Chapter IV: Part 4

while yet you have youth, spirits, and vigour to give fair
play to your abilities, for placing them and yourself in a
proper point of view. And so I give you my blessing.

“SAMUEL CRISP.”

Mr. Crisp, almost immediately after this letter, visited, and for some years, the continent.

This exhortation, in common with whatever emanated from Mr. Crisp, proved decisive; and Mr. Burney fixed at once his resolve upon returning to the capital; though some years still passed ere he could put it in execution.

The following are his reflections, written at a much later period, upon this determination.

After enumerating, with warm regard, the many to whom he owed kindness in the county of Norfolk, he adds:

“All of these, for nearly thirty miles round, had their
houses and tables pressingly open to me: and, in the town
of Lynn, my wife, to all evening parties, though herself
no card player, never failed to be equally invited; for
she had a most delightful turn in conversation, seasoned
with agreeable wit, and pleasing manners; and great powers
of entering into the humours of her company; which, with
the beauty of her person, occasioned her to receive more
invitations than she wished; as she was truly domestic, had
a young family on her hands, and, generally, one of them at
her breast. But whenever we could spend an evening at home,
without disappointing our almost too kind inviters, we had a
course of reading so various and entertaining, in history,
voyages, poetry, and, as far as Chambers’ Dictionary, the
Philosophical Transactions, and the French Encyclopedia, to
the first edition of which I was a subscriber, could carry
us, in science, that those _tête à tête_ seclusions were what
we enjoyed the most completely.

“This, of course, raised my wife far above all the females of
Lynn, who were, then, no readers, with the exception of Mrs.
Stephen Allen and Dolly Young. And this congeniality of taste
brought on an intimacy of friendship in these three females,
that lasted during their several lives.

“My wife was the delight of all her acquaintance; excellent
mother—zealous friend—of highly superior intellects.

“We enjoyed at Lynn tranquillity and social happiness—”

* * * * *

Here again must be inserted another poetical epistle, written, during a short separation, while still at Lynn; which shews that, with whatever fervour of passion he married, he himself was “that other happy man,” in the words of Lord Lyttleton, who had found “How much the wife is dearer than the bride.”

“TO MRS. BURNEY.

“To thee, henceforth, my matchless mate,
My leisure hours I’ll dedicate;
To thee my inmost thoughts transmit,
Whene’er the busy scene I quit.
For thee, companion dear! I feel
An unextinguishable zeal;
A love implanted in the mind,
From all the grosser dregs refined.
Ah! tell me, must not love like mine
Be planted by a hand divine,
Which, when creation’s work was done,
Our heart-strings tuned in unison?
If business, or domestic care
The vigour of my mind impair;
If forc’d by toil from thee to rove,
’Till wearied limbs forget to move,
At night, reclin’d upon thy breast,
Thy converse lulls my soul to rest.
If sickness her distemper’d brood
Let loose,—to burn, or freeze my blood,
Thy tender vigilance and care,
My feeble frame can soon repair.
When in some doubtful maze I stray,
’Tis thou point’st out the unerring way;
If judgment float on wavering wings,
In notions vague of men and things;
If different views my mind divide,
Thy nod instructs me to decide.

My pliant soul ’tis thou can’st bend,
My help! companion! wife! and friend!
When, in the irksome day of trouble
The mental eye sees evils double,
Sweet partner of my hopes and fears!
’Tis thou alone can’st dry my tears.
’Tis thou alone can’st bring relief,
Partner of every joy and grief!
E’en when encompass’d with distress,
Thy smile can every ill redress.
On thee, my lovely, faithful friend,
My worldly blessings all depend:
But if a cloud thy visage low’r, }
Not all the wealth in Plutus’ power, }
Could buy my heart one peaceful hour. }
Then, lodg’d within that aching heart,
Is sorrow’s sympathetic dart.

* * * * *

But when upon that brow, the seat
Of sense refin’d, and beauty sweet,
The graces and the loves are seen,
And Venus sits by Wisdom’s queen;
Pale sadness takes her heavy flight,
And, envious, shuns the blissful sight.
So when the sun has long endur’d
His radiant face to be obscur’d
By baleful mists and vapours dense,
All nature mourns with grief intense:
But the refulgent God of Day
Soon shews himself in bright array;
And as his glorious visage clears,
The globe itself in smiles appears.”

“_Lynn_, 1753.”

The last act of Mr. Burney in relinquishing his residence in Norfolk, was drawing up a petition to Lord Orford to allow park-room in the Haughton grounds, for the rest of its life, to his excellent, faithful mare, the intelligent Peggy; whose truly useful services he could not bear to requite, according to the unfeeling usage of the many, by selling her to hard labour in the decline of her existence.

Lord Orford good-humouredly complied with the request; and the justly-prized Peggy, after enjoying for several years the most perfect ease and freedom, died the death of old age, in Haughton Park.

LONDON.

In 1760 Mr. Burney, with his wife and young family, returned to London; but no longer to the city, which has the peculiar fate, whilst praised and reverenced by the many who to its noble encouragement owe their first dawn of prosperity, of being almost always set aside and relinquished, when that prosperity is effected. Is it that Fortune, like the sun, while it rises, cold, though of fairest promise, in the East, must ever, in its more luxuriant splendour, set in the West?

The new establishment was in Poland-street; which was not then, as it is now, a sort of street that, like the rest of its neighbourhood, appears to be left in the lurch. House-fanciers were not yet as fastidious as they are become at present, from the endless variety of new habitations. Oxford-road, as, at that time, Oxford-street was called, into which Poland-street terminated, had little on its further side but fields, gardeners’ grounds, or uncultivated suburbs. Portman, Manchester, Russel, Belgrave squares, Portland-place, &c. &c., had not yet a single stone or brick laid, in signal of intended erection: while in plain Poland-street, Mr. Burney, then, had successively for his neighbours, the Duke of Chandos, Lady Augusta Bridges, the Hon. John Smith and the Miss Barrys, Sir Willoughby and the Miss Astons; and, well noted by Mr. Burney’s little family, on the visit of his black majesty to England, sojourned, almost immediately opposite to it, the Cherokee King.

The opening of this new plan of life, was as successful to Mr. Burney as its projection had been promising. Pupils of rank, wealth, and talents, were continually proposed to him; and, in a very short time, he had hardly an hour unappropriated to some fair disciple.

Lady Tankerville, amongst the rest, resumed her lessons with her early master, obligingly submitting her time to his convenience, be it what it might, rather than change her first favourite instructor. Ere long, however, she resided almost wholly abroad, having attached herself with enthusiastic fervour to the Princess Amelia, sister to Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Countess even accepted the place of Dame d’Atour to that accomplished princess; whose charms, according to poetical record, banished for a while their too daring admirer, Voltaire, from the Court of Berlin.

This enterprising Countess retained her spirit of whim, singularity, and activity, through a long life; for when, many years later, she returned to her own country, quite old, while Dr. Burney had not yet reached the zenith of his fame, she again applied to him for musical tuition; and when he told her, with regret, that his day was completely filled up, from eight o’clock in the morning; “Come to me, then,” cried she, with vivacity, “at seven!” which appointment literally, and twice a week, took place.

All the first friends of Mr. Burney were happy to renew with him their social intercourse. Mrs. Greville, when in town, was foremost in eagerly seeking his Esther; and Mr. Greville met again his early favourite with all his original impetuosity of regard: while their joint newer friends of Norfolk, Mrs. Stephen Allen and Miss Dorothy Young in particular, warmly sustained an unremitting communication by letters: and Lords Orford, Eglinton, and March, General Lord Townshend, Charles Boone, and many others, sought this enlivening couple, with an unabating sense of their worth, upon every occasion that either music or conversation offered, for accepting, or desiring, admission to their small parties: for so uncommon were the powers of pleasing which they possessed, that all idea of condescension in their worldly superiors seemed superseded, if not annihilated, by personal eagerness to enjoy their rare society.

ESTHER.

Thus glided away, in peace, domestic joys, improvement, and prosperity, this first—and last! happy year of the new London residence. In the course of the second, a cough, with alarming symptoms, menaced the breast of the life and soul of the little circle; consisting now of six children, clinging with equal affection around each parent chief.

She rapidly grew weaker and worse. Her tender husband hastened her to Bristol Hotwells, whither he followed her upon his first possible vacation; and where, in a short time, he had the extasy to believe that he saw her recover, and to bring her back to her fond little family.

But though hope was brightened, expectation was deceived! stability of strength was restored no more; and, in the ensuing autumn, she was seized with an inflammatory disorder with which her delicate and shaken frame had not force to combat. No means were left unessayed to stop the progress of danger; but all were fruitless! and, after less than a week of pain the most terrific, the deadly ease of mortification suddenly, awfully succeeded to the most excruciating torture.

Twelve stated hours of morbid bodily repose became, from that tremendous moment of baleful relief, the counted boundary of her earthly existence.

The wretchedness of her idolizing husband at the development of such a predestined termination to her sufferings, when pronounced by the celebrated Dr. Hunter, was only not distraction. But she herself, though completely aware that her hours now were told, met the irrevocable doom with open, religious, and even cheerful composure—sustained, no doubt, by the blessed aspirations of mediatory salvation; and calmly declaring that she quitted the world with perfect tranquillity, save for leaving her tender husband and helpless children. And, in the arms of that nearly frantic husband, who, till that fatal epoch, had literally believed her existence and his own, in this mortal journey, to be indispensably one—she expired.

When the fatal scene was finally closed, the disconsolate survivor immured himself almost from light and life, through inability to speak or act, or yet to bear witnesses to his misery.

He was soon, however, direfully called from this concentrated anguish, by the last awful summons to the last awful rites to human memory, the funeral; which he attended in a frame of mind that nothing, probably, could have rescued from unrestrained despair, save a pious invocation to submission that had been ejaculated by his Esther, when she perceived his rising agony, in an impressive “Oh, Charles!”—almost at the very moment she was expiring: an appeal that could not but still vibrate in his penetrated ears, and control his tragic passions.

The character, and its rare, resplendent worth, of this inestimable person, is best committed to the pen of him to whom it best was known; as will appear by the subsequent letter, copied from his own hand-writing. It was found amongst his posthumous papers, so ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself obliged to re-write it for the post.

It may be proper to again mention, that though Esther was maternally of French extraction, and though her revered mother was a Roman Catholic, she herself was a confirmed Protestant. But that angelic mother had brought her up with a love and a practice of genuine piety which undeviatingly intermingled in every action, and, probably, in every thought of her virtuous life, so religiously, so deeply, that neither pain nor calamity could make her impatient of existence; nor yet could felicity the most perfect make her reluctant to die.

To paint the despairing grief produced by this deadly blow must be cast, like the portrait of its object, upon the sufferer; and the inartificial pathos, the ingenuous humility, with which both are marked in the affecting detail of her death, written in answer to a letter of sympathizing condolence from the tenderest friend of the deceased, Miss Dorothy Young, so strongly speak a language of virtue as well as of sorrow, that, unconsciously, they exhibit his own fair unsophisticated character in delineating that of his lost love. A more touching description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be found upon record.

“TO MISS DOROTHY YOUNG.

“I had not thought it possible that any thing could urge me
to write in the present deplorable disposition of my mind;
but my dear Miss Young’s letter haunts me! Neither did I
think it possible for any thing to add to my affliction,
borne down and broken-hearted as I am. But the current
of your woes and sympathetic sorrows meeting mine, has
overpowered all bounds which religion, philosophy, reason,
or even despair, may have been likely to set to my grief.
Oh Miss Young! you knew her worth—you were one of the few
people capable of seeing and feeling it. Good God! that
she should be snatched from me at a time when I thought
her health re-establishing, and fixing for a long old age!
when our plans began to succeed, and we flattered ourselves
with enjoying each other’s society ere long, in a peaceable
and quiet retirement from the bustling frivolousness of a
capital, to which our niggard stars had compelled us to fly
for the prospect of establishing our children.

“Amongst the numberless losses I sustain, there are none that
unman me so much as the total deprivation of domestic comfort
and converse—that converse from which I tore myself with
such difficulty in a morning, and to which I flew back with
such celerity at night! She was the source of all I could
ever project or perform that was praise-worthy—all that I
could do that was laudable had an eye to her approbation.
There was a rectitude in her mind and judgment, that rendered
her approbation so animating, so rational, so satisfactory!
I have lost the spur, the stimulus to all exertions, all
warrantable pursuits,—except those of another world. From an
ambitious, active, enterprising Being, I am become a torpid
drone, a listless, desponding wretch!—I know you will bear
with my weakness, nay, in part, participate in it; but this
is a kind of dotage unfit for common eyes, or even for common
friends, to be entrusted with.

“You kindly, and truly, my dear Miss Young, styled her one
of the greatest ornaments of society; but, apart from the
ornamental, in which she shone in a superior degree, think,
oh think, of her high merit as a daughter, mother, wife,
sister, friend! I always, from the first moment I saw her
to the last, had an ardent passion for her person, to which
time had added true friendship and rational regard. Perhaps
it is honouring myself too much to say, few people were more
suited to each other; but, at least, I always endeavoured
to render myself more worthy of her than nature, perhaps,
had formed me. But she could mould me to what she pleased! A
distant hint—a remote wish from her was enough to inspire me
with courage for any undertaking. But all is lost and gone in
losing her—the whole world is a desert to me! nor does its
whole circumference afford the least hope of succour—not a
single ray of that fortitude She so fully possessed!

“You, and all who knew her, respected and admired her
understanding while she was living. Judge, then, with what
awe and veneration I must be struck to hear her counsel when
dying!—to see her meet that tremendous spectre, death, with
that calmness, resignation, and true religious fortitude,
that no stoic philosopher, nor scarcely christian, could
surpass; for it was all in privacy and simplicity. Socrates
and Seneca called their friends around them to give them
that courage that perhaps solitude might have robbed them
of, and to spread abroad their fame to posterity; but she,
dear pattern of humility! had no such vain view; no parade,
no grimace! When she was aware that all was over—when she
had herself pronounced the dread sentence, that she felt she
should not outlive the coming night, she composedly gave
herself up to religion, and begged that she might not be
interrupted in her prayers and meditations.

“Afterwards she called me to her, and then tranquilly talked
about our family and affairs, in a manner quite oracular.

“Sometime later she desired to see Hetty,[21] who, till
that day, had spent the miserable week almost constantly at
her bed-side, or at the foot of the bed. Fanny, Susan, and
Charley, had been sent, some days before, to the kind care
of Mrs. Sheeles in Queen-Square, to be out of the way; and
little Charlotte was taken to the house of her nurse.

“To poor Hetty she then discoursed in so kind, so feeling,
so tender a manner, that I am sure her words will never be
forgotten. And, this over, she talked of her own death—her
funeral—her place of burial,—with as much composure as
if talking of a journey to Lynn! Think of this, my dear
Miss Young, and see the impossibility of supporting such a
loss—such an adieu, with calmness! I hovered over her till
she sighed, not groaned, her last—placidly sighed it—just
after midnight.

“Her disorder was an inflammation of the stomach, with which
she was seized on the 19th of September, after being on that
day, and for some days previously, remarkably in health
and spirits. She suffered the most excruciating torments
for eight days, with a patience, a resignation, nearly
quite silent. Her malady baffled all medical skill from the
beginning. I called in Dr. Hunter.

“On the 28th, the last day! she suffered, I suppose, less,
perhaps nothing! as mortification must have taken place,
which must have afforded that sort of ease, that those who
have escaped such previous agony shudder to think of! On that
ever memorable, that dreadful day, she talked more than she
had done throughout her whole illness. She forgot nothing,
nor threw one word away! always hoping we should meet and
know each other hereafter!—She told poor Hetty how sweet
it would be if she could see her constantly from whence she
was going, and begged she would invariably suppose that that
would be the case. What a lesson to leave to a daughter!—She
exhorted her to remember how much her example might influence
the poor younger ones; and bid her write little letters,
and fancies, to her in the other world, to say how they all
went on; adding, that she felt as if she should surely know
something of them.

“Afterwards, feeling probably her end fast approaching, she
serenely said, with one hand on the head of Hetty, and the
other grasped in mine: “Now this is dying pleasantly! in the
arms of one’s friends!” I burst into an unrestrained agony of
grief, when, with a superiority of wisdom, resignation, and
true religion,—though awaiting, consciously, from instant
to instant awaiting the shaft of death,—she mildly uttered,
in a faint, faint voice, but penetratingly tender, “Oh
Charles!—”

“I checked myself instantaneously, over-awed and stilled as
by a voice from one above. I felt she meant to beg me not to
agitate her last moments!—I entreated her forgiveness, and
told her it was but human nature. “And so it is!” said she,
gently; and presently added, “Nay, it is worse for the living
than the dying,—though a moment sets us even!—life is but a
paltry business—yet

“‘Who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey
This pleasing—anxious being e’er resign’d?
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?’”

“She had still muscular strength left to softly press both
our hands as she pronounced these affecting lines.

“Other fine passages, also, both from holy writ, and from
what is most religious in our best poets, she from time to
time recited, with fervent prayers; in which most devoutly we
joined.

“These, my dear Miss Young, are the outlines of her sublime
and edifying exit—— —— —What a situation was mine!
but for my poor helpless children, how gladly, how most
gladly should I have wished to accompany her hence on the
very instant, to that other world to which she so divinely
passed!—for what in this remains for me?”

Part of a letter, also, to Mrs. Stephen Allen, the friend to whom, next to Miss Dorothy Young, the departed had been most attached, seems to belong to this place. Its style, as it was written at a later period, is more composed; but it evinces in the wretched mourner the same devotion to his Esther’s excellences, and the same hopelessness of earthly happiness.

“TO MRS. STEPHEN ALLEN.

* * * * *
“Even prosperity is insipid without participation with
those we love; for me, therefore, heaven knows, all is at
an end—all is accumulated wretchedness! I have lost a
soul congenial with my own;—a companion, who in outward
appurtenances and internal conceptions, condescended to
assimilate her ideas and manners with mine. Yet believe not
that all my feelings are for myself; my poor girls have
sustained a loss far more extensive than they, poor innocents!
are at present sensible of. Unprovided as I should have
left them with respect to fortune, had it been my fate to
resign her and life first, I should have been under no great
apprehension for the welfare of my children, in leaving them
to a mother who had such inexhaustible resources in her mind
and intellects. It would have grieved me, indeed, to have
quitted her oppressed by such a load of care; but I could
have had no doubt of her supporting it with fortitude and
abilities, as long as life and health had been allowed her.
Fortitude and abilities she possessed, indeed, to a degree
that, without hyperbole, no human being can conceive but
myself, who have seen her under such severe trials as alone
can manifest, unquestionably, true parts and greatness of
mind. I am thoroughly convinced she was fitted for any
situation, either exalted or humble, which this life can
furnish. And with all her nice discernment, quickness of
perception, and delicacy, she could submit, if occasion seemed
to require it, to such drudgery and toil as are suited to the
meanest domestic; and that, with a liveliness and alacrity
that, in general, are to be found in those only who have never
known a better state. Yet with a strength of reason the most
solid, and a capacity for literature the most intelligent,
she never for a moment relinquished the female and amiable
softness of her sex with which, above every other attribute,
men are most charmed and captivated.”

Such, in their early effervescence, was the vent which this man of affliction found to his sorrows, in the sympathy of his affectionate friends.

At other times, they were beguiled from their deadly heaviness by the expansion of fond description in melancholy verse. To this he was less led by poetical enthusiasm—for all of fire, fancy, and imagery, that light up the poet’s flame, was now extinct, or smothered—than by a gentle request of his Esther, uttered in her last days, that he would address to her some poetry; a request intended, there can be no doubt, as a stimulus to some endearing occupation that might tear him from his first despondence, by an idea that he had still a wish of hers to execute.

Not as poetry, in an era fastidious as the present in metrical criticism, does the editor presume to offer the verses now about to be selected and copied from a vast mass of elegiac laments found amongst the posthumous papers of Dr. Burney: it is biographically alone, like those that have preceded them, that they are brought forward. They are testimonies of the purity of his love, as well as of the acuteness of his bereavement; and, as such, they certainly belong to his memoirs. The reader, therefore, is again entreated to remember that they were not designed for the press, though they were committed, unshackled, to the discretion of the editor. If that be in fault, the motive will probably prove a palliative that will make the heart, not the head, of the reader, the seat of his judgment.

“She’s gone!—the all-pervading soul is fled
T’ explore the unknown mansions of the dead,
Where, free from earthly clay, the immortal mind
Casts many a pitying glance on those behind;
Sees us deplore the wife—the mother—friend—
Sees fell despair our wretched bosoms rend!
Oh death!—thy dire inexorable dart
Of every blessing has bereft my heart!
Better to have died like her, in hope of rest,
Than live forlorn, and life and light detest.—
In hope of rest? ah no! her fervent pray’r
Was that her soul, when once dissolv’d in air
Might, conscious of its pre-existent state,
On those she lov’d alive, benignly wait,—
Our genius, and our guardian angel be
Till fate unite us in eternity!
But—the bless’d shade to me no hope bequeaths
Till death his faulchion in my bosom sheaths!
Sorrowing, I close my eyes in restless sleep;
Sorrowing, I wake the live-long day to weep.
No future comfort can this world bestow,
’Tis blank and cold, as overwhelm’d with snow.

* * * * *

When dying in my arms, she softly said:
“Write me some verses!”—and shall be obey’d.
The sacred mandate vibrates in my ears,
And fills my eyes with reverential tears.
For ever on her virtues let me dwell,
A Patriarch’s life too short her worth to tell.
Such manly sense to female softness join’d,
Her person grac’d, and dignified her mind,
That she in beauty, while she trod life’s stage,
A Venus seem’d—in intellect, a sage.
Before I her beheld, the untutor’d mind
Still vacant lay, to mental beauty blind:
But when her angel form my sight had bless’d
The flame of passion instant fill’d my breast;
Through every vein the fire electric stole,
And took dominion of my inmost soul.
By her ... possess’d of every pow’r to please,
Each toilsome task was exercis’d with ease.

* * * * *

For me, comprising every charm of life,
Friend—Mistress—Counsellor—Companion—Wife—
Wife!—wife!—oh honour’d name! for ever dear,
Alike enchanting to the eye and ear!
Let the corrupt, licentious, and profane
Rail, scoff, and murmur at the sacred chain:
It suits not them. Few but the wise and good
Its blessings e’er have priz’d or understood.
Matur’d in virtue first the heart must glow,
Ere happiness can vegetate and grow.
From her I learnt to feel the holy flame,
And found that she and virtue were the same.
From dissipation, though I might receive—
Ere yet I knew I had a heart to give—
An evanescent joy, untouch’d the mind
Still torpid lay, to mental beauty blind;
Till by example more than precept taught
From her, to act aright, the flame I caught.
How chang’d the face of nature now is grown!

* * * * *

Illusive hope no more her charms displays;
Her flattering schemes no more my spirits raise;
Each airy vision which her pencil drew
Inexorable death has banish’d from my view.
Each gentle solace is withheld by fate
Till death conduct me through his awful gate.
Come then, Oh Death! let kindred souls be join’d!
Oh thou, so often cruel—once be kind!”

A total chasm ensues of all account of events belonging to the period of this irreparable earthly blast. Not a personal memorandum of the unhappy survivor is left; not a single document in his hand-writing, except of verses to her idea, or to her memory; or of imitations, adapted to his loss, and to her excellences, from some selected sonnets of Petrarch, whom he considered to have loved, entombed, and bewailed another Esther in his Laura.

When this similitude, which soothed his spirit and flattered his feelings, had been studied and paralleled in every possible line of comparison, he had recourse to the works of Dante, which, ere long, beguiled from him some attention; because, through the difficulty of idiom, he had not, as of nearly all other favourite authors, lost all zest of the beauties of Dante in solitude, from having tasted the sweetness of his numbers with a pleasure exalted by participation: for, during the last two years that his Esther was spared to him, her increased maternal claims from a new baby;[22] and augmented domestic cares from a new residence, had checked the daily mutuality of their progress in the pursuit of improvement; and to Esther this great poet was scarcely known.

To Dante, therefore, he first delivered over what he could yet summon from his grief-worn faculties; and to initiate himself into the works, and nearly obsolete style, of that hardest, but most sublime of Italian poets, became the occupation to which, with the least repugnance, he was capable of recurring.

A sedulous, yet energetic, though prose translation of the Inferno, remains amongst his posthumous relics, to demonstrate the sincere struggles with which, even amidst this overwhelming calamity, he strove to combat that most dangerously consuming of all canker-worms upon life and virtue, utter inertness.

Of his children, James,[23] his eldest son, had already, at ten years of age, been sent to sea, a nominal midshipman, in the ship of Admiral Montagu.

The second son, Charles,[24] who was placed, several years later, in the Charterhouse, by Mr. Burney’s first and constant patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, was then but a child.

The eldest daughter was still a little girl; and the last born of her three sisters could scarcely walk alone. But all, save the seaman, who was then aboard his ship, were now called back to the paternal roof of the unhappy father.

None of them, however, were of an age to be companionable; his fondness for them, therefore, full of care and trouble, procured no mitigation to his grief by the pleasure of society: and the heavy march of time, where no solace is accepted from abroad, or attainable at home, gave a species of stagnation to his existence, that made him take, in the words of Young,

“No note of time,
Save by its loss!”

His tenderness, however, as a father; his situation as a man; and his duties as a Christian, drew, tore him, at length, from this retreat of lonely woe; and, in the manuscript already quoted from, which was written many years after the period of which it speaks, he says: “I was forced, ere long, to plunge into business; and then found, that having my time occupied by my affairs was a useful dissipation of my sorrows, as it compelled me to a temporary inattention to myself, and to the irreparable loss I had sustained.”

Still, however, all mitigation to his grief that was not imposed upon him by necessity, he avoided even with aversion; and even the sight of those who most had loved and esteemed the departed, was the sight most painful to him in sharpening his regrets, “which, therefore, no meeting whatsoever,” he says, “could blunt; since to love and admire her, had been universally the consequence of seeing and knowing her.”

From this mournful monotony of life, he was especially, however, called, by reflecting that his eldest daughter was fast advancing to that age when education is most requisite to improvement; and that, at such a period, the loss of her mother and instructress might be permanently hurtful to her, if no measure should be taken to avert the possible consequences of neglect.

Yet the idea of a governess, who, to him, unless his children were wholly confined to the nursery, must indispensably be a species of companion, was not, in his present desolate state of mind, even tolerable. Nevertheless masters without superintendence, and lessons without practice, he well knew to be nugatory. Projects how to remedy this evil, as fruitless as they were numberless, crossed his mind; till a plan occurred to him, that, by combining economy with novelty, and change of scene for himself, with various modes of advantage to his daughters, ripened into an exertion that brought him, about a month after its formation, to the gates of Paris.

The design of Mr. Burney was to place two of his daughters in some convent, or boarding-house, where their education might be forwarded by his own directions.

Sundry reasons decided him to make his third daughter, Susanna, take place, in this expedition, of his second, Frances; but, amongst them, the principal and most serious motive, was a fearful tendency to a consumptive habit in that most delicate of his young plants, that seemed to require the balsamic qualities of a warmer and clearer atmosphere.

Another reason, which he acknowledged, in after-times, to have had great weight with him for this arrangement, was the tender veneration with which Frances was impressed for her maternal grandmother; whose angelic piety, and captivating softness, had won her young heart with such reverential affection, that he apprehended there might be danger of her being led to follow, even enthusiastically, the religion of so pure a votary, if she should fall so early, within the influence of any zealot in the work of conversion. He determined, therefore, as he could part with two of them only at a time, that Fanny and Charlotte should follow their sisters in succession, at a later period.

PARIS.

Immediately upon his arrival at Paris, Mr. Burney, by singular good fortune, had the honour to be introduced to Lady Clifford, a Roman Catholic dowager, of a character the most benevolent, who resided entirely in France, for the pious purpose of enjoying with facility the rites of her religion, which could not, at that period, be followed in England without peril of persecution.

This lady took the children of Mr. Burney into her kindest favour, and invited their father to consult with her unreservedly upon his projects and wishes; and, through such honourable auspices, scarcely ten days elapsed, ere Esther and Susan were placed under the care of Madame St. Mart, a woman of perfect goodness of heart, and of a disposition the most affectionate.

Madame St. Mart was accustomed to the charge of _des jeunes Anglaises_, two daughters of Sir Willoughby Aston, Selina and Belinda, being then under her roof.

Highly satisfied with this arrangement, Mr. Burney now visited the delightful capital of France; made himself acquainted with its antiquities, curiosities, public buildings, public places, general laws, and peculiar customs; its politics, its resources, its festivities, its arts and its artists; as well as with the arbitrary tyrannies, and degrading oppressions towards the lower classes, which, at that epoch, were, to an English looker-on, incomprehensibly combined, not with murmurs nor discontent, but with the most lively animal spirits, and the freshest glee of national gaiety.

But his chosen haunts were the Public Libraries, to which an easiness of access, at that time deplorably unknown in England, encouraged, nay, excited, the intelligent visitor, who might be mentally inclined to any literary project, to hit upon some subject congenial to his taste; by rousing in him that spirit of emulation, which ultimately animates the humbly instructed, to soar to the heights that distinguish the luminous instructor.

Collections of books, even the most multitudinous and the most rare, may hold, to the common runner through life, but an ordinary niche in places of general resort; nevertheless, the Public Libraries, those Patrons of the Mind, must always be entered with a glow of grateful pleasure, by those who, instinctively, meditate upon the vast mass of thought that they contain.

To wander amidst those stores, that commit talents to posterity as indubitably as the Herald’s Register transmits names and titles; to develop as accurately the systems of nations, the conditions of communities, the progress of knowledge, and the turn of men’s minds, two or three thousand years ago, as in this our living minute; to visit, in fact, the Brains of our fellow-creatures,—not alone with the harrowing knife to dissect physical conformation, but, with the piercing eye of penetration to dive into the recesses of human intelligence, the sources of imagination, and the springs of genius; and there, in those sacred receptacles of mental remains, to survey, in clear, indestructible evidence, all of the soul that man is able to bequeath to man— —

Views such as these of the powers of his gifted, though gone fellow-creatures, seen thus abstractedly through their intellectual attributes; purified equally from the frailties and selfishness of active life, and the sickly humours and baleful infirmities of age; seen through the medium of learned, useful, or fanciful productions; and beheld in so insulated a moment of vacuity of any positive plan of life, instinctively roused the dormant faculties of the subject of these memoirs, by setting before him a comprehensive chart of human capabilities, which involuntarily incited a conscious inquiry: what, peradventure, might be his own share, if sought for, in such heavenly gifts?

And it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable and indescribable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiencies—namely, the class of authors.

For this was the real, though not yet the ostensible epoch, whence may be traced the opening of his passion for literary pursuits.

And from this period, to the very close of his long mortal career, this late, though newly chosen occupation, became all that was most consoling to his sorrows, most diversifying to his ideas, and most animating to his faculties.

Some new stimulus had been eminently wanting to draw a man of his natively ardent and aspiring character from the torpid blight of availless misery; which, in despoiling him of all bosom felicity, had left only to an attempt at some untried project and purpose, any chance for the restoration of his energies.

He did not immediately fix on a subject for any work, though he had the wisdom, at once, and the modesty, to resolve, since so tardily he entered such lists, to adopt no plan that might wean him from his profession—for his profession was his whole estate! but rather to seek one that might amalgamate his rising desire of fame in literature, with his original labours to be distinguished as a follower of Orpheus.

He took notes innumerable in the public libraries, which he meant to revisit on returning to Paris for his daughters, of the books, subjects, passages, and authors which invited re-perusal; and which, hereafter, might happily conduct to some curious investigation, or elucidating commentary.

He made himself master of a beautiful collection of what then was esteemed to be most select of the French classics.

He completed, by adding to what already he possessed, all that recently had been published of that noblest work that had yet appeared in the republic of letters, the original Encyclopedia.

He opened an account with the reigning bookseller of the day, whose reputation in his mind-enlightening business still sustains its renown, M. Guy, whom he commissioned to send over to England the principal works then suspending over the heights of the French Parnassus; where resplendently were grouped all that was most attractive in Wit, Poetry, Eloquence, Science, Pathos, and Entertainment; from Rousseau, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Marmontel, Destouches, Marivaux, Gilbert, Diderot, Fontenelle, de Jaucourt; and many others.

It will easily be conceived how wistfully Mr. Burney must have coveted to make acquaintance with this brilliant set; his high veneration for genius having always led him to consider the first sight of an eminent author to form a data in his life.

But he had neither leisure, nor recommendatory letters; nor, perhaps, courage for such an attempt; the diffidence of his nature by no means anticipating the honourable place he himself was destined to hold in similar circles.

Not small, however, was his solace, while missing every ray of living light from this foreign constellation, when he found himself shone upon by a fixed star of the first magnitude belonging to his own system; for at the house of the English ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, he became acquainted with the celebrated secretary of his lordship, the justly admired, and justly censured DAVID HUME; who, with the skilful discernment that waited neither name nor fame for its stimulus, took Mr. Burney immediately and warmly into his favour.

Had this powerful and popular author, in his erudite, spirited, and intellectual researches and reflections, given to mankind his luminous talents, and his moral philosophy, for fair, open, and useful purposes, suited to the high character which he bore, not alone for genius, but for worth and benevolence; instead of bending, blending, involving them with missive weapons of baneful sarcasm, insidiously at work to undermine our form of faith; he would have been hailed universally, not applauded partially, as, in every point, one of the first of British writers.

To the world no man is accountable for his thoughts and his ruminations; but for their propagation, if they are dangerous or mischievous, the risks which he may allure others to share, seem impelled by wanton lack of feeling; if not by an ignorant yet presumptuous dearth of foresight to the effect he is working to produce: two deficiencies equally impossible to be attributed to a man to whom philanthropy is as unequivocally accorded as philosophy.

Unsolved therefore, perhaps, yet remains, as a problem in the history of human nature, how a being, at once wise and benign, could have refrained from the self-examination of demanding: what—had he been successful in exterminating from the eyes and the hearts of men the lecture and the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures, would have been achieved? Had he any other more perfect religion to offer? More purifying from evil? more fortifying in misfortune? more consoling in woe?—No!—indubitably no!—Nothing fanatical, or mystic, could cope with judgment such as his. To undermine, not to construct, is all the obvious purpose of his efforts—of which he laments the failure as a calamity![25] He leaves, therefore, nothing to conjecture of his motives but what least seems to belong to a character of his sedate equanimity; a personal desire to proclaim to mankind their folly in their belief, and his sagacity in his infidelity.

LONDON.

Mr. Burney now, greatly lightened, and somewhat brightened in spirits, returned to his country and his home. His mind seemed no longer left in desolating inertness to prey upon itself. Nutriment of an invigorating nature was in view, though not yet of a consistence to afford spontaneous refreshment. On the contrary, it required taste for selection, labour for culture, and skill for appropriation. But such nutriment, if attainable, was precisely that which best could re-inforce the poor “tenement of clay,”[26] which the lassitude of unbraced nerves had nearly “fretted to decay.”

Sketches, hints, notes, and scattered ideas of all sorts, began to open the way to some original composition; though the timidity of his Muse, not the dearth of his fancy, long kept back the force of mind for meeting the public eye, that now, in these more easy, dauntless times, urges almost every stripling to present his mental powers to the world, nearly ere his physical ones have emerged from leading-strings in the nursery.

The first, because the least responsible, method of facing the critic eye, that occurred to him, was that of translation; and he began with acutely studying d’Alembert’s _Elémens de Musique théorique et pratique, selon les principes de Rameau_; in which he was assiduously engaged, when the appearance of the celebrated musical _Dictionaire_ of the still more celebrated Rousseau, from its far nearer congeniality to his taste, surprised him into inconstancy.

Yet this also, from circumstances that intervened, was laid aside; and his first actual essay was a trifle, though a pleasing one, from which no real fame could either accrue, or be marred; it was translating, and adapting to the stage, the little pastoral afterpiece of Rousseau, _Le Devin du Village_.

GARRICK.

To this he was urged by Garrick; and the execution was appropriate, and full of merit. But though the music, from its simplicity and the sweetness of its melody, was peculiarly fitted to refine the public taste amongst the middle classes; while it could not fail to give passing pleasure even to the highest; the drama was too denuded of intricacy or variety for the amusement of John Bull; and the appearance of only three interlocuters caused a gaping expectation of some followers, that made every new scene begin by inflicting disappointment.

Mr. Garrick, and his accomplished, high-bred, and engaging wife, La Violetta, had been amongst the earliest of the pristine connexions of Mr. Burney, who had sought him, with compassionate kindness, as soon after his heart-breaking loss as he could admit any friends to his sight. The ensuing paragraph on his warm sentiments of this talented and bewitching pair, is copied from one of his manuscript memorandums.

“My acquaintance, at this time, with Mrs. as well as Mr.
Garrick, was improved into a real friendship; and frequently,
on the Saturday night, when Mr. Garrick did not act, he
carried me to his villa at Hampton, whence he brought me to
my home early on Monday morning. I seldom was more happy
than in these visits. His wit, humour, and constant gaiety
at home; and Mrs. Garrick’s good sense, good breeding, and
obliging desire to please, rendered their Hampton villa, on
these occasions, a terrestrial paradise.

“Mrs. Garrick had every faculty of social judgment, good
taste, and steadiness of character, which he wanted. She was
an excellent appreciator of the fine arts; and attended all
the last rehearsals of new or of revived plays, to give her
opinion of effects, dresses, scenery, and machinery. She
seemed to be his real other half; and he, by his intelligence
and accomplishments, seemed to complete the Hydroggynus.”

This eminent couple paid their court to Mr. Burney in the manner that was most sure to be successful, namely, by their endearing and good natured attentions to his young family; frequently giving them, with some chaperon of their father’s appointing, the lightsome pleasure of possessing Mrs. Garrick’s private box at Drury Lane Theatre; and that, from time to time, even when the incomparable Roscius acted himself; which so enchanted their gratitude, that they nearly—as Mr. Burney laughingly quoted to Garrick from Hudibras—

“Did,—as was their duty,
Worship the shadow of his shoe-tie.”

Garrick, who was passionately fond of children, never withheld his visits from Poland-street on account of the absence of the master of the house; for though it was the master he came to seek, he was too susceptible to his own lively gift of bestowing pleasure, to resist witnessing the ecstacy he was sure to excite, when he burst in unexpectedly upon the younger branches: for so playfully he individualised his attentions, by an endless variety of comic badinage,—now exhibited in lofty bombast; now in ludicrous obsequiousness; now by a sarcasm skilfully implying a compliment; now by a compliment archly conveying a sarcasm; that every happy day that gave them but a glimpse of this idol of their juvenile fancy, was exhilarated to its close by reciprocating anecdotes of the look, the smile, the bow, the shrug, the start, that, after his departure, each enraptured admirer could describe.

A circumstance of no small weight at that time, contributed to allure Mr. Garrick to granting these joyous scenes to the young Burney tribe. When he made the tour of Italy, for the recovery of his health, and the refreshment of his popularity, he committed to the care of Mr. Burney and his young family his own and Mrs. Garrick’s favourite little dog, Phill, a beautiful black and white spaniel, of King Charles’s breed, luxuriant in tail and mane, with the whitest breast, and spotted with perfect symmetry.

The fondness of Mr. Garrick for this little spaniel was so great, that one of his first visits on his return from the continent was to see, caress, and reclaim him. Phill was necessarily resigned, though with the most dismal reluctance, by his new friends: but if parting with the favoured little quadruped was a disaster, how was that annoyance overpaid, when, two or three days afterwards, Phill re-appeared! and when the pleasure of his welcome to the young folks was increased by a message, that the little animal had seemed so moping, so unsettled, and so forlorn, that Mr. and Mrs. Garrick had not the heart to break his new engagements, and requested his entire acceptance and adoption in Poland-street.

During the life of this favourite, all the juvenile group were sought and visited together, by the gay-hearted Roscius; and with as much glee as he himself was received by these happy young creatures, whether two-footed or four.

On the first coming-out of the “Cunning Man,” Mr. Garrick, who undoubtedly owed his unequalled varieties in delineating every species of comic character, to an inquisitive observance of Nature in all her workings, amused himself in watching from the orchestra, where he frequently sat on the first night of new pieces, the young auditory in Mrs. Garrick’s box; and he imitatingly described to Mr. Burney the innocent confidence of success with which they all openly bent forward, to look exultingly at the audience, when a loud clapping followed the overture: and their smiles, or nods: or chuckling and laughter, according to their more or less advanced years, during the unmingled approbation that was bestowed upon about half the piece—contrasted with, first the amazement; next, the indignation; and, lastly, the affright and disappointment, that were brought forth by the beginning buzz of hissing, and followed by the shrill horrors of the catcall: and then the return—joyous, but no longer dauntless!—of hope, when again the applause prevailed.

In these various changes, Mr. Garrick altered the expression of his features, and almost his features themselves, by apparent transformations—which, however less poetical, were at least more natural than those of Ovid.

Mr. Garrick possessed not only every possible inflexion of voice, save for singing, but also of countenance; varying his looks into young, old, sick, vigorous, downcast, or frolicsome, at his personal volition; as if his face, and even his form, had been put into his own hands to be worked upon like Man a Machine.

Mr. Garrick, about this time, warmly urged the subject of these memoirs to set to music an English opera called Orpheus; but while, for that purpose, Mr. Burney was examining the drama, he was informed that it had been put into the hands of Mr. Barthelemon, who was preparing it for the stage.

Astonished, and very much hurt, Mr. Burney hastily returned the copy with which he had been entrusted, to Mr. Johnstone, the prompter; dryly, and without letter or comment, directing him to deliver it to Mr. Garrick.

Mr. Garrick, with the utmost animation, instantly wrote to Johnstone an apology rather than a justification; desiring that the opera should be withdrawn from Mr. Barthelemon, and consigned wholly to the subject of these memoirs; for whom Mr. Garrick declared himself to entertain a friendship that nothing should dissolve.[27]

But Mr. Burney, conceiving that Barthelemon, who had offended no one, and who bore a most amiable character, might justly resent so abrupt a discharge, declined setting the opera: and never afterwards composed for the theatres.

This trait, however trifling, cannot but be considered as biographical, at least for Mr. Garrick; as it so strongly authenticates the veracity of the two principal lines of the epitaph designed for Roscius, many years afterwards, by that acute observer of every character—save his own!—Dr. Goldsmith.

“He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew, when he would, he could whistle them back.”

Whether negligence, mistake, or caprice, had occasioned this double nomination to the same office, is not clear; but Garrick, who loved Mr. Burney with real affection, lost no time, and spared no blandishment, to re-instate himself in the confidence which this untoward accident had somewhat shaken. And he had full success, to the great satisfaction of Mr. Burney, and joy of his family; who all rapturously delighted in the talents and society of the immortal Roscius.

MR. CRISP.