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!

  “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 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.

        “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.