt to lead to a similar ardour of severity in their censure, that, in those days, when the critics were not, wisely, anonymous, the secret and passive war of books and words among authors, menaced the more public and tumultuous one of swords and pistols.[21]

The articles which, occasionally, to a small circle, he avowed, were written with a spirit that made them frequently bright with entertainment, and sometimes luminous with instruction.

In his professional department, he has almost with exultation recorded, in the following passage of his journal, the happy commencement of the year 1791.

“1791.—This year was auspiciously begun, in the musical world, by the arrival in London of the illustrious Joseph Haydn. ’Tis to Salomon that the lovers of music are indebted for what the lovers of music will call this blessing. Salomon went over himself to Vienna, upon hearing of the death of the Prince of Esterhazy, the great patron of Haydn, purposely to tempt that celebrated musical genius hither; and on February 25, the first of Haydn’s incomparable symphonies, which was composed for the concerts of Salomon, was performed. Haydn himself presided at the piano-forte: and the sight of that renowned composer so electrified the audience, as to excite an attention and a pleasure superior to any that had ever, to my knowledge, been caused by instrumental music in England. All the slow middle movements were encored; which never before happened, I believe, in any country.”

In his amical career, he still possessed Mr. Twining, to whom he clung with every species of high esteem and fond regard. And he yet retained his early and excellent old friend, Mr. Hayes; who preserved his memory and his faculties unimpaired, though his body was sunk into a state of debility the most deplorable.

The friendship of Sir Joshua Reynolds the Doctor constantly cultivated with the ardour, as well as pleasure, that always rapidly cements connexions that owe their origin to the attraction of sympathy.

With Sir Joseph Bankes he was now upon terms of lively intimacy; and had the satisfaction of seeing both his sons, from their nautical or classical eminence, share with him in the sprightly, as well as learned and lettered pleasures of the president’s good fellowship.

Mr. Windham, in every walk, whether of literature or sentiment, was amongst those with whom he most delightedly associated.

The elegant Mr. Smelt kept steadily his rank in the first line of the admired friends of the Doctor; but Mr. Smelt, though affectionately retaining for him the most faithful esteem and regard, was now nearly lost to all, except his immediate family; for he had himself lost the partner of his life, and the world faded before him with daily diminishing interest in its pleasures, pains, pursuits, or transactions.

The unfortunate, but truly amiable and high-minded Mr. Beckford was amongst the greatest favourites and most welcome visitors to Dr. Burney; whose remembrance of the friendly zeal of that gentleman in Italy, was a never-failing call for every soothing return that could be offered to him in the calamities which, roughly and ruinously, had now changed his whole situation in life—leaving his virtues alone unalterable.

The two Wesleys, Charles and Samuel, those born rather than bred musicians, sought, and were welcomed by the Doctor, whenever his leisure agreed with his estimation of their talents. With Samuel he was often in musical correspondence.

Horace Walpole invariably delighted in the society of Dr. Burney; and had himself no admirer who carried from his company and conversation a larger or more zested portion of his lordship’s bon mots; or who had a higher taste for his peculiar style of entertainment.

MR. GREVILLE.

But Mr. Greville, the old friend and early patron of the Doctor, he now never saw, save by accident; and rarely as that occurred, it was oftener than could be wished; so querulous was that gentleman grown, from ill-luck in his perilous pursuits; so irascible within, and so supercilious without; assuming to all around him a sort of dignified distance, that bordered, at least, upon universal disdain.

The world seemed completely in decadence with this fallen gentleman; and the writhings of long suffocated mortification, from sinking his fine spirits and sickening his gay hopes, began to engender a morbid irritation, that was ready, upon every fancied provocation, to boil into vehemence of passion, or burst into the bitterness of sarcastic reproach.

This state of things had come upon him unconsciously; though to the observations of his friends its advance had been glaringly evident.

It was not that he wanted, at large, foresight for events to be rationally expected, or judgment to dictate how they should be met: but his foresight, his sense of right, were all for his neighbours! for himself—he had none. To all without he had a nearly microscopic vision; to all within he was blind; as the eye sees every thing—but itself.

“Experience,” Mr. Crisp was wont to say, “is rarely of any use collaterally; it does not become efficient till it has personally been bought. And it must be paid for, also,” he would energetically add, “to be well remembered!”

But so torpid was the infatuation of self-security in Mr. Greville, that pertinaciously he frequented the same seductive haunts, and mechanically adhered to the same dangerous society, till the knowledge of his errors and their mischief was forced upon him by his creditors.

Angered and disgusted, he then, in gloomy sullenness, retired from public view; and lived a rambling, unsettled sort of life, as ill at ease with his family as with the world, from the wounds he habitually inflicted, and occasionally suffered, through the irritability of his argumentative commerce.

MR. AND MRS. SHERIDAN.

Another of the Doctor’s brightest calls to high and animated society was now, also, utterly eclipsed; for She, the loveliest of the lovely, the first Mrs. Sheridan, was fading away—vanishing—from the list of his fair enchantresses.

This paragon of syrens, by almost universal and national consent, had been looked up to, when she sang at oratorios and at concerts, as the star of harmony in England: though so short was that eclât of supremacy, that, from the date of her marriage, her claim to such pre-eminence was known to the public only by remembrance or by rumour; Mr. Sheridan, her husband, inexorably renouncing all similar engagements, and only at his own house suffering her to sing.

Far happier had it been for that captivating and beautiful creature, far happier for her eminent and highly-talented husband, had the appropriate fame that belonged equally to the birth, education, and extraordinary abilities of both, been adequate to their pride of expectation: for then, glowing with rational and modest, not burning with inordinate and eccentric ambition, they would not disdainfully—almost madly—have cast away from their serious and real service the brilliant gifts of favouring nature, which, if seasonably brought forth, would have opened to them, without struggle or difficulty, the golden portals of that splendour to which their passion for grandeur and enjoyment throbbingly aspired.

But from these brilliant gifts, as instruments of advantage, they turned captiously aside; as if the exquisite powers, vocal and dramatic, which were severally intrusted to their charge, had been qualities that, in any view of utility, they ought to shrink from with secrecy and shame.

Yet Dr. Burney always believed Mrs. Sheridan herself to be inherently pure in her mind, and elegantly simple in her taste; though first from the magnetism of affection, and next from the force of circumstances, she was drawn into the same vortex of dissipation and extravagance, in which the desires and pursuits of her husband unresistedly rolled.

Every thing, save rank and place, was theirs; every thing, therefore, save rank and place, seemed beneath their aim.

If, in withdrawing his fair partner from public life, the virtues of moderation had bestowed contentment upon their retreat, how dignified had been such a preference, to all the affluence attendant upon a publicity demanding personal exhibition from a delicate and sensitive female!

Such was the light in which this act of Mr. Sheridan, upon its early adoption, had appeared to Dr. Johnson; and, as such, it obtained the high sanction of his approbation.[22] But to no such view was the subsequent conduct of this too aspiring and enchanting couple respondent. They assumed the expenses of wealth, while they disclaimed the remuneration of talents; and they indulged in the luxuries of splendour, by resources not their own.

Not such, had he lived to witness the result, had been the sanction of Dr. Johnson. He had regarded the retirement from public exhibition as a measure of primitive temperance and philosophic virtue. The last of men was Dr. Johnson to have abetted squandering the delicacy of integrity, by nullifying the labours of talents.

The unhappy delusion into which this high-wrought and mis-placed self-appreciation betrayed them, finished its fatal fanaticism by dimming their celebrity, mocking their ambition, and hurling into disorder and ruin their fortune, their reputation, their virtues, and their genius.

MRS. CREWE.

At the head of the female worthies, who gratified Dr. Burney with eager good wishes on the return of the Memorialist, stood Mrs. Montague. And still the honourable corps was upheld by Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Garrick, and Miss More—though, alas, the last-mentioned lady is now the only one of that distinguished set still spared to the world.

But the person at this epoch the most conciliatory and the most welcome to Dr. Burney, was the still beautiful, though no longer the still young; the humorous, though contemplative; the sportively loquacious, though deeply-thinking, Mrs. Crewe.

This lady was now his most confidential friend, and most intimate correspondent. In politics, they were not, indeed, naturally of the same school; though even there, strong mutual esteem, and a great tendency to mutual trust, induced a propensity to such fairness and candour of discussion, that their opinions were more frequently blended than hostile.

Mrs. Greville, her celebrated mother, who to this partiality had led the way by her example, was now no more; to the infinite grief of her tenderly admiring daughter.

Mrs. Crewe, in felicitating the Doctor on the recovery of his invalid, formed innumerable schemes, some of which were put in immediate execution, for aiding him to recruit her shattered nerves, and restring her animal spirits.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

But a catastrophe of the most sorrowing sort soon afterwards cast a shade of saddest hue upon this happy and promising period, by the death of the friend to whom, after his many deprivations, Dr. Burney had owed his greatest share of pleasure and animation—Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Deeply this loss affected his spirits. Sir Joshua was the last of the new circle with whom his intimacy had mellowed into positive friendship. And though with many, and indeed with most of the Literary Club, a connexion was gradually increasing which might lead to that heart-expanding interest in life, friendship,—to part with what we possess while what we wish is of uncertain attainment, leaves a chasm in the feelings of a man of taste and selection, that he is long nearly as unwilling as he may be unable to re-occupy.

With Mr. Burke, indeed, with the immortal Edmund Burke, Dr. Burney might have been as closely united in heart as he was charmed in intellect, had circumstances offered time and opportunity for the cultivation of intimacy. Political dissimilarity of sentiment does not necessarily sunder those who, in other points, are drawn together by congeniality of worth; except where their walk in life compels them to confront each other with public rivalry.

But Mr. Burke, in whose composition imagination was the leading feature, had so genuine a love of rural life and rural scenery, that he seldom came voluntarily to the metropolis but upon parliamentary business; and then the whole powers of his ardent mind were absorbed by politics, or political connexions: while Sir Joshua, whose equanimity of temper kept his imagination under control; and whose art was as much the happiness as it was the pride of his prosperity, finding London the seat of his glory, judiciously determined to make it that of his contentment. His loss, therefore, to Dr. Burney, was not only that of an admired friend, with whom emulously he might reciprocate and enlighten ideas; but, also, of that charm to current life the most soothing to its cares, a congenial companion always at hand.

And more particularly was he affected at this time by the departure of this valuable friend, from the circumstance of having just brought to bear the return home of the Memorialist, for which Sir Joshua, previously to a paralytic attack, had been the most eager and incessant pleader. The Doctor, therefore, had looked forward with the gayest gratification to the renewal of those meetings which, alike to himself, to his daughter, and to the knight, had invariably been productive of glee and pleasure.

But gone, ere arrived that renewal, was the power of its enjoyment! A meeting, indeed, took place, and with unalterable friendship on both sides. Immediately after the Western tour, Dr. Burney carried the Memorialist to Leicester-square; first mounting to the drawing-room himself, to inquire whether Sir Joshua were well enough for her admission. Assent was immediate; and she felt a sprightly renovation of strength in again ascending his stairs.

Miss Palmer came forward to receive her with warm greeting cordiality; but she rapidly hastened onward to shake hands with Sir Joshua. He was now all but quite blind. He had a green bandage over one eye, and the other was shaded by a green half bonnet. He was playing at cards with Mr. William Burke, and some others. He attempted to rise, to welcome a long-lost favourite; but found himself too weak. He was even affectingly kind to her, but serious almost to melancholy. “I am very glad indeed,” he emphatically said, though in a meek voice, and with a dejected accent, “to see you again! and I wish I could see you better! But I have only one eye now,—and hardly that!”

She was extremely touched; and knew not how to express either her concern for his altered situation since they had last met, or her joy at being with him again; or her gratitude for the earnest exertions he had made to spur Dr. Burney to the step that had been taken.

The Doctor, perceiving the emotion she both felt and caused, hurried her away. And once more only she ever saw the English Raphael again. And then he was still more deeply depressed; though Miss Palmer good-humouredly drew a smile from him, by gaily exclaiming, “Do pray, now, uncle, ask Miss Burney to write another book directly! for we have almost finished Cecilia again—and this is our sixth reading of it!”

The little occupation, Miss Palmer said, of which Sir Joshua was then capable, was carefully dusting the paintings in his picture gallery, and placing them in different points of view.

This passed at the conclusion of 1791; on the February of the following year, this friend, equally amiable and eminent, was no more!

Dr. Burney, extremely unwell at that period himself, could not attend the funeral; which, under the direction of Mr. Burke, the chief executor, was conducted with the splendour due to the genius, and suitable to the fortune of the departed. Dr. Charles Burney was invited in the place of his father, and attended at the obsequies for both.

In the retirement of this mournful interval of personal sickness and mental dejection, Dr. Burney composed the following elegy to the memory of Sir Joshua.

“Farewell, farewell, illustrious friend!

Sent here thy art, and men, to mend;

Farewell, dear friend!—in vain I try

To think of thee without a sigh!

If in life’s long and active round

Thy equal I so rarely found,

How, in my few remaining days,

While nature rapidly decays,

Can hope persuade, in flattering strain,

Thy niche will e’er be fill’d again?

Thy loss is not to art alone,

Which placed thee on Apelles’ throne;

Society has lost still more,

Which both the good and wise deplore;

Thy friends dispers’d, of joy bereft,

No stand, no central point have left;

For when fate cut thy vital thread,

And number’d thee among the dead;

To all who had seen thee give a glow

Wherever wit and wisdom flow;

Who, at thy hospitable board

Had seen thee lov’d, rever’d, ador’d;

Who knew thy comprehensive mind,

Thy zeal for worth of every kind;

Who, in thy Aristippan bowers,

Forgot thy pencil’s magic powers,—

To these, the nation’s light and pride,

Of wit the source, of taste the guide,

From all the heart most precious deems,

Thy loss an amputation seems.”

MR. HAYES.

Another last separation, long menacing, yet truly grievous to the Doctor, was now almost momentarily impending. His good, gay-hearted, and talented old friend, Mr. Hayes, had had a new paralytic seizure, which, in the words of Dr. Burney, “deprived him of the use of one side, and greatly affected his speech, eyes, and ears; though his faculties were still as good and as sound as his heart.”

This account had been addressed, the preceding year, to George Earl of Orford, by desire of the poor invalid.

Pitiable as was this species of existence, Mr. Hayes long lingered in it, with a patience and cheerfulness that kept him still open to the kind offices, as well as to the compassion of his friends: and Dr. Burney held a regular correspondence with Lord Orford upon this subject, till it ceased from a calamitous catastrophe; not such as was daily expected to the ancient invalid, though then bed-ridden, and past eighty years of age, but to the Earl himself, from an attack of insanity.

EARL OF ORFORD.

This was a new grief. Lord Orford had been not only an early patron, but a familiar friend of the Doctor’s during the whole of his sojourn in Norfolk.

This truly liberal, though, as has been acknowledged, not faultless nobleman, attached himself to all that was literary or scientific that came within reach of his kindness at Haughton Hall; yet without suffering this intellectual hospitality to abridge any of the magnificence of the calls of fair kindred aristocracy, which belonged to his rank and fortune. His high appreciation of Mr. Bewley has been already mentioned; and his value of the innate, though unvarnished worth of Mr. Hayes, sprang from the same genuine sense of intrinsic merit.

Nearly in the meridian of his life, Lord Orford had been afflicted with a seizure of madness, occasioned by an unreflecting application of some repelling plaster or lotion to an eruption on the forehead, that had broken out just before one of the birthdays of the King,[23] upon which, as his lordship was then first Lord of the Bedchamber in waiting, his attendance at St. James’s had seemed indispensable.

This terrible malady, after repeated partial recoveries and disappointing relapses, had appeared to be finally cured by the same gifted medical man who blessedly had restored his Sovereign to the nation, Dr. Willis. Lord Orford, from that happy lucid interval, resided chiefly at Ereswell, his favourite villa. And here, once more, Dr. Burney had had the cordial pleasure of passing a few days with this noble friend; who delighted to resort to that retirement from the grandeur and tumult of Haughton Hall.

It had been nineteen years since they had met; and the flow of conversation, from endless reminiscences, kept them up nearly all the first night of this visit. And Dr. Burney declared that he had then found his lordship’s head as clear, his heart as kind, and his converse as pleasing, as at any period of their early intercourse.

Lord Orford, since his revival, had acquired a knowledge, at once profound and feeling, of the French Revolution—the only topic which those who had either hearts or heads could, at that time, discuss. And he animatedly asserted that never before had any country, or any epoch, produced, in one and the same nation, contrasts so striking of atrocious, unheard-of guilt, and consummate, intrepid virtue; warmly adding, as he adverted to the emigrants then pouring into England, that the detestation excited by the murderous and sacrilegious revolutionary oppressors, ought universally to instigate respect as well as commiseration for their guiltless fugitive victims.

The relapse, by which, not three weeks after this meeting, the Earl again lost his senses, had two current reports for its cause: the first of which gave it to a fall from his horse; the second to the sudden death of Mrs. Turk, his erst lovely Patty; “to whom,” says the Doctor, in a letter, after his Ereswell visit, that was addressed to Mrs. Phillips, “he was more attached than ever, from her faithful and affectionate attendance upon him during the long season of his insanity; though, at this time, she was become a fat and rather coarse old woman.”

Dr. Burney was of opinion that to both these circumstances, since one of them quickly followed the other, this last fatal seizure might be owing. Its prompt termination left the good, infirm, and far older Mr. Hayes a sorrowing, but not a long survivor.

Dr. Burney mourned for both; for Lord Orford with true concern—for Mr. Hayes with lasting regret.

Mr. Hayes bequeathed to Dr. Burney a finely chosen and beautifully bound collection of books, among which were several works of great price and rarity; to which was joined a valuable case of coins and medals. And the Doctor’s eldest son, Captain Burney, who from a boy had been known and loved by Mr. Hayes, was worthily named, by that excellent friend, his general heir and residuary legatee.

In speaking of this last event in a letter to Mrs. Phillips, the Doctor says: “I have been so melancholy as to be unwilling to communicate my lâcheté to you, who, I hope, are in better spirits. The death of my worthy and affectionate friend, Hayes, though I gain a charming collection of books by it, fills me with sorrow every time I look at them. Thirty years ago, such a bequest would have made me mad with joy; but now, alas! my literary curiosity and wants lie in a smaller compass. I was already in possession of the best books he has left me, though in worn editions and worse bindings; and as for the rest, my gain is merely nominal: for our books have been so much in common during more than thirty years, that his were mine and mine were his, as much as our own. We had only to stretch out our hands a little further, when we wanted what were distant. How much harder is such a friend to find than such books, scarce, and really valuable as are many of them!”

MR. BURKE.

Upon the publication of the celebrated Treatise of Mr. Burke on the opening of the French Revolution, Dr. Burney had felt re-wakened all his first unqualified admiration of its author, from a full conviction that error, wholly free from malevolence, had impelled alike his violence in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings, and his assertions upon the incurability of the malady of the King: while a patriotism, superior to all party feeling, and above all considerations but the love of his country, had inspired every sentence of the immortal orator in his new work.

The Doctor had interchanged some billets with Mr. Burke upon this occasion; and once or twice they had met; but only in large companies. This the Doctor lamented to Mrs. Crewe; who promised that, if he would spend three or four days at her Hampstead little villa, she would engage for his passing one of them with Mr. Burke; though she should make, she added, her own terms; namely, “that you are accompanied, Mr. Doctor, by Miss Burney.”

Gladly the invitation and the condition were accepted; and the Editor hopes to be pardoned, if again she spare herself the toil of re-committing to paper an account of this meeting, by copying one written at the moment to her sister Susanna. Egotistic in part it must inevitably be; yet not, she trusts, offensively; as it contains various genuine traits of Mr. Burke in society, that in no graver manner than in a familiar epistle could have been detailed.

“To Mrs. Phillips.

“At length, my Susan, the re-meeting, so long suspended, with Mr. Burke, has taken place. Our dearest father was enchanted at the prospect of spending so many hours with him; and of pouring forth again and again the rapturous delight with which he reads, and studies, and admires, the sublime new composition of this great statesman.

“But—my satisfaction, my dear Susan, with all my native enthusiasm for Mr. Burke, was not so unmingled. If such a meeting, after my long illness, and long seclusion, joined to my knowledge of his kind interest in them, had taken place speedily after that on Richmond Hill, at Sir Joshua Reynolds’; where I beheld him with an admiration that seemed akin to enchantment; and that portrayed him all bright intelligence and gentle amenity;——instead of succeeding to the scenes of Westminster Hall; where I saw him furious to accuse,—implacable not to listen—and insane to vanquish! his respiration troubled, his features nearly distorted, and his countenance haggard with baneful animosity; while his voice, echoing up to the vaulted roof in tremendous execrations, poisoned the heated air with unheard-of crimes!—Oh! but for that more recent recollection, his sight, and the expectation of his kindness, would have given me once again a joy almost ecstatic.[24]

“But now, from this double reminiscence, my mind, my ideas—disturbed as much as delighted—were in a sort of chaos; they could coalesce neither with pleasure nor with pain.

“Our dear father was saved all such conflicting perplexity, as he never attended the trial; and how faint are the impressions of report, compared with those that are produced by what we experience or witness! He was not, therefore, like me, harassed by the continual inward question: ‘Shall I see once more that noble physiognomy that, erst, so fascinated my fancy? or, am I doomed to behold how completely ’tis expression, not feature, that stamps the human countenance upon human view?’

“The little villa at Hampstead is small, but commodious. We were received by Mrs. Crewe with great kindness, which you will easily believe was the last thing to surprise us. Her son[25] was with her; a silent and reserved, but, I think, sensible young man, though looking—so blooming is she still—rather like her brother than her son. He is preparing to go to China with Lord Macartney. Her daughter[26] we had ourselves brought from town, where she had been on a visit to the lovely Emily Ogilvie,[27] at the Duchess Dowager of Leinster’s. She, Miss Crewe, is become an intelligent and amiable adolescent; but so modest, that I never heard her uncourted voice.

“Mr. Burke was not yet arrived; but young Burke, who, when I lived in the midst of things, was almost always at my side, like my shadow, wherever we met, though never obstrusively, was the first person I saw. I felt very glad to renew our old acquaintance; but I soon perceived a strangeness in his bow, that marked a decided change from fervent amity to cold civility.

“This hurt me much for this very estimable young man; but alarmed me ten thousand times more for his father, whose benevolent personal partiality—blame him as I may for one or two public acts—I could not forfeit without the acutest mortification, pain, and sorrow.

“But it now oppressively occurred to me, that perhaps young Mr. Burke, studiously as in whatever is political I always keep in the back ground, had discovered my antipathy to the state trial: for though I felt satisfied that Mr. Windham, to whom so openly I had revealed it, had held sacred, as he had promised, my secret—for how could honour and Mr. Windham be separated?—young Burke, who was always in the manager’s box, must unavoidably have observed how frequently Mr. Windham came to converse with me from the Great Chamberlain’s; and might even, perhaps, have so been placed, at times, in the House of Commons’ partition, as to overhear my unrestrained wishes for the failure of the prosecution, from my belief in its injustice—and if so, how greatly must he have been offended for his reverenced father! to whom, also, he might, perhaps, have made known my sentiments!

“This idea demolished in a moment all my hope of pleasure in the visit! and I became more uncomfortable than I can describe.

“Our dear Father did not perceive my disturbance. Always wisely alive to the present moment, he was occupied exclusively with young Mr. Crewe, at the motion of our fair hostess; who, after naming Lord Macartney’s embassy, said: ‘Come, Dr. Burney, you, who know every thing, come and tell us all about China.’

“Soon after entered Mrs. Burke, who revived in me some better hopes; for she was just the same as I have always seen her; soft, serene, reasonable, sensible, and obliging; and we met, I think, upon just as good terms as if so many years had not parted us.

“Next appeared—for all the family inhabit, at present, some spot at Hampstead—Mr. Richard Burke; that original, humorous, flashing, and entertaining brother of the Burke; whom we have so often met, but whom we have never liked, or, at least, understood well enough to associate with for himself; nor yet liked ill enough to shirk when we have met him with others. From him I could develop nothing of my great point of inquietude, i.e. how I stood with his great brother; for I had put myself into a place, in my old way, in the back ground, with Miss Crewe; Miss French, a lively niece of Mr. Burke’s; and a very pleasing Miss Townshend; and Mr. R. Burke did not recollect, or, probably, see me. But my father, immediately leaving young Crewe, and Lord Macartney, and the whole empire of China in the lurch, darted forward to expatiate with Mr. Richard upon his brother’s noble Essay.

“At length—Mr. Burke himself was announced, and made his appearance; accompanied by the tall, keen-eyed Mr. Elliot, one of the Twelve Managers of the Impeachment; and a favourite friend of Mr. Windham’s.

“The moment Mr. Burke had paid his devoirs to Mrs. Crewe, he turned round to shake hands, with an air the most cordial, with my father; who, proud of his alacrity, accepted the greeting with evident delight.

“I thought this the happiest chance for obtaining his notice, and I arose, though with a strong inward tremor, and ventured to make him a curtesy; but where was I, my dear Susan, when he returned me the most distant bow, without speaking or advancing?—though never yet had I seen him, that he had not made up to me with eager, nay, kind vivacity! nor been anywhere seated, that he had not taken a place next mine!

“Grieved I felt—O how grieved and mortified! not only at the loss of so noble a friend, but at the thought of having given pain and offence to one from whom I had received so much favour, and to whom I owed so much honour! and who, till those two deadly blights to his fair fame, the unsubstantiated charges against Mr. Hastings, and the baneful denunciation of the King’s incurability, had appeared to me of a nature as exalted in purity of feeling as in energy of genius.

“While I hesitated,—all sad within—whether to retire to my retreat in the back ground, or to abide where I stood, obviously seeking to move his returning kindness, Mrs. Crewe suddenly said, ‘I don’t think I have introduced Mr. Elliot to Miss Burney?’

“Mr. Elliot and I were certainly no strangers to each other’s faces, so often I had seen him in the Manager’s box, whence so often he must have seen me in the Great Chamberlain’s; but a slight bow and curtesy had hardly time to be exchanged between us—for the moment I was named, imagine my joy, my Susan, my infinite joy, to find that Mr. Burke had not recollected me! He is more near-sighted, considerably, even than my father or myself. ‘Miss Burney!’ in a tone of vivacity and surprise, he now exclaimed, coming instantly, courteously, and smilingly forward, and taking my willing hand, ‘and I did not see—did not know you!’ And then, again, imagine my increasing joy, after this false alarm, to hear him utter words that were all sweetness and amiability, upon his pleasure on our re-meeting!

“I had so mournfully given up all hope of such sounds, that I was almost re-organized by the sudden transition from dejection to delight; and I felt a glow the most vivid tingle in my cheeks and my whole face. Mr. Burke, not aware of the emotion he himself had caused, from not having distinguished me before its operation, took the colour for re-established health, and the air of gaiety for regenerated vigour; and began to pour forth the most fervent expressions of satisfaction at my restoration. ‘You look,’ cried he, still affectionately holding my hand, while benignly he fixed his investigating eyes upon my face, ‘quite—renewed!—revived!—in short, disengaged! You seemed, when I conversed with you last, at the trial, quite——.’ He paused for a word, and then finished with, ‘quite altered!—I never saw such a change for the better!’

“Ah, Mr. Burke, thought I, this is simply a mistake from judging by your own feelings. I seemed altered for the worse at the trial, because I there looked coldly and distantly from distaste and disapprobation; and I here look changed for the better, because I here meet you with the re-kindling animation of my first devotion to your incomparable genius. For never, my dear Susan, can I believe Mr. Burke to be either wilfully or consciously wrong. I am persuaded, on the contrary, that his intentions are always pure; and that the two fatal transgressions which despoiled him of his supremacy of perfection, were both the wayward produce of that unaccountable and inexplicable occasional warp, which, in some or other unexpected instance, is sure, sooner or later, to betray an Hibernian origin; even in the most transcendant geniuses that spring from the land of Erin.

“Mrs. Crewe now made me take a seat by her side on the sofa; but, perceiving the earnestness with which Mr. Burke was talking to me—and the gratification he was giving to his hearer,—she smilingly rose, and left him her own place; which, with a little bow, he very composedly took. He then entered into a most animated conversation, of which while I had the chief address, young Mr. Crewe was the chief object; as it was upon Lord Macartney, the Chinese expedition, and two Chinese youths who were to accompany it. These he described with a most amusing minuteness of detail: and then spoke of the extent of the undertaking in high, and perhaps fanciful terms; but with allusions and anecdotes intermixed, so full of general information and brilliant ideas, as, happily, to enchain again my charmed attention into a return of my first enthusiasm—and with it a sensation of pleasure, that made the rest of the day delicious.

“My father soon afterwards joined us, and politics took the lead. Mr. Burke then spoke eloquently indeed; but with a vehemence that banished the graces, though it redoubled his energies. The French Revolution, he said, which began by legalizing injustice; and which, by rapid steps, had proceeded to every species of despotism, except owning a despot; was now menacing all mankind, and all the universe, with a diabolical concussion of all principle and order.

“My father, you will be very sure, heartily concurred in his opinions, and participated in his terrors. I assented tacitly to all that he addressed to me against the revolutionary horrors; but I was tacit without assent to his fears for stout old England. Surely, with such a warning before us, we cannot fall into similar atrocities. We have, besides, so little, comparatively, to redress! One speech he then made, that I thought he meant to be explanatory of his own conduct, and apparent change in cutting Mr. Fox; as well as in the sentiments he has divulged in his late book in disfavour of democracy: or rather, perhaps, I ought to say of republicanism.

“After expatiating copiously and energetically upon the present pending dangers to even English liberty and property, and to all organized government, from so neighbouring a contagion of havoc and novelty, he abruptly exclaimed: ‘This it is,—the hovering in the air of this tremendous mischief, that has made me an abettor and supporter of courts and kings! Monarchs are Necessary! If we would preserve peace and prosperity, we must preserve Monarchs! We must all put our shoulders to the work: aye, and stoutly, too!—’

“Then, rising, somewhat moved, he turned suddenly towards me, and repeated—‘’Tis this,—and this alone, could have made ME lend MY shoulders to courts and to kings!’ Here he hastily broke up the subject, and joined Mrs. Crewe; as everybody else had already done, except Mr. Elliot; who had stood silent and fixed and tall, looking all the time in one hard stare at Mr. Burke and a certain sister of yours, with a sort of dry, but insatiable curiosity. I attribute it to his so often seeing Mr. Windham, with whom he is very intimate, converse with me at the trial. But whether he was pleased or displeased is all in his own bosom, as he never either smiled or frowned. He only stood erect and attentive. It was so odd, I could sometimes hardly keep my countenance; for there was nothing bold nor rude in his look: it was merely queer and curious.

“My dear father immediately followed Mr. Burke; as I, if I had not been ashamed, should have done too! for when Mr. Burke is himself—that is, in spirits, but not in a rage, there is no turning from him to any thing or any one else! and my father, who goes all lengths with him on the French Revolution, was here, what I was at Sir Joshua Reynolds’, a ‘rapt enthusiast!’

“At dinner, Mr. Burke sat next to Mrs. Crewe; and I, my dear Susan, had the happiness to be seated next to Mr. Burke!—and that by his own smiling arrangement! My other neighbour was his amiable son, in whom, to my great satisfaction, all strangeness now subsided. Whether, generously, he forgave my adherence to Mr. Hastings; or whether his chagrin at it insensibly wore off from the very nature of things, I know not. But it is at least as clear as it is amiable, that he never had troubled his father or mother with what he must have deemed my delinquency. They could not else have honoured me with such unabating distinction.

“The dinner, and, far more, when the servants were dismissed, the dessert, were delightful. How I wish my dear Susanna and Fredy[28] could meet this wonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes! But politics, even then, and even on his own side, must always be excluded! His irritability is so terrible upon politics, that they are no sooner the topic of discourse, than they cast upon his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers!

“I must now give you such little detached traits as I can recollect.

“Charles Fox being mentioned, Mrs. Crewe told us that lately, upon his being shewn a passage upon some subject that, erst, he had warmly opposed, in Mr. Burke’s Book, but which, in the event, had made its own justification, very candidly said: ‘Well, Burke is right!—but Burke is often right—only he is right too soon!’

“‘Had Fox seen some things in that book,’ answered Mr. Burke, ‘as soon, he would at this moment, in all probability, be first Minister of this country.’

“‘What!’ cried Mrs. Crewe, ‘with Pitt? No, No!—Pitt won’t go out; and Charles Fox will never make a coalition with Pitt.’

“‘And why not?’ said Mr. Burke, drily, almost severely; ‘why not that Coalition, as well as other Coalitions?’

“Nobody tried to answer this! The remembrance of Mr. Fox with Lord North, Mr. Pitt with Lord Rockingham, &c., rose too forcibly to every mind; and Mrs. Crewe looked abashed.[29]

“‘Charles Fox, however,’ said Mr. Burke, after this pause, ‘can never, internally, like this French Revolution. He is’—he stopped for a word, and then added, ‘entangled!—but, in himself, if he could find no other objection to it, he has, at least, too much taste for such a Revolution.’

“Mr. Elliot then related that he had recently been in company with some of the first and most distinguished men of the French nation, now fugitives here, and had asked them some questions concerning the new French ministry; but they had answered that they knew not one of them, even by name! ‘Think,’ said he, ‘what a ministry that must be! Suppose a new administration were formed here of English men, of whom we had never before heard the names? What statesmen must they be! How prepared and fitted for government? To begin being known by being at the Helm!’

“Mr. Richard Burke then narrated, very comically, various censures that had reached his ears upon his brother, concerning his last and most popular work; accusing him of being the Abettor of Despots, because he had been shocked at the imprisonment of the King of France! and the Friend of Slavery, because he was anxious to preserve our own limited monarchy in the same state in which it so long had flourished!

“Mr. Burke had looked half alarmed at his brother’s opening, not knowing, I presume, whither his odd fancy might lead him; but, when he had finished, and so inoffensively, and a general laugh that was excited was over, he—THE Burke—good-humouredly turning to me, and pouring out a glass of wine, cried: ‘Come, then, Miss Burney! here’s Slavery for ever!’

“This was well understood, and echoed round the table.

“‘This would do for you completely, Mr. Burke,’ cried Mrs. Crewe, laughing, ‘if it could but get into a newspaper! Mr. Burke, they would say, has now spoken out! The truth has come to light over a bottle of wine! and his real defection from the cause of true liberty is acknowledged! I should like,’ added she, laughing quite heartily, ‘to draw up the paragraph myself!’

“‘Pray then,’ said Mr. Burke, ‘complete it by putting in, that the toast was addressed to Miss Burney!—in order to pay my court to the Queen!’

“This sport went on, till, upon Mr. Elliot’s again mentioning France, and the rising Jacobins, Mr. Richard Burke, filling himself a bumper, and flourishing his left hand, whilst preparing with his right to toss it off, cried, ‘Come! here’s confusion to confusion!’

“Mr. Windham being mentioned, I was gratified by the warmth with which Mr. Burke returns his attachment; for upon Mr. Elliot’s speaking with regret of Mr. Windham’s being so thin, Mr. Burke exclaimed: ‘He is just as he should be! If I were Windham this minute, I should not wish to be thinner nor fatter, nor taller nor shorter, nor in any way, nor in any thing, altered.’

“A little after, speaking of former times, you may believe how I was struck, nay, how enchanted, to hear Mr. Burke say to Mrs. Crewe: ‘I wish you had known Mrs. Delany! She was a perfect pattern of a perfect fine lady; a real fine lady of other days. Her manners were faultless; her deportment was of marked elegance; her speech was all sweetness; and her air and address were all dignity. I always looked up to Mrs. Delany, as the model of an accomplished gentlewoman of former times.’

“Do you think I could hear this testimony to the worth of my revered and beloved departed friend unmoved?

“When, afterwards, we females were joined by the gentlemen at tea, Mr. Richard Burke, crossing hastily over to me, cried, in a loud whisper, almost in my ear: ‘Miss Burney! prune your plumes!—allow me to say, I never was so glad in my life as I am to see you in the world again! Prune your plumes, we all conjure you!—Prune your plumes! we are all expectation!’

“Our evening finished more curiously than desirably, by a junction that robbed us of the conversation of Mr. Burke. This was the entrance of Lord Loughborough and of Mr.[30] and Mrs. Erskine, who, having villas at Hampstead, and knowing nothing of Mrs. Crewe’s party, called in accidentally from a walk. If not accidentally, Mr. Erskine, at least, would probably have denied himself a visit that brought him into a coterie with Mr. Burke; who openly, in the House of Commons, not long since, upon being called by Mr. Erskine his Right Hon. Friend, sternly demanded of him, whether he knew what Friendship meant?

“From this time there was an evident disunion of cordiality in the party. My father, Mr. Elliot, Mr. Richard Burke, and young Burke, entered into some general discourse, in a separate group. Lord Loughborough joined Mrs. Burke. My new young partizan[31] sat with Miss Crewe and Miss Townshend; but the chair of Mrs. Erskine being next to mine, she immediately began talking to me as chattily and currently as if we had known each other all our lives.

“Mr. Erskine confined his attention exclusively to Mrs. Crewe. Mr. Burke, meanwhile, with a concentrated, but dignified air, walked away from them all, and threw himself on a settee at a distant part of the room. Here he picked up a book, which he opened by chance, and, to my great astonishment, began reading aloud! but not directing his face, voice, or attention to any of the company. On the contrary, he read with the careless freedom from effort or restraint that he might have done had he been alone: and merely aloud, because the book being in verse, he was willing to add the pleasure of sound to its sense. But what to me made this seem highly comic, as well as intrepidly singular, was that the work was French; and he read it not only with the English accent, but exactly as if the two nations had one pronunciation in common of the alphabet. It was a volume of Boileau, which he had opened at the famed and incomparable Epître à son Jardinier.

“Yet, while the delivery was so amusing, the tone, the meaning, the force he gave to every word, were so winning to my ears, that I should have listened to nothing else, if I had not unavoidably been engrossed by Mrs. Erskine; though from her, too, I was soon called off by a surprise and half alarm from her celebrated husband.

“Mr. Erskine had been enumerating, fastidiously, to Mrs. Crewe, his avocations, their varieties, and their excess; till, at length, he mentioned, very calmly, having a case to plead soon against Mr. Crewe, upon a manor business in Cheshire. Mrs. Crewe hastily interrupted him, with an air of some disturbance, to inquire what he meant? and what might ensue to Mr. Crewe? ‘O, nothing but losing the lordship of that spot;’ he coolly answered; ‘though I don’t know that it will be given against him. I only know, for certain, that I shall have three hundred pounds for it!’

“Mrs. Crewe looked thoughtful; and Mr. Erskine then, finding he enjoyed not her whole attention, raised his voice, as well as his manner, and began to speak of the New Association for Reform by the Friends of the People; descanting in powerful, though rather ambiguous terms, upon the use they had thought fit, in that association, to make of his name; though he had never yet been to the society; and I began to understand that he meant to disavow it: but presently he added, ‘I don’t know—I am uncertain—whether ever I shall attend. I have so much to do—so little time—such interminable occupation! However, I don’t yet know—I am not decided; for the People must be supported!’

“‘Pray will you tell me,’ said Mrs. Crewe, coolly, ‘what you mean by The People? for I never know.’

“Whether she asked this with real innocence, or affected ignorance, I cannot tell; but he was evidently surprised by the question, and evaded any answer. Probably he thought he might as well avoid discussing such a point before his friend, Mr. Burke; who, he knew well, though lying perdu from delicacy to Mrs. Crewe, would resistlessly be ready, upon the smallest provocation, to pounce with a hawk’s power and force upon his prey, in order to deliver a counter interpretation to whatever he, Mr. Erskine, might reply of who and what were meant by the People.

“I conjecture this from the suddenness with which Mr. Erskine, after this interrogatory, almost abruptly made his bow.

“Lord Loughborough instantly took his vacated seat on the sofa next to Mrs. Crewe; and presently, with much grave, but strong humour, recited a speech which Mr. Erskine had lately made at some public meeting, and which he had opened to this effect. ‘As to me, gentlemen, I trust I have some title to give my opinions freely. Would you know whence my title is derived? I challenge any man amongst you to inquire? If he ask my birth,—its genealogy may dispute with kings! If my wealth,— it is all for which I have time to hold out my hand! If my talents—No!—of those, gentlemen, I leave you to judge for yourselves!’

“When the party broke up, Mr. and Mrs. Burke joined in giving my dear father and me a most cordial invitation to Beaconsfield. How I should delight in its acceptance!

“We finished this charming day in a little trio of our three selves; when our dear ardent father indulged in a hearty laugh at the untoward question of Mrs. Crewe; and at its electrifying effect; declaring that he almost regretted that Mr. Burke had shown his fair hostess such punctilious deference, as not to start up at once with one of his Thunders of Reply, that might have elicited the Lightnings of Mr. Erskine, so as to have worked out, with the assistance of the arch sarcasms of Lord Loughborough, and the pithy remarks of Mr. Elliot, so tremendous a political storm as to have shaken her little dwelling to its foundation.

“This mock taste for fire and fury soon, you will easily believe, gave way to his genuine one for peace, literature, and elegance; and we concluded a short long evening by various select morsels of poetry, that my father read with his usual feeling and spirit; summing up the whole with Rogers’ Pleasures of Memory; from which we retired to rest, in very serene good-humour, I believe, with one another.”

1793.

This happy summer excursion may be said to have charmed away, for a while, from Dr. Burney, a species of evil which for some time had been hovering over him, and which was as new as it was inimical to his health; and as unwelcome as, hitherto, it had been unknown to his disposition; namely, a slow, unfixed, and nervous feverishness, which had infested his whole system; and which, in defiance of this salubrious episode, soon ruthlessly returned; robbing his spirits, as well as his frame, of elasticity; and casting him into a state the least natural to his vigorous character, of wasteful depression.

His recent mental trials had been grievous, and severely felt. The loss of his old and much valued friend, Mr. Hayes; and of his far more admired, and almost equally prized favourite, Sir Joshua Reynolds; joined to that of his early and constantly attached patron, the Earl of Orford, had all been inflicted, or been menacing, at the same time: and a continual anxious watchfulness over the gradual deterioration of health, and decay of life, of three such cherished friends, now nearly the last of early associations—had been ill adapted for impeding the mischief of the long and deeper disturbance caused by the precarious health, and singular situation, of his second daughter: and the accumulation of the whole had, slowly and underminingly, brought him into the state that has been described.

The sole employment to which, during this morbid interval, he could turn himself, was the difficult, the laborious work of composing the most learned and recondite canons and fugues; to which study and exposition of his art, he committed all the activity that he could command from his fatigued faculties.

This distressing state lasted, without relief or remittance, till it was suddenly and rudely superseded by a violent assault of acute rheumatism; which drove away all minor or subservient maladies, by the predominance of a torturing pain that nearly nullified every thing but itself.

He was now ordered to Bath, where the waters, the change of scene, the casually meeting with old friends, and incidentally forming new ones; so recruited his health and his nerves, by chasing away what he called the foul fiend that had subjugated his animal spirits, that he was soon imperceptibly restored to his fair genial existence.

One circumstance, more potent, perhaps, in effect, than the concurrence of every other, contributed to this revivifying termination, by a power that acted as a spell upon his mind and happiness; namely, the enlightening society of the incomparable Mr. Burke; who, most fortunately for the invalid, was then at Bath, with his amiable wife, his beloved son, and his admiring brother; and whose own good taste led him to claim the chief portion of Dr. Burney’s recreative leisure. And with Mr. Burke Dr. Burney had every feeling, every thought, nay, every emotion in common, with regard to that sole topic of the times, the French Revolution.

Dr. Burney wrote warmly of these meetings to the Memorialist, by whom he well knew no subject would be more eagerly welcomed; and he finished his last Bath details with these flattering words: “I dined, in all, eight times at the Burkes’, where every day, after dinner, your health was constantly given by Mr. Burke himself, as his favourite toast.”

GENERAL D’ARBLAY.

The deep public interest which Doctor Burney, whether as a citizen of the world, or a sound patriot, took in the disastrous situation of France, was ere long destined to goad yet more pungently his private feelings, from becoming, in some measure, personal.

At the elegant mansion of the friend, whose sight she never met but with mingled tenderness and reverence, Mr. Locke, the Doctor’s second daughter, began an acquaintance that, imperceptibly, led to a connexion of high esteem and genial sympathy, that no opposition could dispirit, no danger intimidate, and no time—that impelling underminer of nearly all things—could wither.

But though to the strong hold of an attachment of which the basis is a believed congeniality of character, no difficulties are ultimately unconquerable; the obstacles to this were more than commonly formidable. M. d’Arblay was at that time so situated, that he must perforce accompany the friend with whom he acted, Count Louis de Narbonne, to Switzerland; or decide to fix his own abode permanently in England, in the only manner which appeared desirable to him, a home connexion with a chosen object.

Not a ray of hope opened then to point to any restoration in France of Order and Monarchy with Liberty, to which M. d’Arblay inviolably adhered; and exile from his country, his family, and his friends, seemed to him a lot of blessedness, in comparison to joining the murderous and regicidical republic.

Dr. Burney, it may well be believed, was startled, was affrighted, when a proposition was made to him for the union of his daughter with a ruined gentleman—a foreigner—an emigrant; but the proposition came under the sanction of the wisest as well as kindest of that daughter’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Locke, of Norbury Park; and with the fullest sympathies of his cherished Susanna, who already had demonstrated the affection, and adopted the conduct, of a sister to M. d’Arblay. The Doctor could not, therefore, turn from the application implacably; he only hesitated, and demanded time for consideration.

The dread of pecuniary embarrassment, secretly stimulated and heightened by a latent hope and belief in a far more advantageous connexion, strongly opposed a free and happy consent to an alliance which, otherwise, from all he heard or could gather of the merits, the character, and rank in life of M. d’Arblay, he would have thought, to use his own words, “an honour to his daughter, to himself, and to his family.”

Fortunately, about this time, the Prince de Poix and the Comte de Lally Tolendahl, wrote some letters, in which were interspersed their personal attestations of the favour in which they knew M. d’Arblay to have stood with Louis XVI.; mingled with their intimate conviction of the spotless honour, the stainless character, and the singularly amiable disposition for which, in his own country, M. d’Arblay had been distinguished.

These letters, with their writers’ permission, were shewn to Dr. Burney; whom they so touched, nay, charmed, as to conquer his prudence of resistance: and at the village of Mickleham, in the vicinity of Norbury Park, the marriage took place.

Mr. Locke, whose unerring judgment foresaw what would make both parties happy; and whose exquisite sensibility made all virtuous felicity a bosom joy to himself, took the responsible part of father to M. d’Arblay, at the altar, where, in the absence of the Doctor, Captain Burney gave his sister to that gentleman: who quickly, or rather immediately, won from his honoured new relation, an esteem, a kindness, and an affection, that never afterwards failed or faded.

Of sterner stuff than entered into the composition of Dr. Burney must that heart have been moulded, that could have witnessed the noble conduct of that truly loyal sufferer in the calamities of his king and country, General d’Arblay; and could have seen the cheerful self-denial with which he limited his expenditure to his wants, and his wants to the mere calls of necessity; save where he feared involving his partner in his privations,—in one word, who could have beheld him, at the opening of his married career, in the village of Bookham, turn instantly from the uncontrolled restlessness, and careless scorn of foresight, of the roving military life, into a domestic character of the most sage description; renouncing all foreign pleasures; retiring from even martial ambition, though it had been the glory of his hopes, and the bent of his genius, without a murmur, since he no longer thought it coalesced with honour; for home occupations, for family economies, for fireside enjoyments,—and not be struck by such manly self-command, such active, such practical virtue.

THE KING AND QUEEN.

And while stilled by this generous prudence were the inward fears of Dr. Burney with regard to this union, his outward and more public solicitudes were equally removed, by a letter which his daughter d’Arblay had the high honour and joy to receive, written by royal order, in answer to her respectful information of her marriage to the Queen: containing, most benignly by his own command, the gracious good wishes of the King himself, joined to those of the Queen and all the Princesses, for her health and happiness.

MR. BURKE.

And, next only to this deeply gratifying condescension, must be ranked for Dr. Burney, the glowing pleasure with which he welcomed, and copied for Bookham, the cordial kindness upon this occasion of Mr. Burke. The letter conveying its energetic and most singular expression, was written to Dr. Burney by the great orator himself; and speaks first of a plan that had his fullest approbation and most liberal aid, suggested by Mrs. Crewe, in favour of the French emigrant priests; from which Mr. Burke proceeds to treat of the taking of Toulon by Lord Hood; and his, Mr. Burke’s, hope of ultimate success, from the possession of that great port and arsenal of France in the Mediterranean; after which he adds:

“Besides my general wishes, the establishment of Madame d’Arblay is a matter in which I take no slight interest; if I had not the greatest affection to her virtues, my admiration of her incomparable talents would make me desirous of an order of things which would bring forward a gentleman of whose merits, by being the object of her choice, I have no doubt: his choice of her too would give me the best possible opinion of his judgment.

“I am, with Mrs. Burke’s best regards, and all our best wishes for you and M. and Madame d’Arblay, my dear Sir,

“Yours, &c.

“Edmd. Burke.”[32]

And Mrs. Burke, in a postscript of her own, writes:

“Will you be so good as to make my very best compliments to Madame d’Arblay, and tell her that no person can more sincerely wish her every happiness than I do.”

Not even the highly flattered, highly honoured Bookham Hermits themselves could read these generous words from the pen of Mr. Burke, whose personal kindness must apologise for their extraordinary exaggeration, with more vivid delight than they excited in the heart of Dr. Burney, by new stringing his hopes, and lightening his anxieties, upon this alliance.

FRENCH EMIGRANT CLERGY.

The zeal of Mrs. Crewe to propitiate the cause of the Emigrant French Clergy, mentioned in the letter of Mr. Burke, induced her now to enlist as a principal aid-de-camp to her scheme, Dr. Burney; who, having never acquired that power of negation, which the world at large seems so generally to possess, of shirking all personal applications that lead to no avenue, whether straight or oblique, of personal advantage, immediately listened to her call; and thus mentions the subject in a letter to Bookham.

“Mrs. Crewe, having seen at East Bourne a great number of venerable and amiable French Clergy, suffering all the evils of banishment and beggary with silent resignation, has, for some time, had in meditation a plan for procuring an addition to the small allowance that the Committee at the Freemason’s Hall is able to spare from the residue of the subscriptions and briefs in their favour.”

Dr. Burney lost not a moment in assisting this liberal design; in which he had the happiness of engaging the powerful energies of Mr. Windham. And, soon afterwards, growing warmer in the business, from seeing more of the pious sufferers, he consented to becoming honorary secretary himself to the private society of the ladies who were at the head of this charitable exertion; of which the Marchioness of Buckingham[33] was nominated chief, at the desire of Mrs. Crewe.

The world is so full of claims, and of claimants for whatever has money for its object, that the benign purpose of these ladies was soon offensively thwarted from misapprehension, envy, or ill-will, that sought to excite in its disfavour the prejudices ever ready, of John Bull against foreigners, till his justice is enlightened by an appeal to his generosity. Mrs. Crewe wrote warm lamentations on the subject to Dr. Burney, eagerly pressing him to engage his daughter in its cause.

“I never,” said the Doctor, in discussing this project, “receive a letter from Mrs. Crewe, in which she does not express her wishes that you would subscribe with your pen. ‘People in common,’ she truly says, ‘see the coarse, vulgar side of this business; and some good female writer would do well to put out some short essay, to throw a good colouring on such a subject; and bring precedents, if possible, out of the age of chivalry. Now Miss Burney never shone more than when she made her Cecilia burst from the shackles of common forms at Vauxhall, to save the life of Harrel. O! I wish Madame d’Arblay would let us all thank her again for such true pictures of taste and perfection in the moral world! The refinements of courts have been great; but they have seldom reached the heart; and I think genuine elegance was much oftener to be found amongst our ancestors; who, though, perhaps, too strict concerning the female sex, seem, by their writings, hardly ever to have let refinements interfere with the operations of reason and common sense.’”

This quotation was followed by earnestly encouraging exhortations from the Doctor, to charge the new recluse to make some effort in favour of this pious emigrant clergy; and as the request had the full concurrence of M. d’Arblay, to whose every feeling the plan was touchingly interesting, her compliance, though fearful, could not be reluctant.

This was the origin and cause of The Address to the Ladies of Great Britain, in favour of the Emigrant French Priests, that was written for those venerable sufferers, as a pen-offering subscription from this Memorialist.

And the partial view that was taken of it by her fellow recluse; and the warm approvance accorded to it by Mrs. Crewe’s new private secretary, made the writer esteem it the most fortunate effusion of that pen.

Mrs. Doctor Burney was amongst the most active workers for these pious self-sacrificed exiles: as well as for whatever had charity for its object.

GENERAL D’ARBLAY.

Such were the exertions of Dr. Burney, such the concurrent occupations of the happy new recluse, when suddenly a whirlwind encompassed the cottage of the latter, that involved its tenants in tremulous disorder.

It was raised by the taking of Toulon, just mentioned in the letter of Mr. Burke; and began its workings upon the female hermit on the evening of a day which had brightly dawned upon her, in bringing the junction of the suffrage of her father upon her pamphlet to that of her life’s partner.

Her own account of this shock, written to Dr. Burney, will here be inserted, because it was preserved by the Doctor as characteristic of the principles and conduct of his new son-in-law.

“Bookham, 1794.

“To Dr. Burney.

“When I received the last letter of my dearest father, and for some hours after, I was the happiest of human beings; I make no exception. I think none possible. Not a wish remained for me—not a thought of forming one!

[Pg 189]

“This was just the period—is it not always so?—for a stroke of sorrow to reverse the whole scene! That very evening, M. d’Arblay communicated to me his desire of re-entering the army, and—of going to Toulon!

“He had intended, upon our marriage, to retire wholly from public life. His services and his sufferings, in his severe military career,—repaid by exile and confiscation, and for ever embittered to his memory by the murder of his sovereign, had fulfilled, though not satisfied, the claims of his conscience and his honour, and led him, without a single self-reproach, to seek a quiet retreat in domestic society: but—the second declaration of Lord Hood no sooner reached this obscure little dwelling; no sooner had he read the words Louis XVII. and the Constitution, to which he had sworn, united, than his military ardour re-kindled, his loyalty was all up in arms, and every sense of monarchical patriotism now carries him back to war and public service.

“I dare not speak of myself!—except to say that I have forborne to distress him by a single [Pg 190] solicitation. All the felicity of that our own chosen and loved retirement, would effectually be annulled, by the smallest suspicion that it was enjoyed at the expense of any public duty.

“He is now writing an offer for entering as a volunteer into the army destined for Toulon; together with a list of his past services up to his becoming Commandant of Longwy; and the dates of his various promotions to the last recorded of Marechal de Camp, which was yet unsigned and unsealed, when the captivity of Louis XVI. forced the emigration which brought M. d’Arblay to England.

“This memorial he addresses and means to convey in person to Mr. Pitt.”

To Dr. Burney, with all his consideration for his daughter, this enterprise appeared not to be inauspicious; and its spirit and loyalty warmly endeared to him his new relative: who could not, however, give proof of the noble verity of his sentiments and intentions, till many years later; for before the answer of Mr. Pitt to the memorial could be returned, the attempt upon Toulon proved abortive.

1794.

The Doctor continued in his benevolent post of private Secretary to the charitable ladies of the Emigrant Clergy Contribution, so long as the Committee lasted; though with so expert a distribution of time, that his new office robbed him not of the pleasure to yet enlarge the elegance of his literary circles, by being initiated into the Blue parties of Lady Lucan, supported by her accomplished daughter, Lady Spencer.

MR. MASON.

He now, also, renewed into long and social meetings, at his own apartments at Chelsea college, an acquaintance of forty-six years’ standing with Mason, the poet; by whom he was often consulted upon schemes of church psalmody, with respect both to its composition and execution; as well as upon other desirable improvements in our sacred harmony; which Mr. Mason, from practical knowledge both of music and poetry, was peculiarly fitted to investigate and refine.

Of this formation of intimacy, rather than renewal of acquaintance, Dr. Burney, in his Letters to the Hermits, spoke with great pleasure; though, while always admiring the talents, and esteeming the private character of that charming poet, he never lost either his regret or his blame for the truly unclerical use made of his powers of wit and humour, by the insidious, yet biting sarcasms, levelled against his virtuous Sovereign in the poetical epistle to Sir William Chambers.

Had any crime been held up to view, there might have been an exaltation of courage in not suffering the Throne to be its protector; or had any secret vice, that was undermining moral duties, been exposed, there might have been a nobleness of intrepid indignation in casting upon it the glare of public contempt. But the shaft was levelled at one who had neither crime nor vice; an exemption so rare, that it ought to have created respect for the lowest born subject in the realm; and therefore, when marking the character of a monarch, became a call, a commanding call, to every lover of virtue—be his politics what they might—for being blazoned with public applause, as an excitement to public example.

MR. MALONE.

Dr. Burney grew closely connected, also, with that indefatigable anecdote-hunter; date-ferretter; technical difficulty-solver; and collector of various readings—Mr. Malone.

HON. FRED. NORTH.

And he had the happiness of often meeting with the Hon. Frederic North, afterwards Earl of Guildford; whose pleasant wit, practical urbanity, and persevering love of enterprise, made him full of original entertainment; whilst his unvarying gaiety of good-humour enabled him to discard spleen from pain, and to banish murmuring from even the acutest fits of the gout; though maimed by them, distorted, and crippled.

Upon his first visit to Dr. Burney, at Chelsea College, Mr. Frederick North appeared there upon crutches, and with difficulty hobbled into the library; yet he advanced with a smile, saying, that though he must obsequiously beg permission to produce himself in such a plight elsewhere, he boldly felt at home in coming with wooden legs to Chelsea Hospital.

1795.

The health of Dr. Burney was at this time most happily restored to the full exercise of all his powers of life. In a letter written to Bookham, at the close of the spring season, he says:

“I have been such an evaporé lately, that if I were near enough to accost you de vive voix, it would be with Susey’s[34] exclamation, when she was just arrived from France, at only eleven years old, after staying at Mrs. Lewis’s till ten o’clock one night, “Que je suis libertine, papa!” And thus, “Que je suis libertin, ma fille!” cry I. Three huge assemblies at Spencer House; two dinners at the Duke and Duchess of Leeds; two ditto at Mr. Crewe’s; two clubs; a dejeuner at Mrs. Crewe’s villa, at Hampstead; a dinner at Lord Macartney’s; ditto at Mr. Locke’s; ditto at Mr. Coxe’s; two ditto at Sir George Howard’s, at Chelsea; two philosophical conversationes at Sir Joseph Bankes’s; two operas; two professional concerts; Haydn’s benefit; Salomon’s three ancient musics; &c. &c. &c.

“What dissipating profligacy! But what argufies all this festivity? ’Tis all vanity, and exhalement of spirit. I was tired to death of it all before it was over: whilst your domestic occupations and pleasures are as fresh every morning as the roses of your garden.”

The following is the sportive conclusion of another letter, written in the season of fashionable engagements.

“When shall I have done with telling you of mes bonnes fortunes? Betty Carter, Hannah More, Lady Clarges—nay, t’other day, at Dickey Coxe’s, I met with the Miss Berrys, as lively and accomplished as ever; and I have strong invites to their cottage at Strawberry Hill. What say you to that, ma’am?—

“Torn to pieces, I declare!”

MR. ERSKINE.

The Doctor now, in truth, became so universally in fashion, that he was even sought, much to his amusement, by those against whose principles, as far as they were political, he was invariably at war; namely, sundry celebrated oppositionists.

In his letter to the Hermits he particularizes in this liberty list, Mr. Mason, Mr. Stonehewer, Sir William Jones, Mr. Hayley, Mr. Godwin, and the first Lord Lansdowne; ending with Mr. Erskine,[35] whom he had met at two dinners, and to whose house he had been invited to a third convivial meeting: and here this renowned orator and new acquaintance fastened upon the Doctor with all the volubility of his eloquence, and all the exuberance of his happy good-humour, in singing his own exploits and praises, without insisting that his hearer should join in chorus; or rather, perhaps, without discovering, from his own self-absorption, that that ceremony was omitted.

CAROLINE, PRINCESS OF WALES.

The dejeuner above mentioned of Mrs. Crewe at her little villa, at Hampstead, was given in honour of Caroline, Princess of Wales.[36] To this, in order to compliment at once the rank and the taste of her Royal Highness, Mrs. Crewe invited whoever she thought most distinguished, either in situation or in talents. Under the latter class, she was not likely to forget her old friend, Dr. Burney; whose name her Royal Highness no sooner heard, than she desired Mr. Windham to bring him to her for presentation. “And then,” the Doctor in his diary relates, “she said, in very good English, ‘How do you do, Dr. Burney? You and I are not strangers. You are very well known in Germany, and often mentioned there; car, enfin, vous êtes un homme celebre.’”

“After which,” the Doctor’s diary goes on, “in the little colloquial debates, and playful defences of general conversation, she commonly and flatteringly referred to me for arbitration, saying: ‘Is it not so, Dr. Burney? You are a wise man, and must know of the best.’”

“The next time her Royal Highness had music, I was remembered for a summons to Blackheath, forwarded to me by the very agreeable and very deserving Miss Hayman. And here the Princess had the politeness and condescension to shew me her plantations and improvements.

“The music performed was chiefly of Mozart; and her Royal Highness, on piece following piece of the same composer, cried: ‘I hope you like Mozart, Dr. Burney?’ ‘No compositions can better deserve your Royal Highness’s favour,’ I answered; ‘for his inventions and resources are inexhaustible: and his vocal music, of which we knew nothing in England till after he was dead, surpasses in beauty even his instrumental; which had so justly, in this country, obtained him the warmest applause.’ The music was so good, and her Royal Highness was so lively, that Mrs. Crewe, whom I had the honour to accompany, could not take leave till past one o’clock in the morning; and it was past six ere my jaded horses and I reached Chelsea College.”

MRS. THRALE PIOZZI.

Chiefly cheering, however, and agreeable to the Doctor, was an unexpected re-meeting with a long favourite friend, from whom he had unavoidably, and most unpleasantly, been separated,—Mrs. Thrale; whom now, for the first time, he saw as Mrs. Piozzi.

It was at one of the charming concerts of the charming musician, Salomon, that this occurred. Dr. Burney knew not that she was returned from Italy, whither she had gone speedily after her marriage; till here, with much surprise, he perceived amongst the audience, il Signor Piozzi.

Approaching him, with an aspect of cordiality, which was met with one of welcoming pleasure, they entered into talk upon the performers and the instruments, and the enchanting compositions of Haydn. Dr. Burney then inquired, with all the interest that he most sincerely felt, after la sua consorte. Piozzi, turning round, pointed to a sofa, on which, to his infinite joy, Dr. Burney beheld Mrs. Thrale Piozzi, seated in the midst of her daughters, the four Miss Thrales.

His pleasure seemed reciprocated by Mrs. Piozzi, who, sportively ejaculating, “Here’s Dr. Burney, as young as ever!” held out to him her hand with lively amity.

His satisfaction now expanded into a conversational gaiety, that opened from them both those fertile sources of entertainment, that originally had rendered them most agreeable to each other; the younger branches, with amiable good-humour, contributing to the spirit of this unexpected junction.

The Bookhamite Recluse, to whom this occurrence was immediately communicated, received it with true and tender delight. Most joyfully would she, also, have held out her hand to that once so dear friend, from whom she could never sever her heart, had she happily been of this Salomonic party.[37]

METASTASIO.

Dr. Burney still, as he had done nearly from the hour that his History was finished, composed various articles for the Monthly Review. But so precarious and irregular a call upon his fertile abilities, sufficed not for their occupation; and he soon started a new work, on a subject peculiar and appropriate, that came singularly home to his business and bosom; though it was offered to him only by that fatal power which daily and unfailingly lavishes before us subjects for our discussions—and for our tears!—Death; which, some time previously to the liberation of the Doctor’s mind from the arcana of musical history, had cast the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio upon posterity.

No poet could be more congenial to Dr. Burney than Metastasio, the purity of whose numbers was mellifluously in concord with the purity of his sentiments; while both were in perfect unison with the taste of the Doctor. He considered it, professionally, to be even a duty, for the Historian of the Art of Music, to raise, as far as in him lay, a biographical monument to the glory of the man whose poetry, after that which is sacred, is best adapted to inspire the lyric muse with strains of genial harmony, in all the impassioned varieties that the choral shell is capable to generate for the musical enthusiast.

The first object of Dr. Burney in his visit to Vienna, at the period of his German Tour, had been to see and to converse with Metastasio; whose resplendent lyrical fame had raised him, in his own dramatic career, to a height unequalled throughout Europe.

The benign reception given to the Doctor by this amiable and venerable bard; the charm of his converse; the meekly borne honours by which he was distinguished and surrounded; and the delightful performances, and graceful attractions of his Niece, Mademoiselle Martinez, are fully and feelingly set forth in the third volume of the Musical Tours.

When decided, therefore, upon this subject for his pen and his powers, he employed himself without delay in preparatory measures for his new undertaking: and procured every edition of the Poet’s works; to glean from each all that might incidentally be interspersed of anecdote, in letters, advertisements, prefaces, or notes.

He was kindly assisted in getting over various documents from Vienna, by the late Lord Mansfield, who, while Lord Stormont, had been British Ambassador at that capital when it was visited by Dr. Burney.

The present Earl Spencer, also, liberally aided the passage to England of some works much wanted, but difficult of attainment.

From Haydn, with whom the Doctor was in constant commerce, and who chiefly resided at Vienna, he received considerable local and agreeable help.

And through the generous and judicious friendship of the faithful Pacchierotti, he was furnished with every species of assistance that judgment, zeal, and a perfect acquaintance with the calls of the subject, could suggest.

“In short,” says the Doctor, in a letter to Bookham, “I am prodigiously hallooed on in my Metastasio mania by all sorts of poets and critics; and, to bring all to a point, I have a letter, which I inclose for your perusal, from the enchanting Mademoiselle Martinez.”

Thus powerfully encouraged, the Doctor consigned himself to this new composition. Not, however, as when working at his History, to the sacrifice of his ease, his comfort, and his friends: with these, on the contrary, his spring and winter intercourse were now lively and frequent; and with some of them he indulged himself in spending a portion of his summer.

1795.

While he had been blessed by the preservation of Messrs. Crisp, Bewley, and Twining, he had neither inclination nor time for any diffusion that would have robbed him of their incomparably endearing and enlightening society. A few days in rotation were all that he could bestow on his many other claimants; but the two first of these heart, head, and leisure-monopolizers, Messrs. Crisp and Bewley, were gone; and had left a chasm that the third only could fill; and he, Mr. Twining, was now almost unremittingly occupied in kindly attendance upon a sick and suffering wife.

The next who, now, ranked nearest to Dr. Burney for consolation and confidence, was Mrs. Crewe; to whom he would willingly have dedicated the greatest part of his wandering holidays, but that her country residence, at Crewe Hall, in Cheshire, exacted two journeys so incommodious and fatiguing, that it was rarely, and with difficulty, they could be undertaken.

To his valuable old friend, Mr. Coxe, he gave a week or two, at his pleasant villa, near Southampton, every season. And he made rambling visits, of a few days, to Lady Mary Duncan, Sir Joseph Bankes, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Garrick, Lady Clarges, and several others.

With his two sons, and his eldest daughter, as their residences were within a few miles of his own abode, he was in constant commerce; but to his Susanna, since she had been separated from the paternal roof, he devoted a fortnight every year; and he gratified his fourth daughter, Charlotte, now resident in Norfolk, with visits rather longer, because her greater distance from Chelsea made them necessarily less frequent.

BOOKHAM.

In the first of these domestic and amical tours that were made after the marriage of his second daughter, he suddenly turned out of his direct road to take a view of the dwelling of the Hermits of Bookham; in which rural village they were temporarily settled, in a small but pleasant cottage, endeared for ever to their remembrance from having been found out for them by Mr. Locke.

It was not, perhaps, without the spur of some latent solicitude, some anxious incertitude, that Dr. Burney made this first visit to them abruptly, at an early hour, and when believed far distant; and if so, never were kind doubts more kindlily solved: he found all that most tenderly he could wish—concord and content; gay concord, and grateful content.

When he sent in his name from his post-chaise, the Hermits flew to receive him; and ere he could reach the little threshold of the little habitation, his daughter was in his arms. How long she there kept him she knows not, but he was very patient at the detention! Tears of pleasure standing in his full eyes at her rapturous reception; and at witnessing the unsophisticated happiness of two beings who, from living nearly in the front of life, nourished in retirement no wish but for its continuance.

CAMILLA; OR A PICTURE OF YOUTH.

The Memoirs of Metastasio, with all their interest to a man whose love of literary composition was so eminently his ruling passion, surmounted not—for nothing could surmount—the parental benevolence that welcomed with encouragement, and hailed with hope, a project now communicated to him of a new work, the third in succession, from the author of Evelina and Cecilia.

That author, become now a mother as well as a wife, was induced to print this, her third literary essay, by a hazardous mode of publicity, from which her natively-retired temperament had made her, in former days, recoil, even when it was eloquently suggested for her by Mr. Burke to Dr. Burney; namely, the mode of subscription.

But, at this period, she felt a call against her distaste at once conjugal and maternal. Her noble-minded partner, though the most ardent of men to be himself what he thought belonged to the dignity of his sex, the efficient purveyor of his own small home and family, was despoiled, by events over which he had no control, of that post of honour.

This scheme, therefore, was adopted. Its history, however, would be here a matter of supererogation, save as far as it includes Dr. Burney in its influence and effect; for neither the author, nor her partner in all, could feel greater delight than was experienced by Dr. Burney, from the three principal circumstances which emanated from this undertaking.

The first of these was the honour graciously accorded by her Majesty, Queen Charlotte, of suffering her august name to stand at the head of the Book, by deigning to accept its Dedication.

The second was the feminine approbation marked for the author by three ladies, equally conspicuous for their virtues and their understanding; the honourable and sagacious Mrs. Boscawen, the beautiful and zealous Mrs. Crewe, and the exemplary and captivating Mrs. Locke; who each kept books for the subscription, which the kindness of their friendship raised as highly in honour as in advantage.

And the third circumstance, to the Doctor the most touching, because now the least expected, was the energetic interest, to which the prospect of seeing this Memorialist emerge again from obscurity, re-animated the still generous feelings of the now nearly sinking, altered, gone Mr. Burke! who, on finding that his charges against Mr. Hastings were adjudged in Westminster Hall to be unfounded, though he was still persuaded himself that they were just, had retired from Parliament, wearied and disgusted; and who, on the following year, had lost his deeply-attached brother; and, almost immediately afterwards, his nearly idolized son, who was “the pride of his heart, and the joy of his existence,” to use his own words in a paragraph of a letter written to the mutually respected and faithful friend of himself and of Dr. Burney, Mrs. Crewe.

That lady, well acquainted with the reverence of Dr. Burney for Mr. Burke, and the attachment with which Mr. Burke returned it, generally communicated her letters from Beaconsfield to Chelsea College; and not unfrequently with a desire that they might be forwarded on to Bookham; well knowing that the extraordinary partiality of Mr. Burke for its female recluse, would make him more than pardon the kind pleasure of Mrs. Crewe in granting that recluse such an indulgence.

The letter, whence is taken the fond sad phrase just quoted, was written in answer to the first letter of Mrs. Crewe to Mr. Burke, after his irreparable bereavement; and the whole of the paragraph in which it occurs will now be copied, to elucidate the interesting circumstance for Dr. Burney to which it led. Beautiful is the paragraph in the pathetic resignation of its submission. No flowery orator here expands his imagination; nothing finds vent but the touching simplicity of a tender parent’s heart-breaking sorrow.

“To Mrs. Crewe.

“We are thoroughly sensible of your humanity and compassion to this desolate house.

---

“We are as well as people can be, who have nothing further to hope or fear in this world. We are in a state of quiet; but it is the tranquillity of the grave—in which all that could make life interesting to us is laid—and to which we are hastening as fast as God pleases. This place[38] is no longer pleasant to us! and yet we have more satisfaction, if it may so be called, here than anywhere else. We go in and out, without any of those sentiments of conviviality and joy which alone can create an attachment to any spot. We have had a loss which time and reflection rather increase the sense of. I declare to you that I feel more this day, than on the dreadful day in which I was deprived of the comfort and support, the pride and ornament of my existence!”

Mrs. Crewe, extremely affected by this distress, and as eager to draw her illustrious friend from his consuming grief, as to serve and to gratify the new Recluse, sent to Beaconsfield the next year, 1795, the plan, in which she took so prominent a part, for bringing forth Camilla, or a Picture of Youth; in the hope of re-exciting his interest for its author.

The following is the answer which, almost with exultation of kindness, Mrs. Crewe transmitted to the Hermits.

“To Mrs. Crewe.

---

“As to Miss Burney—the subscription ought to be, for certain persons, five guineas; and to take but a single copy each. The rest as it is. I am sure that it is a disgrace to the age and nation, if this be not a great thing for her, If every person in England who has received pleasure and instruction from Cecilia, were to rate its value at the hundredth part of their satisfaction, Madame d’Arblay would be one of the richest women in the kingdom.

“Her scheme was known before she lost two[39] of her most respectful admirers from this house;[40] and this, with Mrs. Burke’s subscription and mine, make the paper I send you.[41] One book is as good as a thousand: one of hers is certainly as good as a thousand others.”

The reader will not, it is hoped, imagine, that the emotion excited by these words at Bookham sprang from a credulity so simple, or a vanity so insane, as that of arraigning the judgment of Mr. Burke by a literal acceptation of their benevolent, rather than flattering exaltation:—No! the emotion was to find Mr. Burke still susceptible of his old generous warmth of regard: and that emotion was of the tenderest gratitude in the Recluse, upon seeing herself still, in defiance of absence, of distance, of time, and even of deadly sorrow, as much its honoured object as when she had been sought by him in her opening career.

The felicitations of Dr. Burney to Bookham upon this extraordinary effusion of heart-affecting kindness, were so full of happiness, as to demand felicitations in return for himself.

METASTASIO.

In 1795 the Memoirs of Metastasio made their appearance in the republic of letters. They were received with interest and pleasure by all readers of taste, and lovers of the lyric muse. They had not, indeed, that brightness of popular success which had flourished into the world the previous works of the Doctor; for though the name of Metastasio was familiar to all who had any pretensions to an acquaintance with the classical muses, whether ancient or modern, it was only the chosen few who had any enjoyment of his merit, or who understood the motives to his fame. The Italian language was by no means then in its present general cultivation; and the feeling, exalted dramas of this tenderly touching poet, were only brought forward, in England, by the miserable, mawkish, no-meaning translations of the opera-house hired scribblers.[42] And all that was most elegant and most refined, in thought as well as in language, of this classical bard, was frequently so ill rendered into English, as to become mere matter of risibility, held up for mockery and ridicule.

The translations, or, more properly speaking, imitations, occasionally interspersed in this work, of some of the poetry of Metastasio, were the most approved by the best critics; as so breathing the sentiments and the style of the author, that they read, said Horace Lord Orford, like two originals.

But the dissertation concerning the rules was what excited most attention. Dr. Warton, a professed and standard supporter of them and of Aristotle, confessed, with surprise, that he was shaken from his firm ancient hold, through the treatise on their subject by Metastasio, as given, in so masterly a manner, by Dr. Burney.

Mr. Twining, the able and learned commentator and translator of Aristotle, and one of the most candid of men, allowed himself, also, to be struck, if not convinced, by the reasoning of Metastasio, as presented by Dr. Burney.

Mr. Mason, likewise, owned that he was set upon taking quite a new view of that long-battled topic. And the ingenious Mr. Walker opened a critical and literary correspondence from Dublin with Dr. Burney, relative to this interminable question.

Meanwhile, from the public at large, these Memoirs obtained a fair and satisfactory approvance that kindly sheltered the long-earned laurels of Dr. Burney from withering, if they elicited not such productive fragrance as to make those laurels bloom afresh.

On the opening of July, 1796, the parental feelings of Dr. Burney were auspiciously gratified by the reception of his daughter’s new attempt; of which the first homage was offered, and graciously received in person at Windsor, by the King, as well as by the Queen; with the most benevolent marks of unvaried favour, and with the condescension of repeated private audiences with the Queen, and with the Princesses, during a short Windsor sojourn. But that which enchanted beyond his hopes the Doctor’s fondest desires, was that his daughter had the signal happiness of naming his foreign-born, though domestic-bosomed son-in-law, General d’Arblay, to the King, upon the Terrace, by the gracious motion of his Majesty; who there accorded him the high honour of a conversation of several minutes.

This, which was the proudest instant of his daughter’s life, was not less elevating to the loyal heart of the Doctor; who considered it as an indication that the unsullied conduct and character of General d’Arblay had reached the ears of the King, who had his Royal Highness the Duke of York at his side; and who certainly would not himself thus publicly have sought out and distinguished a foreigner, of whose principles he could have had any doubt.

MR. BURKE.

But—what, next to this highest benignity, had most been coveted by Dr. Burney, met not his hopes! The kindly predilection of Mr. Burke, brought forward with such previous and decided partiality for this new enterprise, never reached its intent. Mr. Burke received it at Bath, on the bed of sickness, in the anguish of his lingering and ceaseless depression for the loss of his son; and when he was too ill and weak to have spirits even to open its leaves; withheld, perhaps, the more poignantly, from internal recurrence to the happy family parties to which repeatedly he had read its two predecessors, in the hearing of him by whom his voice now could be heard no more!

Visited by Mrs. Crewe, soon after the appearance of Camilla in the world, he said, “How ill I am you will easily believe, when a new work of Madame d’Arblay’s lies on my table, unread!”[43]

To Dr. Burney the result of this publication was fondly pleasing, in realising a project formed by the willing Hermits, immediately upon their marriage, of constructing a slight and economical, but pretty and convenient cottage, for their residence and property.

Most welcome, indeed, to the Doctor was a scheme that had their settlement in England for its basis: and most consoling to the harassed mind and fortunes of M. d’Arblay was the prospect of creating for himself a new home; since his native one, at that time, seemed lost even to his wishes, in appearing lost to religion, to monarchy, and to humanity.

Almost instantly, therefore, after the return of the Hermits from the honoured presentation of Camilla at Windsor, a plan previously drawn up by M. d’Arblay, was brought forward for execution; and a small dwelling was erected as near as possible to the Norbury mansion, on a field adjoining to its Park, and rented by the Hermits from the incomparable Mr. Locke.

EARL MACARTNEY.

The celebrated embassy of Lord Macartney to China, which had taken place in the year 1792, had led his lordship to consult with Dr. Burney upon whatever belonged to musical matters, whether instruments, compositions, band, or decorations, that might contribute, in that line, to its magnificence.

The reputation of Dr. Burney, in his own art, might fully have sufficed to draw to him for counsel, in that point, this sagacious ambassador; but, added to this obvious stimulus, Lord Macartney was a near relation of Mrs. Crewe, through whom he had become intimately acquainted with the Doctor’s merits; which his own high attainments and intelligence well befitted him to note and to value.

Always interested in whatever was brought forward to promote general knowledge, and to facilitate our intercourse with our distant fellow creatures, Dr. Burney, even with eagerness, bestowed a considerable portion of his time, as well as of his thoughts, in meditating upon musical plans relative to this expedition; animated, not alone by the spirit of the embassy, but by his admiration of the ambassador; who, with unlimited trust in his taste and general skill, as well as in his perfect knowledge upon the subject, gave carte blanche to his discretion for whatever he could either select or project. And so pleased was his lordship both with the Doctor’s collection and suggestions, and so sensible to the time and the pains bestowed upon the requisite researches, that, on the eve of departure, his lordship, while uttering a kind farewell, brought forth a striking memorial of his regard, in a superb and very costly silver inkstand, of the most beautiful workmanship; upon which he had had engraven a Latin motto, flatteringly expressive of his esteem and friendship for Dr. Burney.

At this present period, 1796, this accomplished nobleman was again preparing to set sail, upon a new and splendid appointment, of Governor and Captain-General of the Cape of Good Hope; and again, upon the leave-taking visit of the Doctor, he manifested the same spirit of kindness that he had displayed when parting for China.

In a room full of company, to which he had been exhibiting the various treasures prepared as presents for his approaching enterprise, he gently drew the Doctor apart, and whispered, “To you, Dr. Burney, I must shew the greatest personal indulgence, and private recreation, that I have selected for my voyage.” He then took from a highly-finished travelling bookcase, a volume of Camilla, which had been published four or five months; and smilingly said, “This I have not yet opened! nor will I suffer any one to anticipate a word of it to me; and, still less, suffer myself to take a glimpse of even a single sentence—till I am many leagues out at sea; that then, without hindrance of business, or any impediment whatever, I may read the work throughout with uninterrupted enjoyment.”

MRS. PHILLIPS.

Bright again with smiling success and gay prosperity was this period to Dr. Burney; but not more bright than brittle! for, almost at its height, its serenity was broken by a stroke that rent it asunder!—a wound that never could be healed!

The peculiar darling of the whole house of Dr. Burney, as well as of his heart; whose presence always exhilarated, or whose absence saddened every branch of it, his daughter Susanna, was called, by inevitable circumstances, from his paternal embraces and fond society, to accompany her husband and children upon indispensable business, to Ireland; then teeming with every evil that invasion, rebellion, civil war, and famine, could unite to inflict.

The absence was fixed for only three years; but the dreadful state of that unfortunate country, joined to the delicate, if not already declining health of this beloved daughter; with his own advance in years, made this parting a laceration of gloomy prognostic, almost appalling. He suffered, however, no vent to these sensations before her whom they would nearly have demolished: he only permitted them to break out afterwards to some of his children; and strained her to his bosom, at the cruel instant of separation, with all he could assume of smiling hope for her speedy return. While she, though trembling throughout her shattered frame with the acutest filial tenderness, set off without a murmur. She wished to sustain her beloved father, not to forsake herself; and she quitted his honoured presence with excited spirits, and apparent cheerfulness.

Mixed with some of the Doctor’s poetical effusions, there remains an elegiac fragment upon this voyage to Ireland, from which the following lines are extracted.

“On the departure of my daughter Susan to Ireland.

“My gentle Susan! who, in early state,

Each pain or care could soothe or mitigate;

And who in adolescence could impart

Delight to every eye, and feeling heart;

Whose mind, expanding with increase of years,

Precluded all anxiety and fears

Which parents feel for inexperienc’d youth,

Unguided in the ways of moral truth—

On her kind nature, genially her friend,

A heart bestow’d instruction could not mend:

Intuitive, each virtue she possess’d,

And learn’d their foes to shun and to detest.

“Nor did her intellectual powers require

The usual aid of labour to inspire

Her soul with prudence, wisdom, and a taste

Unerring in refinement; sound and chaste.

“Yet of her merits this the smallest part—

Far more endear’d by virtues of the heart,

Which constantly excite her to embrace

Each duty of her state with active grace.

[Pg 222]

“Such was the prop and comfort of my age

Whose filial tenderness might well assuage

The sorrows which infirmities produce.

“My vital drama’s now so near its end,

That the last act’s unlikely to extend

Till she return.——

“And yet—

The few remaining scenes to me allow’d

Shall not on useless murmurs be bestow’d;

But, patiently resign’d, I’ll act my part;

Try each expedient——

And, till the curtain drop, and end the play,

For my dear Susan’s welfare ardent pray!”

This virtuous resolution the Doctor put in practice with his utmost might; and, having finished with Metastasio, he turned his thoughts, with all their functions, critical, elucidating, inventive, etymological, and didactive, upon a work which he purposed to make the basis of a composition, or compilation, explanatory of every word, phrase, and difficulty belonging to the science, the theory, and the practice of music.

From the impossibility to find place in his History for the whole of his vast accumulation of materials, there remained in his hands matter amply adequate for forming the major, and far most abstruse part of a theoretical dictionary of this description. And, from this time, at intervals, he laboured at it with his usual vigour.

But not here ended the sharp reverse of this altered year; scarcely had this harrowing filial separation taken place, ere an assault was made upon his conjugal feelings, by the sudden, at the moment, though from lingering illnesses often previously expected, death of Mrs. Burney, his second wife.

She had been for many years a valetudinarian; but her spirits, though natively unequal, had quick and animated returns to their pristine gaiety; which, joined to an uncommon muscular force that endured to the last, led all but herself to believe in her still retained powers of revival.

Extremely shocked by this fatal event, the Doctor sent the tidings by express to Bookham; whence the female recluse, speeded by her kind partner, instantly set off for Chelsea College. There she found the Doctor encircled by most of his family, but in the lowest spirits, and in a weak and shattered state of nerves; and there she spent with him, and his youngest daughter, Sarah Harriet, the whole of the first melancholy period of this great change.

It was at this time, during their many and long tête à têtes, that he communicated to her almost all the desultory documents, which up to the year 1796, form these Memoirs.

His sole occupation, when they were alone, was searching for, and committing to her examination, the whole collection of letters, and other manuscripts relative to his life and affairs, which, up to that period, had been written, or hoarded. These, which she read aloud to him in succession, he either placed alphabetically in the pigeon-holes of his bureau, or cast at once into the flames.

The following pages upon this catastrophe are copied from his after memorandums.

Having briefly mentioned that his second son, Dr. Charles, prevailed with him to accept a secluded apartment at Greenwich, till the mournful last rites should be paid to the departed, with whose remains his daughters continued at Chelsea College, he thus goes on.

“On the 26th of October, she was interred in the burying ground of Chelsea College. On the 27th, I returned to my [Pg 225] melancholy home, disconsolate and stupified. Though long expected, this calamity was very severely felt. I missed her counsel, converse, and family regulations; and a companion of thirty years, whose mind was cultivated, whose intellects were above the general level of her sex, and whose curiosity after knowledge was insatiable to the last. These were losses that caused a vacuum in my habitation and in my mind, that has never been filled up.

“My four eldest daughters, all dutiful, intelligent, and affectionate, were married, and had families of their own to superintend, or they might have administered comfort. My youngest daughter, Sarah Harriet, by my second marriage, had quick intellects, and distinguished talents; but she had no experience in household affairs. However, though she had native spirits of the highest gaiety, she became a steady and prudent character, and a kind and good girl. There is, I think, considerable merit in her novel, Geraldine, particularly in the conversations; and I think the scene at the emigrant cottage really touching. At least it drew tears from me, when I was not so prone to shed them as I am at present.”

Afterwards, recurring again to his departed wife, he says:

“In the course of nature, she should not have gone before me. She was the admirer and sincere friend of that first wife, whose virtues and intellectual powers were perhaps her model in early life. Without neglecting domestic and maternal duties, she cultivated her mind in such a manner by extensive reading, and the assistance of a tenacious and happy memory, as to enable her to converse with persons of learning and talents on all subjects to which female studies are commonly allowed to extend; and through a coincidence of taste and principles in all matters of [Pg 226] which the discussion is apt to ruffle the temper, and alienate affection, our conversation and intercourse was sincere, cordial, and cheering.

“She had read far more books of divinity and controversy than myself, and was as much mistress of the theological points of general dispute as reading and reflection could make her; but, within a few days, if not hours, of her death, she lamented having perused so many polemical works; and advised a female friend, fond of such researches, who was with her,[44] not to waste her time on such inquiries; saying, ‘they will disturb your faith—by leading to endless controversy: they have done me no good!’”

In the same memorandum book, occurs, afterwards, the following paragraph:

“I shut myself up for some weeks; and, during part of that time, while sorting and examining papers with my daughter d’Arblay, she found among them the fragment of a poem on Astronomy, began at the period of the first ascent from balloons, and formed on the idea that, by their help, if, in process of time, a steerage was obtained, and the art of keeping them afloat, and ascending to what height the steersman pleased, was also discovered, parties might easily and pleasantly undertake voyages to the moon; and, perhaps, to the planets nearest to the earth, such as Mars and Venus: without considering that each planet and satellite must have its vortex and atmosphere filled with different beings and productions, none of which can subsist in another region.

“This wild fancy put it into my daughter d’Arblay’s head to persuade me to attempt a serious historical and didactic poem on the subject [Pg 227] of astronomy; in order to employ my time and thoughts during the first stages of my sorrow for the losses I had sustained: and, having been a dabbler almost all my life in astronomy, I was not averse to the proposition.”

To the great satisfaction of this daughter, from the recreative employment of time to which it led, this idea was neither forgotten nor set aside; it was, in truth, but a return to the original propensity to astronomy which had been nourished by his first conjugal partner, who enthusiastically had shared his taste for contemplating the stars.

In his letters, after the return of the Memorialist to her cottage, the sadness of his mind is touchingly portrayed. In the first of them he says:

“Nov.—I have been writing melancholy, heart-rending letters this day or two, which have oppressed me greatly: yet I am still more heartless in doing nothing. The author of the poem on The Spleen, says, ‘Fling but a stone, the giant dies:’ but such stones as I have to fling will not do the business. James and Charles[45] dined here yesterday, and kept the monster at a little distance; but he was here again the minute they were gone. I try to read; but ‘pronounce the words without understanding one of them,’ as Dr. Johnson said, in reading my Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients.”

And in another letter, of Dec. 2nd, 1796, he writes,—

“I have been tolerably well in body, but in mind extremely languid, and full of heartaches.

“Few people have been more repandu, or more frequently forced from home than myself; or more separately occupied when there: yet the short intervals I was able to spend with my family, ever since I had one, were the happiest of my life. Even labour, care, and anxiety, for those we love, have their pleasures; and those very superior to what can be derived by working and thinking for self.”

Most anxiously, in answer to these communications, the Memorialist pressed upon him a forced application to his Musical Dictionary; or, preferably yet, to the last started subject of his balloon ideal Voyages. But while this, after heavenly hopes, was what she urged for occupation; what chiefly she brought forward to him as comfort, was the solace which he had bestowed upon herself, during her late visit, from witnessing his mild and exemplary resignation. She ardently begged him to have recourse, for further self-consolation, to his own reflections upon all that had passed with the poor sufferer during the whole of their long intercourse; by looking back to his unabated, constant, and indulgent kindness, through sickness, misfortunes, and time; joined to the most grievous events, and trying circumstances.

MRS. CREWE.

Mrs. Crewe, whose fancy was as fertile as her friendship was zealous, perceiving the melancholy state of spirits into which the Doctor had fallen, sought to awaken him again into new life and activity through the kindly medium of his parental affections. She suggested to him, therefore, the idea of a new periodical morning paper, serious and burlesque, informing, yet amusing, upon The Times as they Run; strictly anti-jacobinical, and professedly monarchical; but allowing no party abuse, nor personal attack; and striving to fight the battles of morals and manners, by enlisting reason on their side, and raising the laugh against their foes.

The Times as they Ran, at that epoch, appeared big with every species of danger that could issue, through political avenues, from the universal sway of revolutionary systems which occupied, or revolutionary schemes which bewildered mankind. All thoughts were ingrossed by public affairs. Private life seemed as much a chimera of imagination, as reverting to the pastoral seasons of the poets of old, in wandering through valleys, or ascending mountains, crook in hand, with sheep, deer, or goats.

Mr. Burke, in his unequalled and unrivalled Essence of the French Revolution,—for such his Essay on that stupendous event may be called, had sounded a bell of alarm throughout Europe; echoing and re-echoing, aloud, aloft, around, with panic reverberation,

“Every man to his post! or

Havoc will let loose the dogs of war,”

with massacre, degradation, shame, and devastation, “involving all—save the inflictors!”

Nor vain was the clangor of that bell. All who dreaded evils yet untried, evils wrapped up in the obscurity of hidden circumstances; dependent on the million of inlets to which accident opens an entrance; and of uncertain catastrophe; still more than they recoiled from ills which, however unpalatable, have been experienced, and are therefore known not to outstretch the powers of endurance; caught its fearful sound, and listened to its awful warnings: and the lament of Mr. Burke that the times of chivalry were gone by, nearly re-animated their return, from the eloquence with which he pointed them out as antidotes to the anarchy of insubordination; and spurs to rescue mankind from hovering degeneracy.

Fraught with these notions, Mrs. Crewe conceived an idea that a weekly paper upon such subjects, treating them so variously as to keep alive expectation, by essaying

“—— happily to steer

From grave to gay; from lively to severe,”

might turn to what Mr. Burke, and Dr. Burney, and she herself, deemed the right way of seeing things, the motley many who, from wanting reflection to think for themselves, are dangerously led to act by others.

This weekly paper Mrs. Crewe purposed to call The Breakfast Table. And it was her desire, expressed in the most flattering terms, that the Doctor should bear a prominent part in it; but that his daughter should be the editor and chief.

The letters of Mrs. Crewe on this plan are full of spirit and ingenuity; and of comic as well as sagacious ideas. “If we are saved,” she cries, “from the infection, i. e. the jacobinism of our neighbours, it will be through the wise foresight of Mr. Burke; and from seeing that persiflage has been their bane, and that Quiz, if we are not upon our guard, will be ours; and, above all, from taking heed that Jacobinism does not carry the day in polite companies; for Newgate never does mischief to society. No! ’tis your fine talkers, and free-thinkers, and refiners, that are to be feared. Watch but the vital parts, and the extremities will take care of themselves....

“I mentioned my idea of this paper to our Beaconsfield friends;[46] but they have enough to do there...!

“I think, indeed, there should be a society to join in this plan; which should include strictures upon life and manners at the end of the eighteenth century; to come out in one sheet for breakfast tables. How folks would read away, and talk, in all great towns, and in all country-houses; nay, and in London itself; where I remember my poor mother told me much of the effects produced formerly by periodical papers; even Pamela, when it came out in that way. Now how well Madame d’Arblay could manage such a work! and how one and all would join to get epigrams for her; and bobs at the times, in prose and in verse: and news from Paris; &c. &c. And we might all have a finger in the pie! and try to laugh people out of their Jacobinism. Old anecdotes, characters, and bits of poetry rummaged out of old authors; especially from some of the quaint, but clever ancient French poets: and a thousand interesting things that would be read, and tasted, and felt, if well introduced: and if Madame d’Arblay’s name could be said to preside, it would suit people’s laziness so well to have matters brought before them all ready chosen and prepared...!

“And O! how Mr. Burke’s spirit would be relevé by such a spur! which is now choaked and kept down by gross abuse and disheartedness.

“Think of all this, Dr. Burney; it may employ you. Let it be a secret at first, and I have no objection to cater for our society of writers. People love to read the beauties of books; and we might pick out bits of Mr. Burke’s, so as to impress and shame all out of at least creeping Jacobinism. I am certain, already, that Mr. Windham would approve the plan. The only point is to do it well.”

Project upon project, scheme upon scheme, and letter upon letter followed this opening, and sought, progressively, to make it effective to the Doctor: while all, by the desire of Mrs. Crewe, was communicated to Bookham, with the most cordial zeal for attracting its female recluse from her obscurity, by placing her at the head of a design to work at mind and morals, in concert with the high names of Mr. Windham, Mr. Canning, and the then Dean of Chester; with various other honourable persons, marked out, but not yet engaged.

“Do ask Madame d’Arblay,” she continues, “to form some plan. We will all help to address letters to her, if she will be ‘Dear Spec.’”

She then adds a wish that the nominal Editor should be supposed to live in the neighbourhood of Sir Hugh Tyrold; whose simplicity of truth, perplexity of doubts and humility, and laughable originality of dialect, might produce comic entertainment to enliven the serious disquisitions.

And, in conclusion, her filial heart, always wedded to the memory of her distinguished mother, earnestly desired to make this work a mean to bring forth some “novel characters” of that celebrated lady, that might be taken from a posthumous manuscript which Mrs. Crewe, long since, had given to this Memorialist, to finish—if she thought feasible—or otherwise to edit; but which various impediments had, and still have, kept unpublished in her hands.

Nothing could be more honourable than such a proposition, nor more gratefully felt by the then Bookham, and afterwards West Hamble Female Hermit: but she, who, from the origin of her first literary attempt, might almost be called an accidental author, could by no means so new model the natural shyness of her character, as to assume courage for meeting the public eye with the opinions, injunctions, and admonitions of a didactic one. Her answer, therefore, to her Father, which, after communicating to Mrs. Crewe, Dr. Burney preserved, is here abridged and copied.

“To Dr. Burney.

“I hardly know whether I am most struck with the fertility of the ideas that Mrs. Crewe has started, or most gratified at their direction. Certainly, I am flattered where most susceptible of pleasure, when kindness such as hers would call me forth from my retirement, to second views so important in their ends, and demanding such powers in their progress. But though her opinion might give me courage, it cannot give me means. I am too far removed from the scene of public life to compose anything of public utility in the style she indicates. The manners as they rise; the morals, or their deficiencies, as they preponderate, should be viewed, for such a scheme, in all their variations, with a diurnal eye. The editor of such a censorial and didactic work, should be a watchful frequenter of public places, and live in the midst of public people. The plan is so excellent, it ought to be well adopted, and well fulfilled: but many circumstances would render its accomplishment nearly impossible for me. Wholly to omit politics, would mar all the original design: yet the personal hostility in which all intermingling with them is entangled, would make a dreadful breach into the peace of my happiness.” &c.

Then follows a statement of local obstacles to her presiding over such a project, from the peculiar position of M. d’Arblay; which required the most inflexible adherence to his cottage seclusion, till he could dauntlessly spring from it in manifestation of his loyal principles.

“But tell Mrs. Crewe,” she continues, “I entreat you, my dearest Father, that I am not only obliged, but made the happier by her kind partiality; and that, if otherwise circumstanced, I should have delighted to have entered into any scheme in which she would have taken a part.”

Here, at once, ere, in fact, it was begun, this business ended: Dr. Burney was acquiescent: and Mrs. Crewe was far too high-bred a character to prosecute any scheme, or persist in any wish of her own, that opposed the feelings of those whom she meant to please, or to serve. The topic, therefore, from the most eager pressure, was instantly cast into silence, from which it quietly dropt into oblivion.

DUKE OF PORTLAND.

But not so passive was Mrs. Crewe with respect to the signal favour to which the Doctor was rising in the estimation of the Duke of Portland, with whom, through her partial introduction, a long general acquaintance was now cementing into an intercourse of peculiar esteem and regard. His Grace, indeed, conceived so strong a liking to the principles and the opinions of Dr. Burney, as to manifest the most flattering pleasure in drawing them forth. And equally he seemed gratified, whenever they chanced to be tête à tête, in unbending his own mind in unrestrained and kind communication.

To owe the origin of this affectionate attachment to Mrs. Crewe, to whom already were owing such innumerable circumstances of agreeability, only heightened its charm. And it was here but the natural effect of situation—Mrs. Crewe being, at her pleasure, domiciliated at the various mansions of the Duke, from the marriage of one of her brothers with Lady Charlotte Bentinck, a daughter of his Grace.

This connexion became, ere long, a spring of spirits as well as of pleasure to Dr. Burney, in affording him, at Burlington House, a continually easy access to the highest rank of society of the Metropolis; and an elegantly prepared sojourn in the country, at the noble villa of Bulstrode Park; where the distinguished kindness of the Duke made the visits of the Doctor glide on deliciously to his satisfaction.

MR. BURKE.

But in the midst of this delectable new source of enjoyment to Dr. Burney, a deeply-mourned and widely-mournful loss tried again, with poignant sorrow, his kindliest affections.

On the 10th of July, 1797, he received the following note:—

“Dear Sir,

“I am grieved to tell you that your late friend, Mr. Burke, is no more. He expired last night, at half-past twelve o’clock.

“The long, steady, and unshaken friendship which had subsisted between you and him, renders this a painful communication; but it is a duty I owe to such friendship.

“I am, Dear Sir, &c.,

“Edw. Nagle.”

“Beaconsfield, 9th July, 1797.”

Hard, indeed, was this blow to Dr. Burney. He lamented this high character in all possible ways, as a friend, a patriot, a statesman, an orator, and a man of the most exalted genius.

“He was certainly,” says his letter to Bookham upon this event, “one of the greatest men of the present century; and, I think I might say, the best orator and statesman of modern times. He had his passions and prejudices, to which I did not subscribe; but I always ardently admired his great abilities, his warmth of friendship, his constitutional urbanity.”

He then adds:—

“That, while such was his character, and such his loss in public, he, (Dr. Burney,) and his daughter, to whom Mr. Burke had been so unremittingly and singularly partial, must be ungrateful indeed not yet more peculiarly to lament his departure, and honour his character in private.”

In her answer, she sorrowingly assures the Doctor that there was nothing to fear of her want of sympathy in this affliction. “I feel it,” she cries, “with my whole heart, and participate in every word you say of that truly great man. That he was not, as his enemies exclaim, perfect, is nothing in the scale of his stupendous superiority over almost all those who are merely exempt from his defects. That he was upright in heart and intention, even where he acted erroneously, I firmly believe: and that he asserted nothing that he had not persuaded himself to be true, even from Mr. Hastings being the most rapacious of villains, to the King’s being incurably insane.[47] He was as liberal in sentiment as he was luminous in intellect, and extraordinary in eloquence; and for amiability, he was surely, when in spirits and good-humour—all but the most delightful of men. Yet, though superior to envy, and glowing with the noblest zeal to exalt talents and merits in others, he had, I believe, an unavoidable, though not a vain consciousness of his own greatness, that shut out from his consideration those occasional and useful self-doubts that keep the judgment in order, by making us, from time to time, call our motives and our passions to account.”

The Doctor was amongst the invited who paid the last homage to the manes of Mr. Burke by attending his funeral.

“Malone and I,” he says, “went to Bulstrode together, in my carriage, with two added horses. We found there the Dukes of Portland and Devonshire. Windham arrived to dinner. The Lord Chancellor and the Speaker could not leave London till four o’clock, but were at Bulstrode by seven. All set off together for Beaconsfield, where we found the rest of the pall-hearers, Lords Fitzwilliam and Inchiquin, Sir Gilbert Elliot, Frederick North, Drs. King and Lawrence, Dudley North, and very many of the great orator’s personal friends; though, by his repeated [Pg 242] injunctions, the funeral was ordered to be very private. He left a list to whom rings of remembrance were to be sent, in which my name honourably occurs; and a jeweller has been with me for my measure.

“After these mournful rites, the Duke of Portland included me in his invite back to Bulstrode, with the Duke of Devonshire, the Chancellor, the Speaker, Windham, Malone, and Secretary King: and there I continued the next day.

“The Duke pressed me to stay on, and accompany him and his party to a visit, the following morning, in honour of Mr. Burke, that was to be made to the school, founded by that enlarged philanthropist, for the male children of the ruined emigrant nobility, now seeking refuge in this country. But it was not in my power to prolong my absence from town.”

DR. WARREN.

Dr. Burney now lost, also, his sagacious physician and enlightened friend, Dr. Warren; “a loss sad,” he says, “indeed, to his family, to science, and to hundreds of people whose lives he preserved.”

MRS. CREWE.

The unwearied Mrs. Crewe, grieved at the fresh dejection into which these reiterated misfortunes cast the Doctor, now started a scheme that had more of promise than any other that could have been devised of affording him some exhilaration. This was arranging an excursion that would lead him to visit the scene of his birth, that of his boyhood, and that of his education; namely, Shrewsbury, Condover, and Chester; by prevailing with him to accompany her to Mr. Crewe’s noble ancient mansion of Crewe Hall: a proposal so truly grateful to his feelings, that he found it resistless.

The following account of its execution is extracted from his own letters to the Hermits:

“The die is thrown; and I have agreed, at last, to go down with Mrs. Crewe to the family mansion in Cheshire, which Mr. Crewe, as well as herself, has so long pressed me to visit. M. le President de Fronteville, a very agreeable French gentleman, is to be of the party. But dear Mr. Crewe, with his daughter,[48] sets off first, to pass a condoling day or two with poor Mrs. Burke at Beaconsfield. We are then to join at Wycomb; and thence to Oxford; &c.

“Crewe Hall, 2d August.

“I could not get a moment to write on the road, as we travelled at a great rate, with Mrs. Crewe’s four horses, followed by four post. I have now only time to name what places we passed ere we got to old Shrewsbury, which lies forty miles out of the right road of [Pg 244] dear Mrs. Crewe; who so kindly made a point of carrying me thither. Blenheim—Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon,—where I visited the mansion, or rather cabane of our immortal bard, now a butcher’s shop! I sate on his easy chair, still remaining in his chimney corner; and wondered more than ever how a man living in such a miserable house and town, should have attained such sublime ideas of grandeur in the most exalted situations. Birmingham—Wolverhampton—Nufnal by the Rekin—Watling, thought a Roman road—Lord Berwick’s—and, at five o’clock in the afternoon, on Monday, old Shrewsbury.

“I ran away from Mrs. Crewe, who was too tired to walk about, and played the Cicerone myself to Miss Crewe, who has both understanding and curiosity for gaining knowledge, and to M. de Fronteville, to whom I undertook to shew off old Shrewsbury; of which I knew all the streets, lanes, and parishes, as well as I did sixty years ago.

---

“I found my way, without a single question, to the old Town Hall, the New Town House, High Street, and Raven Street, where I was born. And then to the Free School, founded by Henry VIII. and endowed by his daughter Bess.

“We went up to the top of the highest tower in the Castle, which Sir William Pulteney now inhabits. He has repaired every one of the lofty and venerable towers in their true ancient and Gothic style. After dinner, I laid out a shilling or two with an old bookseller, whom I catechised about old people and old things,—but alas! of the first, not one creature is now alive whom I remember, or who can remember me!

“The next morning, Tuesday, I set off alone, at seven o’clock, to visit the new church, St. Chad’s; which is a very fine one but so irreverently secular, that it would make a very handsome theatre. I then walked in that most beautiful of all public walks, as I still believe, in the world, called the Quarry; formed in verdant and flower-enamelled fields, by the Severn side, with the boldest and most lovely opposite shore imaginable.

“I found my way, also, from this walk to a new bridge, called The Welsh Bridge; which leads to Montgomeryshire. On the former old one there was a statue, which was supposed to be of Llewellen, Prince of Wales; but is now discovered to be of the Black Prince. It is well preserved, and is not of bad sculpture. I was driven back to the inn by the rain.

“We all adjourned to breakfast with Dr. Darwin, who is newly married to a daughter of Mr. Wedgewood’s. They are very intelligent, agreeable, and shrewd folks.

“In a most violent rain, nearly a storm, we left my dear old Shrewsbury; and without being able, in such weather, to get to my dearer old Condover.

Yet I could have found nothing there but melancholy remembrances; all gone for whom I had cared,—or who had cared for me!

“Crewe Hall was built in the reign of James the First, of half Gothic, half Grecian architecture. It is the completest mansion I ever saw of that kind; and has been repaired and kept up in the exact costume of that period. It is a noble house; well fitted, and well applied to hospitality. Mr. Crewe is one of the politest men in his own house, and one of the best landlords that I know.

“The park, in the midst of which the mansion stands, is well wooded and planted. There is a noble piece of water in sight of [Pg 246] my window, nearly of the same effect as that of Blenheim, allowing for the different magnitude of the mansions and grounds. Mrs. Crewe has a little ferme ornée, to which she sometimes retires when the house is crowded with mixed company. ’Tis fitted up with infinite fancy and good taste. She has established there a school of forty girls, who are taught needle-work and reading. The outside is built in imitation of a convent, and the matron is called the Abbess.

“When I had passed, most agreeably, about a fortnight at Crewe Hall, Mrs. Crewe fulfilled her kind promise of making an excursion to Chester, knowing how much I yearned to see again that city of my youth. Miss Crewe, and M. le President alone made the party; which turned out most pleasantly. I ran about Chester, the rows, walls, cathedral, and castle, as familiarly as I could have done fifty years ago; visited the Free School, where I Hic, hæc, hoc’d it three or four years; and the cathedral, where I saw and heard the first organ I ever touched.

“From Chester, we went to Liverpool by water, on a new canal that communicates with the river Mersey. The passage-boat was very convenient, and the voyage very pleasant. The sight of the shipping from the Mersey is very striking. We put up at the Hôtel; passed all the morning in visiting Liverpool, the docks, warehouses, &c., which we were shewn by Mr. Walker, a rich and great ship-broker, and an acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Crewe’s. Mrs. Walker is a really elegant and agreeable woman.

“Eight Jamaica ships had come in for Mr. Walker a few days before our arrival, by which he cleared £10,000. We dined at his villa, two or three miles from the town, on turtle; and afterwards went to the play, at a pretty theatre, where the performance was good.

[Pg 247]

“We then took a little dip into a charming part of Wales, about Wrexham, and visited Lady Cunliffe, wife of Sir Foster, capo di casa of a very old and worthy family of my acquaintance of very many years. She is an elegant and most pleasing woman; the house is just finished by Wyatt, in exquisite taste; as is the furniture, &c. &c.

“At the end of a month, the President and I took leave, reluctantly, of Crewe Hall, and set off together for London. Mrs. Crewe made a party with us, the first day, to Trentham Hall, the very fine place of the Marquis of Stafford. We were very hospitably as well as elegantly received by the Marchioness. The park, through which the river Trent runs; the woods; the valley of Tempe; the iron bridge over a large and clear piece of water; the pictures, all fine in their way; and the house, lately altered and enlarged by Wyatt: all this we saw to great advantage, for almost all, in compliment to Mrs. and Miss Crewe, was shewn us by the Marchioness herself.

“We thence went to Wedgewood’s famous pottery, called Etruria, and witnessed the whole process of that ingenious and beautiful manufactory, of which the produce is now dispersed all over the world. Mrs. Crewe wanted to send you a mighty pretty hand churn for your breakfast table; but I was sure it would be broken to pieces in the journey, and did not dare take it in charge. Here I parted with that dear Mrs. Crewe.

LITCHFIELD.

“The President and I got to Litchfield about ten o’clock that night; and the next morning, before my companion was up, I strolled about the city with one of the waiters, in search of [Pg 248] Dr. Johnson’s good negro, Frank Barber, who, I had been told, lived there; but, upon inquiry, I found that his residence was in a village four or five miles off: I saw, however, the house where Dr. Johnson was born; and where his father, ‘an old bookseller,’ died. The house is stuccoed; has five sash windows in front; and pillars before it. It is in a broad street, and is the best house thereabouts, though it is now a grocer’s shop!

“I next went to the Garrick mansion; which has been repaired, stuccoed, enlarged, and sashed. Peter Garrick, David’s elder brother, died nearly two years ago, leaving all his property to the apothecary who had attended him: but the will was disputed and set aside not long since; it having been proved at a trial, that the testator was insane at the time the will was made; so that Mrs. Doxie, Garrick’s sister, a widow with a numerous family, recovered the house and £30,000. She now lives in it with her children, and has been able to set up her carriage. The inhabitants of Litchfield were so pleased with the decision of the Court, that they illuminated the streets, and had public rejoicings on the occasion.

“I next tried to find the abode of Dr. James, inventor of the admirable fever powder, which so often has saved the life of our dear Susan, and of others without number; but the ungrateful Litchfieldites knew nothing about him! I could find only one old man who remembered or knew even that he was a native of the town! ‘The man who has lengthened life’ to be forgotten at his natal place! and already!

“The Cathedral here is the most complete and beautiful Gothic building I ever saw. The outside was very ill-used by the fanatics of the last century; but there are three perfect spires still standing, and more than fifty whole-length figures of saints in their original niches. The choir is exquisitely beautiful. A [Pg 249] fine new organ is erected, and was well played. I never heard the cathedral service so well performed, to that instrument only, before. The services and anthems were of middle-aged music, neither too old and dry, nor too modern and light; the voices subdued, and exquisitely softened and sweetened to the building.

“I found here a monument to Garrick; and another just by it to Johnson. The former put up by Garrick’s widow; the latter by Johnson’s friends. Both are beautiful, and alike in every particular of workmanship.”

Note of Dr. Burney’s, in a memorandum book of this year, 1797:

“I beg that my pilgrimage to Litchfield, in 1797, may somewhere be recorded in my Memoirs, from memorandums made on the spot, after visiting the house where Dr. Johnson was born, and his father kept a bookseller’s shop; the house where Garrick lived, and his elder brother died; and seeking in vain for the birth-place, or at least residence, of Dr. James.”

POEM ON ASTRONOMY.

Upon the return of Dr. Burney to Chelsea, his astronomical project became his greatest amusement as well as occupation. In a memorandum upon its idea he writes:

“Very early in life I collected all the books I could attain upon this subject. I was already, therefore, in possession of a good number; to which I now added whatever I could procure from [Pg 250] France, as well as in England. And with these, having the free run of Sir Joseph Bankes’ scientific library, with that of the Royal Society, and of the Museum, I obtained such ample materials, that I took my daughter d’Arblay’s advice, and, in little more than a year from the time that I began the work, I had made a rough sketch of an historical and didactic Poem on Astronomy.”

This enterprise, shortly afterwards, so grew upon his fancy, that, to use again his own words,

“Every spare minute I now devote to astronomy and its history, which I try incessantly to versify, but find very difficult to render poetical. This probably, however, may be the case with most didactic poems.”

In another letter to the Hermitage on this subject, in which he describes his various whirls of business and engagements, he sportively cries:

“And, after fulfilling them all, instead of going to sleep, like a mere dull mortal, I take a flight upon Pegasus to the moon, or to some planet, or fixed star.”