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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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