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The main sources for this memoir of Frances or Fanny Burney,—afterwards Madame D’Arblay,—in addition to her novels, the literature of the period, and the works specified in the footnotes, are as follows:—

I am indebted to the kindness of Archdeacon Burney, Vicar of St. Mark’s, Surbiton, for access to his unique extra-illustrated copy of the Diary and Letters of 1842-6, which contains, among other interesting mss., the originals of Mrs. Thrale’s letter mentioned at page 86 of this volume, and of Burke’s letter mentioned at page 124. Archdeacon Burney is the possessor of Edward Burney’s portrait of his cousin (page 88); of the Reynolds portraits of Dr. Burney and Garrick from the Thrale Gallery (page 94); of a very fine portrait of Dr. Charles Burney by Lawrence; and of a group by Hudson of Hetty Burney, her husband, Charles Rousseau Burney, and her husband’s father, Richard Burney of Worcester.

I am also indebted to Mrs. Chappel of East Orchard, Shaftesbury, granddaughter of Mrs. Barrett, the editor of the Diary and Letters, for valuable information as to Burney relics in her possession.

A. D.

75, Eaton Rise, Ealing, W.,

September 18, 1903.

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CONTENTS

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Fanny Burney

In the second half of the seventeenth century, there lived at the village of Great Hanwood, four miles from Shrewsbury, a country gentleman of a good estate, named James Macburney. In later life, he was land-steward to the Earl of Ashburnham; and he rented or possessed a house in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Tradition traces his family to Scotland, whence it was said to have arrived with James i. However this may be,—and the point was not regarded as of much importance by his descendants,—James Macburney married his Shropshire rector’s daughter; begat a son; and in due time, became a widower. The son—also James Macburney—was educated at Westminster School under the redoubtable Dr. Busby. Then, taking to art, he worked as a pupil of the “eminent Face Painter,” Michael Dahl. About 1697, at the age of nineteen, he ran away with Rebecca Ellis, an actress in Giffard’s Company, and younger than himself. Thereupon his irate father disinherited him, and in further token of his displeasure, took to wife his own cook, by whom he had another son called Joseph, who, as soon as he arrived at man’s estate, removed all possible difficulties in regard to the succession by dissipating the property. Having effected this with much promptitude, he settled down contentedly as a Norfolk dancing master. Meanwhile, his elder half-brother,—who, though lacking in discretion, had many pleasing gifts (he was, in particular, an accomplished violin-player),—being left, by the death of his actress-wife, with a numerous family, wedded, for the second time, a beautiful young lady of Shropshire, Mistress (i.e. Miss) Ann Cooper. Miss Cooper was currently reported to have rejected Wycherley the dramatist, who, it may be remembered, like the elder Macburney, was desirous of disappointing his natural heir. Miss Cooper had some money; but James Macburney’s second marriage increased the number of his children. The youngest members of his family were twins, Susannah (who died early), and Charles, afterwards the well-known historian of music, and the father of Fanny Burney. Like his predecessors, he was born Macburney, but the “Mac” was subsequently dropped.

Not long after Charles Burney’s birth, which took place on the 12th April 1726, in Raven Street, Shrewsbury (a name probably derived from the famous Raven Inn once familiar to Farquhar and “Serjeant Kite”), James Burney, as we may now call his father, settled at Chester as a portrait painter, leaving his little son at nurse in Condover, a village near Shrewsbury. Here, with an affectionate foster mother, Charles Burney throve apace, until he was transferred to the Chester Grammar School. At this date his natural gifts were sufficiently manifest to enable him at a pinch to act as deputy for the Cathedral organist. Subsequently, he became the pupil of his half-brother, James, the organist of St. Mary’s Church at Shrewsbury. Then, being again in Chester when the famous Dr. Augustine Arne was passing through the town on his return from Ireland to London, he was fortunate enough to be taken as that master’s apprentice. This was in August 1744, when he was eighteen, pleasant-mannered, intelligent, very musical, very versatile, and—as he continued to be through life—an indefatigable worker. From Arne he did not learn much except to copy music, and to drudge in the Drury Lane Orchestra, which Arne conducted; and, although he had an elder brother in London, he was left greatly to his own devices. But his abilities and personal charm brought him many friends. He was frequently at the house in Scotland Yard of Arne’s sister, Mrs. Cibber, the foremost tragic actress of her day; and here he made acquaintance with many notabilities. Handel was often among the visitors, playing intricate fugues and overtures with his pudgy fingers upon the harpsichord; and Garrick, with the wonderful eyes; and Garrick’s surly old rival, the bon-vivant, James Quin; and Mason; and Thomson the poet of The Seasons.

With Arne, Charles Burney would probably have remained, but for a fortunate accident. At the shop of Jacob Kirkman, the German harpsichord maker in Broad Street, Golden Square, he met Mr. Fulke Greville, a descendant of Sidney’s friend, the famous Fulke Greville of Queen Elizabeth’s days. The Greville of 1746 either possessed, or affected to possess, many of the attributes of Bramston’s Man of Taste:—

Like Bramston’s hero, he also dabbled in gardening. But his accomplishments were not confined to pugilism and field sports. He danced, fenced, drew, wrote verses, and trifled with metaphysics. Lastly, he “had an ear.” After the fashion of his day, he had doubted whether any musician could possibly be a gentleman, but Charles Burney undeceived him. The result was that Greville paid three hundred pounds to cancel Burney’s engagement to Arne, and attached his new friend to his own establishment in the capacity of musical companion. This curious conjunction, which seems to have included a fair experience of Greville’s other diversions, did no harm to Charles Burney. On the contrary, at Greville’s country seat of Wilbury House in Wiltshire, he met many interesting and some eminent people, who considerably enlarged his social aptitudes. In 1747, however, his patron married a Miss Frances Macartney,—the “Flora” of Horace Walpole’s Beauties,—making, in his impatience of the conventional,—or fogrum as it was then styled,—a perfectly superfluous stolen match. “Mr. Greville”—said the lady’s matter-of-fact father, when his pardon and blessing were formally requested—“has chosen to take a wife out of the window, whom he might just as well have taken out of the door.” Burney gave away the bride; and after standing proxy for a duke at the baptism of the first child,^[1] would have accompanied the Grevilles to Italy. But at this juncture he discovered that he, too, had an affair of the heart. Thereupon Mr. Greville magnanimously released him from his engagement, and left him to marry the woman of his choice.

She was a Miss Esther Sleepe, very attractive and very amiable. Her mother, although of Huguenot origin, was a Roman Catholic. Esther herself was a Protestant. She married Charles Burney about 1748, and they went to live in the City. In 1749, her husband was appointed organist of St. Dionis Backchurch, which had been rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Burney’s modest salary was £30 per annum. But he composed music, and soon found many pupils. When his first child, called Esther after her mother, was born, is not stated; but the register of St. Dionis contains record of the birth, in June, 1750, of James Burney, afterwards an admiral; and, in 1751, of a son Charles, who, apparently, died early. Before this date, hard work and close application had begun to tell upon the father of the little family, and he was advised by his friend Dr. John Armstrong, the author of The Art of Preserving Health, to try living in the country. He accordingly accepted the post of organist, with a salary of £100 a year, at St. Margaret’s Church, King’s Lynn, to which place he removed in 1751, his wife joining him some months later. At King’s Lynn, on the 13th June, 1752, was born his second daughter, Frances, or Fanny Burney, whose life-story forms the theme of this volume. The name of Frances came to her from her godmother, Mrs. Greville; and she was baptized at St. Nicholas, in Ann Street. At Lynn were born two other children, Susanna, no doubt so named after her father’s twin sister; and a second Charles, later a famous Greek scholar, Rector of Deptford, and Chaplain to George iii. The date of Susanna’s birth is not known; but Charles Burney was born in December, 1757.

At Lynn, in spite of an execrable instrument, and an irresponsive audience, the new organist’s health speedily improved. His hearers, if unmusical, were not unfriendly, and his own good qualities helped him as of yore. “He scarcely ever entered a house upon terms of business, without leaving it upon those of intimacy.” He gave music lessons in many of the great Norfolk mansions,—at Houghton (Lord Orford’s), at Holkham (the home of the Leicesters), at Rainham (General Lord Townshend’s), and at Felbrigge Park (Mr. Windham’s),—padding along the sandy crossroads to his destination upon his sure-footed mare “Peggy,” with a certainty that permitted him to study Tasso or Metastasio in the saddle, and even to consult a dictionary of his own composing which he carried in his great-coat pocket. These things, added to correspondence with the Greville circle, projects for a History of Music, increasing means, and a pleasant home, made Lynn life very tolerable for a season. But towards 1759 he seems to have wearied a little of his provincial lot, added to which, friends began to counsel his return to town, and to protest against his exile among “foggy aldermen.” “Really, among friends,”—wrote one of them, to whom we shall often refer hereafter,—“is not settling at Lynn planting your youth, genius, hopes, fortune, etc., against a north wall? Can you ever expect ripe, high-flavoured fruit, from such an aspect?” And then the writer went on to adjure him to transplant his “spare person,” his “pretty mate,” and his “brats” to the more congenial environment of the capital. He eventually quitted Lynn in 1760 for London, which he had left about nine years before.

At this date, he was four and thirty. He set up his tent in Poland Street, then a rather more favoured place of residence than it is at present, and having, beyond the Oxford Road (as Oxford Street was then called), little but open fields and market gardens. Portman Square, Manchester Square, Russell Square,—of all these not a stone had been laid.^[2] But Poland Street was not without aristocratic occupants. The Duke of Chandos, Sir Willoughby Aston (with whose daughters the Miss Burneys went to school at Paris), Lady Augusta Bridges and others were all distinguished neighbours in this now dingy street—to say nothing of the Cherokee King, who, when he visited England, actually, to the delight of the Burney children, took lodgings “almost immediately opposite.” At Poland Street Charles Burney rapidly became the music master most in request with the fashionable world. Soon he had not an hour of the day unoccupied, beginning his rounds as early as seven in the morning, and finishing them, sometimes, only at eleven at night. Often he dined in a hackney coach on the contents of a sandwich box and a flask of sherry and water. But he must still have found time for original work, since it was at Poland Street that, besides “Sonatas for the Harpsichord,” he composed in 1763 the setting for Bonnell Thornton’s Burlesque Ode on St. Caecilia’s Day, “adapted to the Antient British Musick; viz.: the Salt Box, the Jew’s Harp, the Marrow-Bones and Cleavers, the Hum-Strum or Hurdy-Gurdy,” and the rest, which was performed at Ranelagh in masks, to the huge delectation of an audience musical and unmusical, and the amusement of Dr. Johnson.^[3] But the pleasures of increasing popularity were dashed by domestic misfortune. Mrs. Burney, the “pretty mate” of the last paragraph, having, in the new home, given birth to a fourth daughter, Charlotte, sickened of consumption. A visit to the Bristol Hot Wells (Clifton) proved unavailing; and to the intense grief of her husband and family, she died, after a brief illness, on the 28th September, 1761. She seems to have been a most affectionate mother, and sympathised with her husband in his bookish tastes. With one of his subsequent essays he published a translation from Maupertuis, which she, naturally an excellent French scholar, had executed; and her reading of Pope’s Works and the Virgil of Spence’s friend Christopher Pitt, was one of the memories of her daughters. But at the time of her death her eldest child was only twelve, and her youngest a baby.

The little family at Poland Street, thus suddenly left motherless, must have been an exceptionally interesting one. Esther, or Hetty, the eldest, is described as extremely beautiful, and possessed of that fortunate combination, good sense, good humour, and an abundant love of fun. She was besides remarkably musical, and according to the Gentleman’s Magazine, was wont to astonish her father’s guests, at a very early age, by her skilful instrumentalism. James, the eldest son, who, at the age of ten, entered the Navy under Admiral Montagu as a nominal midshipman, was an unusually bright and manly lad, full of vivacity and high spirits. When at school in his Norfolk home, he had been taught by Eugene Aram. He could recall how that “melancholy man” would pace the playground talking of strange deeds to the elder boys; and he remembered well the memorable night in August 1758 when

James Burney rose to eminence in his profession,—sailed twice round the world with Captain Cook, was with him at his death, and lived to be a fine specimen of the old-time sailor, cheery and humourous, unpolished externally, but “gentle and humane” at heart. Charles Lamb loved him; Southey depicts him in his Captainhood as “smoking after supper, and letting out puffs at one corner of his mouth, and puns at the other”; and he dropped Hazlitt out of his whist parties, to which he was as attached as Mrs. Battle, because “W. H.” had affronted him by reviewing his sister Fanny’s Wanderer severely in the Edinburgh. In this brief biography James Burney cannot often appear hereafter, which must excuse these anticipations. The third child, Susanna, or, to be exact, Susanna Elizabeth, was also remarkable for her sweetness and charm. Joseph Baretti praised her dolcissima voce; her knowledge of music was affirmed to be exact and critical; and her native literary faculty was as fine, if not as imperative, as that of her sister Frances. Charles, the second boy, was still in the nursery; and Charlotte was a baby. Neither of these last can have had much influence on Frances, who with Esther, Susanna and James made up the little group of clever children which delighted Charles Burney’s friends, from Garrick to the singer Pacchieroti. “All! all! very clever girls” (James was of course at sea)—said this observer later in his queer broken English. “Sense and witta (sic) inhabit here. . . . All I meet with at Dr. Burney’s house are superior to other people. I am myself the only Bestia that enters the house. I am, indeed, a truly Beast”—by which the poor gentleman in his humility, as Mrs. Ellis suggests, obviously intended no more than is conveyed by the French bÊte.

In the above enumeration of Charles Burney’s children, Frances has been intentionally passed over, and to Frances we now turn. Like many other persons destined to make their mark in this world, she does not seem to have impressed it greatly at the outset. Neither for beauty nor physique was she notable in childhood; indeed she was both short and short-sighted. She was besides extremely shy and silent, as well as backward in most things. At the age of eight she had not learned to read, and her sailor brother used often to divert himself by giving her a book upside down in order to see what she would make of it. Mrs. Burney’s friends used to call her the “little dunce”; but her shrewder mother “had no fear of Fanny.” For it was observed, by those who looked close, that her perceptive faculties were exceedingly acute; that, in a quiet way, she noticed many things; that she was full of humour and invention in her play; and that whenever she went with the rest to Mrs. Garrick’s box at Drury Lane, although she could not read the piece acted, she was quite capable of mimicking the actors, and even of putting appropriate speeches into their mouths. These exhibitions, however, she would only give in the strictest domestic privacy. Before strangers, she became at once the demure, reserved, and almost sheepish little person whom it was the custom to designate familiarly as “the old lady.” An anecdote related by her father illustrates some of these peculiarities of character. Next door to the Burneys in Poland Street lived a wig-maker who supplied the voluminous full-bottomed periwigs then favoured by the gentlemen of the Law. The Burney girls used to play with the wig-maker’s daughters, and one day the playmates got access to the wig-magazine. They then proceeded to array themselves in what Fanny’s later friend Dr. Hawkesworth calls “the honours of the head,” dancing about in great delight at their ridiculous figures. Unfortunately one of the ten-guinea flaxen masterpieces soused suddenly into a garden tub filled with water, and forthwith losing all its portentous “Gorgon buckle,” was declared by the manufacturer to be totally spoilt. “He was extremely angry,” says Fanny’s father, “and chid very severely his own children; when my little daughter, the old lady, then ten years of age [1762], advancing to him, as I was informed, with great gravity and composure, sedately says; ‘What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure; but it’s of no use to speak of it any more; because what’s done can’t be undone.’ ”^[5] Dr. Johnson himself could not have been more oracular, though he would probably have said (as indeed he does in Rasselas)—“What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted!”

At this point it becomes necessary to introduce a personage who, for the future, plays no inconsiderable part in Frances Burney’s biography. Mention has been made of a friend by whom Charles Burney was advised to exchange the north wall of Lynn for a more congenial London aspect. This was one Samuel Crisp, a gentleman twenty years older than Fanny’s father, who had made his acquaintance when acting as musical companion to Fulke Greville. Samuel Crisp was a person of some importance in his day,—a man of taste and fashion, good-looking, well-mannered and accomplished, having gifts both artistic and musical,—friendly alike with the Duchess of Portland and Mrs. Montagu,—with Lady Coventry and Richard Owen Cambridge, with Quin and Garrick. Like many of equal abilities, he had dabbled in literature; and two years after Fanny’s birth, Garrick had produced at Drury Lane, not without pressure from the writer’s aristocratic supporters, a tragedy which Crisp had essayed upon a subject already treated more than a hundred years before by John Webster,—the story of Virginia. Crisp’s play cannot be said to have failed, for it ran for two nights more than Johnson’s Irene. But, on the other hand, it was not a genuine success, although Garrick, besides supplying an excellent Prologue and Epilogue, himself acted Virginius to the Virginia of Mrs. Cibber. The truth is, it was dull,—too dull even to be galvanised into mock vitality by the energy of the manager. No alterations could thenceforth persuade Garrick to revive it, and the author was naturally deeply chagrined. In a frame of mind very unfriendly to humanity in general, he carried his mortification to Italy. Returning in due course somewhat soothed and restored, he settled at Hampton, furnishing a house there so lavishly with guests, pictures, bustos and musical instruments that he speedily began to exhaust his sources of income. His annoyance at this discovery being aggravated by gout, in a fit of spleen he sold his villa by the Thames; and determining to realise Pope’s “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” took sanctuary with a friend in a secluded part of the country.

The retreat he selected was at Chessington, or—as it was then spelled—Chesington Hall, a rambling and ruinous old house between Kingston and Epsom. At this date, though on high ground, it stood in the middle of a wild and almost trackless common, which separated it effectually from the passing stranger. Its owner, Mr. Christopher Hamilton, was an old friend of Crisp and, since the house was too large for his means, only too pleased to welcome as an inmate, a companion who would share his expenses. At Chessington Crisp lived many years, and at Chessington he was buried. Until he became too infirm, he quitted it annually for a few weeks every spring, when he repaired to Town to visit his old haunts, look in at a concert or two, and run through the principal picture galleries. Lord Macaulay has described him as “hiding himself like a wild beast in a den,” in consequence of the failure of his tragedy, which—as we have seen—was rather indulgently received, at all events on the stage.^[6] But Lord Macaulay had not before him all the information we have at present. Although Crisp rated his tragic powers too high, and consequently felt his qualified success more acutely, it is probable that impaired health and reduced means had most to do with his withdrawal to Chessington; and there is no particular evidence that his seclusion, though strict, was savage. In one of his periodical visits to London, he happened upon Burney; came at once to see him at Poland Street; grew keenly interested in his motherless children, and thenceforward continued to be the lifelong ally and adviser of the family. Chessington Hall became a haven of rest for the Burneys,—“a place of peace, ease, freedom and cheerfulness,” to which, even when it was later turned into a boarding-house by Miss Hamilton, the father retired to work at his books, and the children for change of air. As Crisp grew older, they grew more and more necessary to his existence, filling the dark passages and tapestried chambers of the old house with fiddles and harpsichords, dancing, amateur acting, and all the stir and bustle of their fresh and healthy vitality. Their company must have been invaluable to a host, contracted, but by no means wedded, to melancholy; and there is no doubt that in return his experience of the world, his sterling good sense, and his educated taste were of the greatest service to them. They brightened and cheered his life; but they also owed not a little to the personage whom, in brief space, they came to designate affectionately as “Daddy” Crisp.

For two or three years after Mrs. Burney’s death not much is known of her husband’s doings. His grief at first was intense; but like many sensible men, he at once sought to mitigate it by hard work, attempting among other things a prose translation of Dante’s Inferno. In June, 1764, he paid a short visit to Paris in order to place Hetty and Susan at school there. Fanny was older than Susan, but apart from her general backwardness, her father seems to have apprehended that her very emotional character (she had been overpowered with grief at her mother’s death) might, when on the Continent, perhaps induce her to adopt the creed of her grandmother, Mrs. Sleepe, to whom she was much attached. In the French capital, Charles Burney found many friends, and under the influence of Paris air, Paris clothes, Paris festivities and the ComÉdie Italienne, began speedily—like Garrick in the same place a few months afterwards—to recover his spirits, and interest himself once more in his old pursuits. Either now or later, he set to work upon a version of Rousseau’s musical intermÈde, the Devin du Village, under the title of The Cunning Man.^[7] Towards the end of June, he left Hetty and Susan in the care of a certain Mme. St. Mart. They remained at Paris for about two years, returning in 1767.

The first diarist of the family appears to have been Susan Burney, who began her records at the early age of ten. Soon after her return home she sketched the portraits of her two elder sisters. “The characteristics of Hetty seem to be wit, generosity, and openness of heart:—Fanny’s,—sense, sensibility, and bashfulness, and even a degree of prudery. Her understanding is superior, but her diffidence gives her a bashfulness before company with whom she is not intimate, which is a disadvantage to her. My eldest sister shines in conversation, because, though very modest, she is totally free from any mauvaise honte: were Fanny equally so, I am persuaded she would shine no less. I am afraid that my eldest sister is too communicative, and that my sister Fanny is too reserved. They are both charming girls—des filles comme il y en a peu.”^[8] The words make one think that the composing of CaractÈres or Portraits must have formed part of Mme. St. Mart’s curriculum. At all events they are all we know of Frances Burney at this time, and they coincide with what we have learned already. Doubtless, during the absence of her sisters in France, she had been slowly developing. To her busy father, although he left her much to herself, she was devotedly attached; and she had grown almost as fond of the adopted parent who had now become her “guide, philosopher and friend.” When Hetty and Susan were away, she probably saw a great deal of Mr. Crisp, and in the beginning of 1766 paid her first visit to the “dear, ever dear Chesington” which was to figure so frequently in her future journals. It had been her father’s intention that she and her younger sister Charlotte should also have the advantage of two years’ schooling at Mme. St. Mart’s establishment; but the project, first postponed, was afterwards abandoned in consequence of Mr. Burney’s second marriage.

This took place in October, 1767. The lady, Elizabeth Allen, was the widow of a wealthy Lynn wine-merchant. She had been the intimate friend of the late Mrs. Burney, whose death she had deplored almost as much as Mrs. Burney’s husband. She had three children; but, owing to losses in her widowhood, apparently possessed nothing but a dower-house in the churchyard of St. Margaret’s at Lynn. Coming to London for the education of her eldest daughter, Maria, she renewed her acquaintance with the Burneys. Handsome, intelligent, well-read, and something of a blue-stocking to boot, she seems speedily to have inspired in Mr. Burney an affection as genuine as her own for him. But as her Lynn relatives were not likely to approve the match, seeing particularly that Mr. Burney had six children of his own, the marriage took place privately at St. James’s, Piccadilly; and the newly wedded pair, with the connivance of the friendly Crisp, spent their honeymoon in a farm-house near Chessington. Even then, the matter was kept quiet, being only revealed at last by the misdelivery of a letter. After this, the second Mrs. Burney took her place definitively as the mistress of the Poland Street home, and the Lynn dower-house became an additional holiday resort for the combined family. The children on both sides seem to have been delighted with an alliance which brought them more intimately together; and the new mamma increased rather than diminished the literary tone of the house. “As Mrs. Stephen Allen,” says Mrs. Ellis, “she had held a sort of bas bleu meeting once a week; as Mrs. Burney, she received men of letters, or art, almost daily, in an informal way.” One result of the marriage, as already stated, was that Fanny and Charlotte did not go to Paris. Charlotte was put to school in Norfolk; and it was arranged that Susanna should teach Fanny French.

At the time of her father’s second marriage, Fanny Burney was in her sixteenth year. Whether she had written much previous to the return of her sisters from Paris, cannot be affirmed; but it is evident that, with the advent of the diary-keeping Susanna, her native bias to scribbling rapidly increased. Every available scrap of paper was covered with stories and humourous sketches, confided only to the discreet ears of the younger sister, who laughed and cried over these masterpieces in secret. But it so chanced that Mrs. Burney the second, with all her appreciation of the monde parleur, was also keenly alive to the misÈres du monde scribe. Something led her to suspect that the girls were writing a good deal more than in her opinion was good for them, and the result was that they were gently but firmly admonished not to spend too much time in idle crude inventions. Thus, one fine day, it came about that, in the paved play-court at Poland Street, when her father was at Chessington and her step-mother at Lynn, the docile Fanny “made over to a bonfire” all her accumulated stock of prose compositions. In the Preface to her last novel of The Wanderer, where it is added that Susanna stood weeping by, the date of this holocaust is given as her fifteenth birthday (June 1767). But as it obviously occurred some time after her father’s second marriage in October of the same year, her memory must have deceived her. Among the papers she burned was said to be an entire work of fiction, to which we shall return. Luckily,—although by this act she provisionally abjured authorship, and the discredit supposed to attach in the polite world to female writers and female writers of novels and romances in particular,—she did not refrain from journal-keeping. For the date of her first entry in her Early Diary is May 30 [1768], at which time Mr. Burney’s second marriage had been publicly acknowledged.

Before dealing with those portions of this chronicle which concern the present chapter, it is necessary to say something of the proceedings of the father of the family. In 1769 Mr. Burney, of whom we shall hereafter speak as “Dr.” Burney, received his Mus. D. degree at Oxford, his preliminary exercise being an anthem which was performed in the Music School, where it “was received with universal applause.”^[9] The chief vocalist was one of the Doctor’s pupils, Miss Jenny Barsanti, often referred to in the Diary; and Fanny wrote some congratulatory verses to her father on his distinction, which, at all events, exhibit a knack of rhyming. The receipt of his degree appears to have revived all Dr. Burney’s dormant literary ambitions. In matters connected with his profession he had always been an industrious note-taker; and he was also much interested in astronomy. One of the results of this last taste was an anonymous pamphlet prompted by the comet of 1769, at the close of which year it was published. To this was appended the translation from Maupertuis by the first Mrs. Burney, of which mention has been made. The Essay on Comets attracted no notice; but it served to strengthen its author’s hand; and he began systematically to look over the miscellaneous collections he had accumulated towards that History of Music of which he had dreamed at Lynn. In arranging and transcribing the mass of material, Fanny fell naturally into the office of amanuensis and keeper of the records. But these had not long been manipulated before her father discovered that it would be necessary for him to make a personal tour in France and Italy,—first, to procure information in regard to ancient music, and secondly, to ascertain, by ear and eye, the actual condition of the musical art on the Continent. At Paris he visited Rousseau and Diderot, both of whom were interested and helpful. At Ferney he had a chance interview with Voltaire, then seventy-eight and wasted to a skeleton, but still working ten hours a day, and writing without spectacles. Discord, rather than harmony, was the topic of this conversation. The quarrels of authors—Voltaire held—were good for letters, just as, in a free government, the quarrels of the great and the clamours of the small were necessary to liberty. The silence of critics (he said) did not so much prove the age to be correct, as dull. Dr. Burney had started in June 1770; he did not return until January 1771, when he almost immediately buried himself at Chessington to prepare his notes and journal for the press. In the following May his book was printed under the title of The Present State of Music in France and Italy; or, the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to collect Materials for a General History of Music; and it obtained a considerable success. Copies went to Mason, Hawkesworth, Garrick, and Crisp, all of whom had aided in its progress. Among its other readers must have been Johnson, who told Mr. Seward that he had “that clever dog, Burney” in his eye when, two years later, he wrote his own Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.^[10]

During Dr. Burney’s absence abroad, his wife had found the Poland Street house too small. She accordingly fixed upon a fresh residence in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, which was then much more in the country than it is at present. The new home was at the upper end of the square, which had been considerately left open by the architect so as to afford a delightful prospect, across Lamb’s Conduit Fields, of Highgate and Hampstead, which Miss Burney—we regret to say—spells “Hygate and Hamstead.” There was also a special interest in the house itself, for it had once been inhabited by Queen Anne’s printer, Alderman Barber, the “Johannes Tonsor” and “very good and old friend” of Swift; and it was a fond tradition of the Burney household that the author of Gulliver’s Travels had often dined with Barber at Queen Square. But the Journal to Stella, when it mentions Barber, invariably refers to him as in the City; and it is probable that Swift visited him uniformly at his place of business. In any case, the Queen Square house was “well fitted up, convenient, and handsome.” Especially was there a closet or playroom up two pair of stairs where Fanny could retire to compose her Diary, for which task, during her father’s absence abroad, she had unexpected opportunities. But she had also another, and more picturesque asylum in her step-mother’s dower-house at Lynn. At the end of a long side garden was a “Look Out” or Gazebo, called “The Cabin,” from which ships could be seen on the Ouse. Here, except when she was driven from it to the more secluded garden by the profane language of the seafaring population, she was accustomed to write and dream at her ease.

Dr. Burney’s activity did not permit him to pause long after his first book. Very soon we hear that he is learning German,—no doubt with a purpose. In July, 1772, he set out upon a second tour, this time to collect materials for his history in Germany and the Netherlands. During his absence, which lasted five months, his family lived mainly at Lynn and Chessington. In December he returned to England, terminating his travels by an unique experience. Upon his passage to Dover, in the very stormy winter of 1772, he was so exhausted by sea-sickness that he fell asleep in his berth, and was carried back again to Calais. On reaching Queen Square he had a severe illness, requiring to be carefully nursed by his family; but, with his customary energy, dictated to his daughters, from his bed, portions of the new Tour whenever the intervals of pain permitted him to do so. As soon as he was convalescent, he hastened off to Chessington, carrying his secretaries with him. The result of his labours was at press in February, 1773, and was published in May. It was received even more kindly than its predecessor, and included detailed Proposals for the forthcoming General History of Music. Not many months after, in consequence of difficulties as to title, the Queen Square house was given up, and the Burneys moved to Leicester Fields.

With some account of the next new house, which had, even then, its history, we may fitly open a fresh chapter. In closing this one, however, something must be said as to that Early Diary which Fanny Burney began to keep in May 1768. When, in 1842-6, her Diary and Letters were edited by her sister Charlotte’s daughter, Mrs. Charlotte Francis Barrett, an amiable and learned lady who happily combined a knowledge of Hebrew with a genius for making jelly, it was thought right to withhold the portions preceding the publication of Evelina, as being “of a more private and personal nature than that which attaches to the Journal after its writer became universally known.” But in 1889, this earlier portion also was edited by the late Mrs. Annie Raine Ellis from the original mss. which the first writer, in her own words, had freely “curtailed and erased of what might be mischievous from friendly or Family Considerations.” One of the explanatory memoranda states, and another repeats, that the record was begun at the age of fifteen. Prefixed to the Diary, and “Addressed to a Certain Miss Nobody,” is a whimsical Introduction, which Mrs. Barrett reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of the Diary and Letters of 1842-6. This, of course, may be earlier than the rest, as it is said to be on older paper, and in a slightly different hand. The Diary that follows, as already stated, was considerably revised by the writer in her old age; and, as reprinted in 1889, shows numerous omissions. Of the record for 1769, for example, Mrs. Ellis says, “Much has been cut from the Diary of this year, and it has many erasures. It appears to have been in two or three cahiers, which all lie now within one quarto sheet of paper, so much are they shrunk in size.” There are also large excisions in the accounts for 1771 and 1772; and the manuscript everywhere bears token of wholesale obliterations. Where these are Miss Burney’s own, they are said to be so effectual that scarcely a word can be read. In future chapters, we shall take leave to make sundry extracts from the Burney chronicle; but in this, where only a brief period (1768-73) is in question, we may fairly confine our citations to a few notes, relating mainly to the diarist and her method.

In the first lines of her address to Nobody, Miss Burney defines her purpose. The reason, she says, which induces her to keep a Journal is that, “when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory,” she may have some account of her “thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions.” Writing in the Cabin at Lynn a little later, she reverts to this idea. “I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts, at the very moment—my opinion of people when I first see them, and how I alter, or how confirm myself in it—and I am much deceived in my fore sight, if I shall not have very great delight in reading this living proof of my manner of passing my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I know, and a thousand other things in future—there is something to me very unsatisfactory in passing year after year, without even a memorandum of what you did, etc.” Presently, she has her difficulties. Dr. Burney comes upon a fugitive page of this chronique intime, and though he does not forbid the practice, protests that if he finds it lying about he will post it up in the market place. Then one of her mother’s friends, Miss Dorothy Young (whom the first Mrs. Burney on her death-bed had recommended her husband to marry) had her doubts about this “most dangerous employment.” “Suppose now,” says Miss Young, “your favourite wish were granted, and you were to fall in love [it may be noted that Fanny had already confided this tender aspiration to her pages], and then the object of your passion were to get sight of some part which related to himself?” Here was an appalling suggestion, to which Fanny could only reply that she should have to take a precipitate trip to Rosamond’s Pond in St. James’s Park, then the last resort of the despairing. It is characteristic of this very early entry in the Diary, that the conversation is given exactly as if it had been reported in shorthand. As the record progresses, there are many similar instances of this practice, which greatly irritated distrustful Mr. Croker. “I shall recollect as much of the conversation as I can, and make the parties speak for themselves,” Miss Burney writes of a long interview with the currish misogynist and Tory, Dr. John Shebbeare. And then follows a dialogue to which the names of the speakers are prefixed as they would be in a play.

Some of the most interesting entries at this date relate to her reading, and show that, instead of being, as Lord Macaulay supposed,^[11] an infrequent student of novels, her activity in this way was fully equal to her opportunities. Richardson’s works she must have known intimately, as she reminds her sister of their early love for him; she reads and cries over and criticises the Vicar of Wakefield; she reads Rasselas, and thinks the style and sentiments inimitable. The subject however is dreadful. “How terrible is it to be told by a man of his [Johnson’s] genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real, happiness is ever unattainable in this world!” The Sentimental Journey,—which was a special favourite with her step-mother,—she read three times; and, from a reference to “Hobby Horses,” was probably acquainted with Tristram Shandy, or at all events with its famous eighth chapter. Stranger still, she had not only read PrÉvost’s Doyen de KillÉrine (with which she is delighted), but that very stimulating work, the Vie de Marianne of Marivaux. Further, she occasionally quotes much inferior productions, e.g. the Henry and Frances of Mrs. Griffiths, the Lady Julia Mandeville of the once-popular Mrs. Brooke, and the Lydia of Shebbeare. These are advanced mainly in answer to Lord Macaulay. But the Diary contains numerous references to studies of a sterner sort. Among the books she speaks of reading, are Plutarch’s Lives, Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, Hawkesworth’s Telemachus, Hume, Smollett, Smith’s Thucydides, Middleton’s Cicero, Hooke’s Roman, and Stanyan’s Grecian History,—all of which she professes to go through systematically. Here is strong meat enough, one would imagine, for a budding Mme. Roland;—certainly it would be a trying course, in the days when skipping was unknown, for even that model and methodical student, Miss Clarissa Harlowe. Moreover it proves plainly that Fanny’s close attention to braid-stitch, cross-and-change, pinking, pointing, frilling, and all the other niceties of that needlework which her step-mother regarded as so important to young persons—did not leave her without leisure for literature.

To give any detailed summary of the material contained in the first four years of Miss Burney’s Diary would be impracticable here. There are several portraits which (like that of Dr. Shebbeare) show that the writer’s pen is already working willingly and easily in what was to be her most congenial field. There is a long description of the forgotten Spanish traveller, Mr. Richard Twiss, a polyglot eccentric of the first water; there is another of a delightful fop and cousin, Richard Burney, of Worcester, Junr., the son of Dr. Burney’s elder brother; there is a picturesque Journal, addressed to Susan in 1773, of a visit to Teignmouth,—or “Tingmouth,” as the writer calls it,—which Mrs. Ellis fairly characterises as “Fanny’s first book, privately circulated,” and which contains some lively sketches of rural sports and watering-place oddities. Some of these descriptions and portraits go off in letters to “Daddy” Crisp at Chessington, who is delighted, and gives his “dearest Fannikin” some very seasonable advice, which, in after years, she unhappily neglected. “If once you set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical, and run in smooth periods, I shall mind them no otherwise than as newspapers of intelligence. . . . There is no fault in an epistolary correspondence like stiffness and study. Dash away whatever comes uppermost; the sudden sallies of imagination, clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth folios. . . . Never think of being correct when you write to me.” Not the least notable of Fanny’s records are the glimpses we get of some of her father’s friends. One is poor mad Kit Smart, always needy and out-at-elbows, with whom Burney had grown acquainted at Arne’s, and who died in 1772 in the King’s Bench Prison. Another, who also died in this period, is Hawkesworth, whose end, according to Fanny, was certainly hastened by the attacks made upon him in connection with his subsidised publication of Cook’s Voyages. Garrick more or less pervades the chronicle, dashing into the house in the most unexpected manner; rushing away with little Charlotte whom he declares to be the image of Comedy in Reynolds’s picture; acting, grimacing, mimicking, posturing, and altogether comporting himself in every respect like the excellent friend and histrion he was. Fanny often sees him play—as Bayes in the Rehearsal; as Richard the Third; as Lear, and as Abel Drugger in the Alchemist. Of “crook’d back’d Richard” she says,—“It is inconceivable how terribly great he is in this character! I will never see him so disfigured again; he seemed so truly the monster he performed, that I felt myself glow with indignation every time I saw him. The applause he met with, exceeds all belief in the absent. I thought at the end they would have torn the house down: our seats shook under us.” Of Lear,—“He was exquisitely great; every idea I had formed of his talents, although I have ever idolized him, was exceeded.” But she very properly blames Cibber’s feeble alterations of Shakespeare’s work. As to Abel Drugger, perhaps Garrick’s greatest part, she says:—“Never could I have imagined such a metamorphose as I saw; the extreme meanness, the vulgarity, the low wit, the vacancy of countenance, the appearance of unlicked nature in all his motions.” These are more than the opinions of an “unlessoned girl,” for they are confirmed to the full by experienced spectators such as Lichtenberg and Mme. Necker. To Goldsmith, then not far from his end, there is passing reference. “Dr. Goldsmith”—says the diary in May, 1773,—“has just brought on the stage a new comedy, called, ‘She stoops to Conquer.’ We went to it with Mr. and Mrs. Young; it is very laughable and comic; but I know not how it is, almost all diversions are insipid at present to me, except the opera.” There is another mention of Goldsmith a few pages further on. It relates to his projected Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Among other contributors, Dr. Burney was to undertake the article “Musician.” But the plan never got beyond the prospectus stage. Goldsmith died in the following year, and Dr. Burney’s paper probably found its ultimate place in his own History of Music.

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[1]	This was Fanny Burney’s later friend,—the beautiful Mrs. Crewe of Reynolds, and the “Amoret” of Sheridan and Charles Fox.

[2]	Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, i. 134.

[3]

Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell’s Johnson, 1887, i. 420. In a note communicated by Burney in 1799 to the third edition of Boswell’s book, he dates this performance “1769,” when (he says) he resided at Norfolk. But his memory must have deceived him, for according to the Annual Register for 1763, the Burlesque was performed at Ranelagh on June 10 in that year, having been previously published as a pamphlet, which is to be found in the British Museum; and it figures among the new books for June, 1763, in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The point is a trifling one, only important here because the success of the Ode has been advanced as one of the things which decided its composer to leave Lynn for London in 1760.

[4]	Admiral Burney’s recollections are referred to in Hood’s “Preface” to the separate issue of The Dream of Eugene Aram published in 1831, with William Harvey’s illustrations.

[5]	Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 170-1.

[6]	Crisp’s Virginia was published anonymously by Tonson in 1754 with a dedication to the writer’s friends, the Earl and Countess of Coventry.

[7]	The Cunning Man (i.e. fortune-teller or soothsayer) was produced at Drury Lane in 1766 when Rousseau came to England, but it was coldly received (Biographia Dramatica, 1812, ii. 145).

[8]	In Letter lxiv. of Evelina, Miss Burney, applying this locution to Lord Orville, attributes it to Marmontel. The above passage is printed in the “Introduction” to the Diary and Letters, 1892, i. pp. xi-xii.

[9]	Oxford Journal, 23 June 1769.

[10]

Dr. Birkbeck Hill (Boswell’s Johnson, 1887, iv. 186 n.) seems, perhaps not unnaturally, to doubt this, as Burney “writes chiefly of music.” But it is confirmed by a passage in the Early Diary, 1889, i. 212. “He [Baretti] told my father that Dr. Johnson . . . has read both his Tours with great pleasure, and has pronounced him to be one of the first writers of the age for travels!” Moreover, in the second Tour, the author was less chary of personal anecdote. In Edward FitzGerald’s letters, he draws Carlyle’s attention to some of the very interesting particulars which the second Tour contains concerning Frederick the Great (More Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1901, p. 67). But Carlyle, who quotes the visit to Voltaire from the first Tour, does not mention the second at all.

[11]	Lord Macaulay relied upon the fact, mentioned in the Dedication to The Wanderer (p. xxii), that Dr. Burney’s large library only contained one novel, Fielding’s Amelia. But, as Mrs. Ellis pertinently remarks, “Novels were brought into the house if they did not abide in it.”

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No. 1, St. Martin’s Street, now No. 35, to which the Burneys moved early in 1774, may fairly be described as a house with a history. We say “now,” since it still exists,—standing to the right at the top of the little street which opens into Leicester Square from the south; and having on its left that Orange Street Congregational Church where, in its Huguenot days, was wont to preach Wesley’s opponent,—the Rev. Augustus Montague Toplady. The house itself, once red brick, but at present stuccoed over, is not impressive, save for the distinction conferred by a Society of Arts tablet which proclaims it to have been formerly the residence of Newton. Miss Burney, indeed, as her father supposed, declares that Sir Isaac built it; but this is an error. He took it in 1710, when he was nearing seventy, and he lived in it until 1725, two years before he died at Kensington. Beyond occasional visits to the Princess Caroline at Leicester House on the opposite side of the Fields; and the fact that he superintended the production of two editions of the Principia during his period of residence, no very definite traditions belong to his sojourn in St. Martin’s Street. But Dr. Burney, who valued literary association, had a better reason for connecting his new house with Swift, than he had for connecting him with Queen Square. For in Newton’s house in St. Martin’s Street had certainly dwelt one of Swift’s intimates and Newton’s relatives, the beautiful and witty Catherine Barton,—the “jolie niÈce” of Voltaire,—and the “Super-intendant of his domestick Affairs” to Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, to whom, it is conjectured, she was privately married. After the death of Halifax in 1715, she became the wife of John Conduitt, Newton’s successor as Master of the Mint; and, when in town, was accustomed to reside with her uncle in Leicester Fields. And it is no great stretch of imagination to assume that, at such times, though Swift himself was in exile, she was visited by the other old friends who had clustered around her when she was a Toast of the Kit Cats. The chairs of Lady Worsley and Lady Betty Germaine must often have waited at the narrow approach by which the street was then entered from the Fields, while their mistresses “disputed Whig and Tory” with Mrs. Conduitt, or were interrupted in a tÊte-À-tÊte by Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry.^[12]

As regards situation, the change from Queen Square to St. Martin’s Street was not entirely for the better. It was no small loss to substitute an “unpleasant site,” “confined air,” and a “shabby immediate neighbourhood” for the unobstructed view of “Hampstead’s breezy Heath” which the Bloomsbury home afforded.^[13] But in the way of convenience, and a central position, the difference was great, in addition to which, compared with its predecessor, the new residence was “large and good.” It is true that the stairs were so steep and narrow that one of Fulke Greville’s friends broke his sword in climbing them; but, on the other hand, most of the rooms were panelled, and one, at least, of the ceilings “prodigiously painted and ornamented,” not, as the Doctor was careful to explain, by him, but by previous occupants. The chief glory of the house, however, was the unpretentious structure at the top, which passed for Sir Isaac’s observatory. It is perhaps safest to say “passed,” because, between 1725 and 1774, there must have been other dwellers in No. 1, St. Martin’s Street, and many things may have happened. But the Burneys seem to have devoutly believed in the small-paned, wooden turret, with the leaden roof and tiny fireplace, which embodied so respectable a tradition. They exhibited it religiously to their visitors; and one of its new owner’s first acts was to put it into repair. When, four years later, it was all but whirled away by the hurricane of 1778, he practically rebuilt it. And it was unquestionably Fanny’s chosen retreat and scriptorium. “His [Newton’s] observatory is my favourite sitting place, where I can retire to read or write any of my private fancies or vagaries.” And then follows what—having regard to some of her previous utterances—is more interesting than unexpected.^[14] “I burnt all up to my fifteenth year—thinking I grew too old for scribbling nonsense, but as I am less young, I grow, I fear, less wise, for I cannot any longer resist what I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts from time to time upon paper.”

Whatever may have been her exact age at the date of the famous auto-da-fÉ in the paved court at Poland Street, she must have been nearing two and twenty when she “popped down” the foregoing passage; and the moment, taken in connection with the change of scene from Bloomsbury to Leicester Fields is a favourable one for reviewing the Burney family circle in 1774-5. Dr. Burney’s second or German Tour, as we know, had been published in 1773; and in the same year he had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society. At present, in the intervals of rheumatism, he was working, with Fanny’s aid, at his History of Music. By his second wife he had two children,—Richard, and Sarah Harriet, the latter of whom eventually, like her gifted half-sister, became a novelist. But both Richard and Harriet, at this date, were in the nursery. Esther, or Hetty, the eldest daughter, had been married for some time to her cousin, Charles Rousseau Burney, afterwards of Bath, a musician and former pupil of her father; while Maria Allen, the daughter of Dr. Burney’s second wife, was married to a Mr. Rishton. James Burney, the sailor, having sailed with Cook in his second voyage, and been made a lieutenant, had now returned home. In 1775 he was serving on the North American Station, when he was recalled to accompany Cook on his third and fatal expedition. Of the rest, Susan and Charlotte were now grown up, Charlotte being about fifteen, and Susan some years older. Charles, after having enjoyed the reputation of being “the sweetest-tempered boy in the Charterhouse School,” was now, in all probability, pursuing at Cambridge those studies for which he was eventually to be classed with Porson and Parr. The only one of the Queen Square frequenters no longer to be encountered at St. Martin’s Street was “Daddy” Crisp. By this date he was sixty-eight, and his fits of gout had become so severe, that he had ceased to make his annual descents upon London from his Surrey hermitage. But his interest in all that befell his friends at Leicester Fields remained unabated; and in this he was kept carefully posted up by his favourite “Fannikin,” who, what with acting as librarian and amanuensis to her indefatigable father, writing periodical news-letters of “from six to twelve large quarto pages” to Chessington, and keeping her own voluminous journal besides—must have been very actively employed both in the Observatory and out of it. Not without reason can it have been that she acquired the “murtherous stooping” which her Mentor deplored, nor was it entirely chargeable to the shortness of sight which she shared with Charlotte BrontË. It is from her bright and graphic despatches to Mr. Crisp that we propose to draw most of the material for this chapter. Often these are repeated in her Diary, and they are also expanded in the Memoirs of Dr. Burney which she wrote in later years; but they are at their best and freshest in her letters,—letters which, in many cases, must have been scribbled off immediately after the occurrence of the events they described. From one of them it is clear that their writer thought nothing of setting to work at what would now be considered a very lengthy epistle, when the entertainment of the evening had come to an end.

The Queen Square circle had already been sufficiently diversified; but it grew wider and even more varied at Leicester Fields. Some of the Doctor’s friends were now in his immediate vicinity. The family of Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Strange, the engraver,—old Paris acquaintances,—were, for the moment, lodging close by. Reynolds, who had just painted the beautiful Eliza Linley (Mrs. Sheridan) as “St. Cecilia,” lived only just across the Fields at No. 47; and Garrick, in the new house recently built for him by the brothers Adam at the Adelphi, was not too far off to be a frequent looker-in. Another artistic friend was the sculptor, Joseph Nollekens, whom Burney had met in Italy. James Barry, the eccentric and pugnacious Irish painter from Castle Street, then engaged in decorating the Meeting Room of the Society of Arts with vast designs (in one of which Dr. Burney, in a queue and tye-wig, figures incongruously among the nymphs of the Thames),—was also among the familiar faces. But the majority were naturally persons who were more or less attracted to the Historian of Music. In this category comes James Harris of Salisbury, “a most charming old man,”—says Fanny, not only the author of Hermes, but a writer upon Music, and a composer whose pastoral of Daphnis and Amaryllis had actually been produced at Drury Lane. With him was his wife, the delightful Mrs. Harris whose gossiping letters to her son, the first Earl of Malmesbury, are some of the most charming in their kind. Then there was another new friend, whom the Burney girls grew to love almost as much as “Daddy” Crisp himself, the Rev. Thomas Twining of Fordham, near Colchester, afterwards the translator of Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry. His acquaintance with Dr. Burney had begun over the German Tour, for Twining, too, had meditated a History of Music, which he abandoned in favour of Burney’s. “They were far from young when they met,”—says Twining’s brother and biographer referring to the new friends,—“and they could ill afford to lose time.”^[15] Besides these, there were the foreign professionals who regarded the author of the Tours as the supreme arbiter in matters musical:—the celebrated soprano, Lucrezia Agujari, otherwise the Bastardini; the almost equally celebrated Caterina Gabrielli, and the Inglesina, Cecilia Davies; while the men were represented by the singer and composer, Rauzzini, who is so much commended in the German Tour, by Gasparo Pacchieroti and others. Finally, there were the “Lyons,”—as the diarist calls them,—the Otaheitan Omai, who had come from the Society Islands with Lieutenant Burney; and the Abyssinian traveller, James Bruce of Kinnaird; and last, but by no means largest, for Bruce was six feet four, the Russian “man-mountain,” Alexis Orloff, who had certainly helped to strangle his Imperial Master, Peter iii., and was also—though not so surely—the reputed favourite of that terrible Czarina who, according to Walpole, had even more teeth than the famous Wild Beast of the GÉvaudan. The goings and comings of these, and other notables and notorieties,—for those mentioned by no means exhaust the list,—must have been an unexampled school of character to a budding novelist, whose gift lay especially in seizing upon the peculiarities of human nature, whose perceptions were at their freshest and keenest, and whose singularly retentive memory was not yet perplexed and bewildered by too prolonged an experience of the very variegated patchwork of Eighteenth Century society.

Among the first visits to St. Martin’s Street that Fanny chronicles is one from that “most entertaining of mortals, Mr. Garrick.” He arrived, as usual, very early in the morning, marching straight into the study where Dr. Burney, “surrounded by books and papers innumerable,” was having his hair dressed. Fanny was making breakfast; Charlotte reading the paper. Nobody else was a-stir. “My father,”—says Miss Burney,—“was beginning a laughing sort of apology for his litters, and so forth, but Mr. Garrick interrupted him with ‘Aye now; do be in a little confusion; it will make things comfortable!’ ” He then began to look gravely at the hairdresser. (Dr. Burney, it may be stated in parenthesis wore his own hair,—a crop so bushy and luxuriant that Frances Reynolds persisted in regarding it as artificial.) “He (Garrick) was himself in a most odious scratch-wig, which nobody but himself could dare to be seen in. He put on a look in the Abel Drugger style of envy and sadness, as he examined the hairdresser’s progress; and, when he had done, he turned to him with a dejected face, and said, ‘Pray Sir, could you touch up this a little?’ taking hold of his own frightful scratch.” At which the hairdresser only grinned, and left the room. But Garrick continued his proceedings in the same mirthful spirit. He made enquiries as to the progress of the History of Music, protesting that he was only waiting to blow the trumpet of Fame, which he forthwith proceeded to do with a stick, after the fashion of a Raree-Show-man. “Here is the only true History, Gentlemen; please to buy, please to buy. Sir, I shall blow it in the very ear of yon scurvy magistrate”—by whom he meant Sir John Hawkins of Twickenham, whom Horace Walpole had incited to a rival performance. His final exploit, after mimicking the Spanish traveller, Twiss, and Dr. Arne, Burney’s old master, was to give a dramatic rendering of an interview he had recently had with Johnson,—not yet personally known to the young ladies. Johnson had asked Garrick to lend him a book, and Johnson’s carelessness about books was notorious. “ ‘David, will you lend me Petra[r]ca?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘David, you sigh.’ ‘Sir, you shall have it.’ Accordingly, the book, finely bound, was sent, but scarce had he received it, when uttering a Latin ejaculation (which Mr. Garrick repeated) in a fit of enthusiasm,—over his head goes poor Petra[r]ca,—Russia leather and all!”^[16] After this the mercurial actor bustled off to give breakfast to Boswell, promising to come soon, and plague them again. By the Burney household Garrick was idolised; but Miss Burney hints that where he was not on cordial terms, he could contrive to make himself extremely disagreeable.

Other early visitors were Bruce, the already mentioned Abyssinian traveller, and the Otaheitan Omai. We will take the traveller first. At this time he had been twelve years abroad, four of which had been spent in unexplored parts of Africa. “His figure is almost gigantic! he is the tallest man I ever saw,” writes Fanny,—who adds elsewhere that he almost frightened Mr. Twining. “I cannot say I was charmed with him; for he seems rather arrogant, and to have so large a share of good opinion of himself, as to have nothing left for the rest of the world but contempt. Yet his self-approbation is not that of a fop; on the contrary, he is a very manly character, and looks so dauntless and intrepid, so that I believe he could never in his life know what fear meant.” Despite his hauteur, Bruce seems to have taken to the Burneys. He liked music, and he lodged in Leicester Fields, so he came often to their social evenings. He even favoured the Doctor with two drawings, a Theban harp and an Abyssinian lyre, which were copied for the History of Music. The latter instrument prompted some rather obvious gibes about Abyssinian liars from Walpole and Selwyn. Bruce, as Johnson said, was “not a distinct relater,” added to which his large, imperious and rather swaggering manner prejudiced people against his stories, and had the effect of delaying his account of his exploits until a few years before his death in 1794. One of his last appearances at St. Martin’s Street was in 1776, when he stayed to supper “which, you know, with us, is nothing but a permission to sit over a table for chat, and roast potatoes, or apples.” But “his Abyssinian Majesty,” as Fanny calls him, neither discoursed on this occasion upon the Abyssinian lyre, nor the merits of raw beef-steaks as a diet. He only told a long and rather stupid story of a practical joke at a masquerade.

Omiah, Omai, Omy, or familiarly, Jack,—the other “lyon of lyons”—came to St. Martin’s Street upon the invitation of James Burney, whose sister gives detailed accounts of his visits. At the time of the first, the Society Islander, of whom, in his native state, there is a portrait in Cook’s Voyages, can only have been a few months in England. But although he had not learned English, he had already acquired all the externals of a fine gentleman. He arrived betimes, after a preliminary note in due form, arrayed splendidly in a Court suit of Manchester velvet lined with white satin, a bag, laced ruffles (on his tattooed hands), and a very handsome sword which had been given him by King George the Third. Though not handsome, he was tall and well proportioned. “He makes remarkable good bows—not for him but for anybody, however long under a Dancing Master’s care,” writes Miss Burney. “Indeed he seems to shame Education, for his manners are so extremely graceful, and he is so polite, attentive, and easy, that you would have thought he came from some Foreign Court,”—a sentiment which seems later to have prompted a comparison between the lamentable failure of Lord Chesterfield’s precepts to make of Philip Stanhope anything but a “pedantic booby,” and the exemplary rapidity with which Otaheitan Omiah had contrived to “cultivate the Graces.” Miss Burney saw Omiah again before he returned to Ulietea. Upon this occasion, he obliged the company with “a song of his own country,” which, from his subsequent analysis, must have comprised the entire scenario of a comic opera. But his audience were too musical, and it was not a success. “So queer, wild, strange a rumbling of sounds never did I before hear, and very contentedly can I go to the grave, if I never do again. His [Omiah’s] song is the only thing that is savage about him.”^[17]

But it is time—looking to the limitations of our space—to turn from the specific to the general, and give some account of the St. Martin’s Street musical evenings. Already at Poland Street and Queen Square these entertainments had been the rule; and at Newton’s house, with the Doctor’s increasing popularity, they attained their greatest importance. Moreover, they found, as they had not before found, their faithful chronicler in Daddy Crisp’s correspondent. The chief performers on ordinary occasions seem to have been Esther Burney and her husband, their piÈce de rÉsistance being MÜthel’s Duet for two harpsichords. Another famous harpsichord player was the Baroness Deiden, the wife of the Danish Ambassador, whose reputation is said to have been European. But the “peacock’s brains” of the record was certainly the Agujari, and Miss Burney’s enthusiasm overflows. Carestini, Farinelli, Senesino, all Mr. Crisp’s old idols,—’twas to these only that the Bastardini could be compared. And she seems certainly to have done her best. She arrived for tea before seven, stayed till twelve, sang almost all the time, permitted her hearers to encore nearly every song, and sang moreover in twenty different styles, minuets, cantabiles, church-music, bravuras and even that popular Vauxhall misÈre, the rondeau, growing at last so excited over an aria parlante from the Didone Abbandonata (“Son Regina, e sono Amante”) that “she acted it throughout with great spirit and feeling.” This was pretty well for the lady whom Macaulay qualifies as the “rapacious” Agujari, apparently because, at this date, she was earning fifty pounds a song—which she thoroughly deserved, since people went to hear her and no one else—at the Oxford Street Pantheon.^[18] But she had an exceedingly appreciative audience, limited by her own request to the Burney family; she was tired of singing at concerts, book in hand, “comme une petite ÉcoliÈre,” and most of all, she was anxious to give the Historian of Music, who was also all-powerful in matters operatic, a taste of her real quality. It does not appear that she ever repeated her performances at St. Martin’s Street, so that it would be inaccurate to represent her as figuring habitually and gratuitously at the Burney “conversations.”

One of the next things which Fanny recounts to Mr. Crisp is the production, at the Opera House in the Haymarket, of that very Didone of Metastasio from which Agujari had borrowed her aria parlante. But the diva upon this occasion (Saturday, Nov. 11, 1775) was Caterina Gabrielli, who seems to have behaved with all her traditional caprice. The Burney family, who occupied the front row of the first gallery, are terribly divided as to her merits. “She was most impertinently easy,” says Fanny, “visibly took no pains, and never in the least exerted herself.” Elsewhere she writes, “Her voice is feeble, but sweetly toned. She has great powers of execution; but—she is no Agujari!” And thereupon, in the contest and confusion of opinion, the writer turns to a little concert that has just taken place in St. Martin’s Street, “at which assisted a most superb party of company.” It originated in the desire of Dr. King, sometime chaplain to the British factory at St. Petersburg, that the famous Prince Orloff,^[19] before he left England, should hear Hetty and her husband in MÜthel’s duet. Both in her Diary and Letters, Fanny has treated this exceptional entertainment at considerable length; and she subsequently “embroidered” the record in the Memoirs of her father. We shall depend, by preference, upon her account to Mr. Crisp. After introducing the guests as they arrive:—Dr. Ogle, the musical Dean of Winchester; Dr. King, who announces consequentially that the Prince, having dined at Lord Buckingham’s, is coming as soon as he has been to Lady Harrington’s rout; the virtuosa, Lady Edgecumbe (“all condescension, repartee (and yet) good humour”); Mr. Charles Boone, the fine gentleman who broke his sword in the staircase; Mrs. Brudenel; Mr. Anthony Chamier—all of whose conversation turns upon the Gabrielli and her performance of the evening before,—one of the rat, tat, tats with which the diarist diversifies her narrative, announces M. le Baron de Demidoff, thin, long-nosed, with a most triste and foreign countenance. M. de Demidoff travels with the Prince, whose avant-coureur he is. He brings the gratifying intelligence that His Highness is detained at Lady Harrington’s, but may be expected with the least possible delay. Then follow Mr. Harris of Salisbury, Lord Bruce, a younger brother of the Duke of Montague (who has been to St. Martin’s Lane by mistake)—and so forth. At last—like Charlemagne after his Paladins—appears Prince Orloff, accompanied by General Bawr, a Hessian, stern, martial, who has seen service in the Turkish war. And here we most willingly surrender the pen to Miss Burney. “The Prince is another Mr. Bruce, being immensely tall and stout in proportion. He is a handsome and magnificent figure. His dress was very superb. Besides a blue Garter he had a star of diamonds of prodigious brilliancy; he had likewise a shoulder knot of the same precious jewels, and a picture of the Empress hung from his neck, which was set round with diamonds of such magnitude and lustre that, when near the candle, they were too dazzling for the eye. His jewels, Dr. King says, are valued at above £100,000. He was extremely gracious and polite, and appears to be addicted to pleasantry. He speaks very little English but knows French perfectly. He was received by my father in the drawing-room. The library, where the music was, was so crowded, he only shewed himself at the door, where he bowed to Mr. Chamier, who had met with him elsewhere.”

The MÜthel duet, which had been postponed for the Prince’s arrival, was then played with prodigious applause, relaxing even the “sorrowful countenance” of the Baron de Demidoff, who clapped his snuff box rapturously, calling out in broken English, “Dis is so pretty as ever I heard in my life!” Lord Bruce, turning to Prince Orloff, told him the performers were man and wife. His Highness seemed surprised, and walking up to Mrs. Burney, made her many compliments; and, expressing his wonder that two such executants should chance to be united, added “Mais, qu’a produit tant d’Harmonie?” To this Hetty, in a flutter, could find no fitter reply than “Rien, Monseigneur, que trois enfants,”—that being the extent of her family,—an artless and unexpected answer at which Monseigneur laughs immoderately, and, being “addicted to pleasantry,” retails freely to those about him, with many “droll comments and observations” on Mrs. Burney’s words. “When the room was a good deal thinned”—Fanny goes on—“Mr. Harris told me he wished some of the ladies would express a desire of seeing the Empress’s picture nearer. ‘I, you know,’ said he, ‘as a man, cannot, but my old eyes can’t see it at a distance.’ ” [The truth was, Mr. Harris wished to be able to compare Orloff’s picture of Catherine II. with his son James’s (Lord Malmesbury’s) portrait of the King of Spain.] “I went up to Dr. King, and made the request to him. He hesitated some time, but afterwards hinted the demand to General Bawr, who boldly made it to the Prince. His Highness laughed, and with great good humour, desired the General to untie the picture from his neck, and present it to us; and he was very facetious upon the occasion, desiring to know if we wanted anything else? and saying that if they pleased, the ladies might strip him entirely! Not very elegant, methinks, his pleasantry! When we got it there was hardly any looking at the Empress for the glare of the diamonds. Their size is almost incredible. One of them, I am sure, was as big as a nut-meg at least. When we were all satisfied it was returned, and the Prince most graciously made a bow to, and received a curtsie from, everyone who looked at it.”^[20]

In the remainder of Fanny’s letters to Mr. Crisp, she gives an account of a further concert arising out of the famous duet. This time the principal guest was the Count (afterwards the Duke) de Guines, the French Ambassador, who was not only a virtuoso of the first order, but an accomplished flute-player, who had the reputation of having dared to beard that other distinguished performer on the same instrument, Frederick the Great. His Majesty had said to him impatiently and impertinently—“Je vous prie, qu’est-ce que fait votre maÎtre quand il ne peut pas chasser De Guisnes?” The Count—a typical aristocrat of the pre-Revolution days—shrugged his shoulders, and made answer, “Il est vrai, Sire, que mon maÎtre n’a pas le bonheur de savoir jouer de la flÛte,”^[21] a retort more dexterous than deserved, since Frederick, whom Dr. Burney had listened to at Potsdam, was not by any means a mere amateur. Lady Edgecumbe had talked so much to M. de Guines about the duet, that he expressed a great desire to hear it, and a second concert had to be arranged. The company convened on this occasion included Lord Ashburnham, “Groom of the Stole, and First Lord of the Bedchamber,” the Baron and Baroness Deiden, Lord Barrington, Lord Sandwich (“Jemmy Twitcher,” to wit), and Signor Venanzio Rauzzini, the “pius Æneas” to the Dido of Gabrielli. Rauzzini was vainly implored to indulge the company with a Rondeau de sa faÇon—i.e. from his own Piramo e Tisbe; but he pleaded the professional cold. Fanny is enchanted with the young Roman’s appearance. “He looked like an angel,” she writes. “Nothing can be more beautiful than this youth. He has the complection of our Dick,—the very finest white and red I ever saw: his eyes are the sweetest in the world, at once soft and spirited: all his features are animated and charming.” “ ‘Avez vous une AssemblÉe chez vous tous les Dimanches,’^[22] cried he, to my father. ‘Je viendrai une autre fois quand je pourrai chanter!’ Only think how we were let down! ‘Une autre fois!’ cried Hetty; ‘Une autre fois!’ echoed Susette; ‘Une autre fois!’ still more pathetically echoed your humble servant.” But he contributed his quota to the gossip about the Gabrielli; and when the oft-told story was repeated as to the extraordinary ceremonial parade she observed in quitting the Opera House on Saturdays, with first a running footman to clear the way, then her sister, then herself, then a page for her train, then another footman, and then a man out of livery to carry her lap-dog in her muff,—Rauzzini interjected, “Et puis, une autre pour un singe, et un autre pour un perroquet!” As to “Mrs. Gabrielle” (for so she styled herself on her Golden Square doorplate), it is manifest that her reputation for whim had created considerable prejudice against her. But in the History of Music Dr. Burney, who knew her intimately, is much milder in his expressions than the more excitable members of his family. He says that despite her low origin (she was the daughter of a Cardinal’s cook at Rome), she had extraordinary grace and dignity of gesture. She was, moreover he declared, the most intelligent and best bred virtuosa with whom he ever conversed, speaking like a well-educated woman, who had seen the world, not only on music, but on other subjects. “In youth,” he writes, “her beauty and caprice had occasioned an universal delirium among her young countrymen, and there were still remains of both sufficiently powerful, while she was in England, to render credible their former influence.”

That Fanny’s detailed despatches delighted her correspondent at Chessington, is only to be expected. “You have produc’d such an illustrious assembly of Princes, and generals, and lords, and ladies, and wits, and pictures, and diamonds, and shoulder-knots, that I feel myself shrink into nothing at the idea of them,—nay, you yourself that made one among them, seem to be a little dazzled at their glare.” And then Mr. Crisp rallies her upon her evident admiration of the “beautiful Rauzzini.” In another letter there is a significant sentence. “You have learned from that R[ogue] your father (by so long serving as amanuensis, I suppose) to make your descriptions alive”—an utterance which, while it throws some light on the vexed question of Miss Burney’s style, also recalls us to the progress of that History of Music, in which she bore so laborious a part. In March 1775 it had come to a “dead stop” owing to Dr. Burney’s rheumatism, which prevented him from writing; and in April it was scarcely moving. “My father’s History goes on very slowly indeed at present. . . . He teaches from nine to nine almost every day, and has scarce time to write a page a week.” Still, it gradually progresses, and in October, Fanny is able to report that the first volume is ready. “The History has been this very day, for the first time since its long cessation, put into the press[?]. It is now rough written to the end of the first volume, Preface and Dedication inclusive. When it is actually published, we intend to keep the Carnival.” A few days before, the Dedication to the Queen had been read by Dr. Burney to an admiring friend; and in 1776 the first volume was issued, when, we may conclude, the Carnival was duly kept.

But of this, unhappily, no record has been preserved; and it was some years before a second volume gave the busy Doctor opportunity for a further jubilation.^[23] Beyond the fact that the Burneys, and Fanny in particular, made friends (through the Stranges) with the Miss Paynes, daughters of the famous old bookseller in Castle Street, “next the Upper Mews-Gate,” whose L-shaped shop was so well known to Eighteenth Century bibliomaniacs,^[24]—little remains of interest from the records of 1775. For 1776 there is no journal at all, what had been written having been “destroyed in totality,” as consisting wholly of family matters or anecdotes; and save for a very graphic picture of the slatternly Duchess of Devonshire in St. James’s Park, no very attractive correspondence, although Mr. Crisp refers to a “conversation piece” which Fanny drew of the fine company at the house of Sir James Lake, the great portrait collector, which should have been good to read. “If specimens of this kind had been preserved of the different Tons that have succeeded one another for twenty centuries last past,” he writes, “how interesting would they have been! infinitely more so, than antique statues, bas-reliefs, and intaglios.” In a fragment dated 2 December there is a vignette of Nollekens the sculptor, “a jolly, fat, lisping, laughing, underbred, good-humoured man as lives: his merit seems pretty much confined to his profession, and his language is as vulgar as his works are elegant.” Mrs. Nollekens (the very handsome daughter of Fielding’s friend Justice Welch), his wife, is also mentioned: “a civil, obliging, gentle sort of woman; rather too complaisant.” Then there is a costume-piece of “Miss B—— something, a sister-in-law of Mr. Hayes of the Pantheon,” and not entirely unsuggestive of Lady Louisa Larpent in Evelina; “a young lady quite À-la-mode,—every part of her dress, the very pink and extreme of the fashion;—her [head] erect and stiff as any statue;—her voice low, and delicate, and mincing;—her hair higher than twelve wigs stuck one on the other;—her waist taper, and pinched evidently;—her eyes cast languishingly from one object to another, and her conversation very much the thing.” Decidedly “Daddy” Crisp was right in saying: “To do you justice, Fanny, you paint well!”

For the next year, 1777, there is only one letter to Mr. Crisp; but it is an important one, since it gives Miss Burney’s account of her first meeting with Dr. Johnson, to which accident, indeed, it owes its preservation. Dr. Burney had for some time known Johnson slightly,—he had written to him from Lynn with regard to the Dictionary; he had also met him at intervals; and, as we have seen, Johnson, notwithstanding his insensibility to music, had read and appreciated the Musical Tours. Writing Dr. Burney’s Memoirs in extreme old age, his daughter seems to have thought that Johnson had already accompanied her father to Winchester to put his youngest son, Richard, under the care of the then Head Master of that day, Joseph Warton; and that he had also, before this date, interested himself to procure Dr. Burney access to the libraries at Oxford. But her memory must have led her astray, for both these things, as is plain from Boswell, belong to 1778, while Miss Burney’s “first sight” of the great man demonstrably took place on the 20th March, 1777,^[25] and came about in this wise. Dr. Burney had been invited by Mr. and Mrs. Thrale to give lessons in music to their eldest daughter, Queenie, afterwards Viscountess Keith. Report says that the lessons were not a great success, since Mrs. Thrale was in the habit of interrupting them sadly in order to talk politics and literature with the clever Historian of Music. But, as usual, Dr. Burney speedily became a favourite with all the household; and, as Johnson was then staying at Streatham, one of the results was a joint visit by the Doctor and Mrs. Thrale to St. Martin’s Street, which visit was promptly reported by Fanny for consumption at Chessington. It took place fourteen years before Boswell’s book, and as printed in the Early Diary of 1889, exhibits a fresher version than that put forward later by the writer herself in the Memoirs of her father. No excuse therefore is needed for giving it the preference here.

“Mrs. and Miss Thrale, Miss Owen, and Mr. Seward came long before Lexiphanes. [This was a name given to Johnson in 1767, in a little book written to burlesque his style by a Scotch purser named Campbell.] Mrs. Thrale is a very pretty woman still; she is extremely lively and chatty; has no supercilious or pedantic airs, and is really gay and agreeable. Her daughter [Queenie] is about twelve years old, stiff and proud, I believe, or else shy and reserved: I don’t yet know which.” . . . “My sister Burney [Esther] was invited to meet and play to them. The conversation was supported with a good deal of vivacity (N.B. my father being at home) for about half an hour, and then Hetty and Susette, for the first time in public, played a duet; and in the midst of this performance Dr. Johnson was announced. He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout; but stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting, as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion. His dress, too, considering the times, and that he had meant to put on his best becomes, being engaged to dine in a large company [at Mrs. Montagu’s], was as much out of the common road as his figure; he had a large wig, snuff-colour coat, and gold buttons, but no ruffles to his shirt, doughty fists,^[26] and black worsted stockings. He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs. Thrale. He poked his nose over the keys of the harpsichord, till the duet was finished, and then my father introduced Hetty to him as an old acquaintance, and he cordially kissed her! When she was a little girl, he had made her a present of The Idler.

“His attention, however, was not to be diverted five minutes from the books, as we were in the library; he pored over them, shelf by shelf, almost touching the backs of them with his eye-lashes, as he read their titles. At last, having fixed upon one, he began, without further ceremony, to read to himself, all the time standing at a distance from the company. We were all very much provoked, as we perfectly languished to hear him talk; but it seems he is the most silent creature, when not particularly drawn out, in the world.

“My sister then played another duet with my father; but Dr. Johnson was so deep in the EncyclopÉdie that, as he is very deaf, I question if he even knew what was going forward. When this was over, Mrs. Thrale, in a laughing manner, said, ‘Pray, Dr. Burney, can you tell me what that song was and whose, which Savoi sung last night at Bach’s concert, and which you did not hear?’ My father confessed himself by no means so good a diviner, not having had time to consult the stars, though in the house of Sir Isaac Newton. However, wishing to draw Dr. Johnson into some conversation, he told him the question. The Doctor, seeing his drift, good-naturedly put away his book, and said very drolly, ‘And pray, Sir, who is Bach? is he a piper?’ Many exclamations of surprise you will believe followed this question. ‘Why, you have read his name often in the papers,’ said Mrs. Thrale; and then she gave him some account of his Concert, and the number of fine performances she had heard at it.^[27]

“ ‘Pray,’ said he, gravely, ‘Madam, what is the expense?’

“ ‘Oh,’ answered she, ‘much trouble and solicitation to get a Subscriber’s Ticket;—or else half a Guinea.’

“ ‘Trouble and solicitation,’ said he, ‘I will have nothing to do with; but I would be willing to give eighteen pence.’

“Ha! ha!

“Chocolate being then brought, we adjourned to the drawing-room. And here, Dr. Johnson being taken from the books, entered freely and most cleverly into conversation; though it is remarkable he never speaks at all, but when spoken to; nor does he ever start, though he so admirably supports, any subject.

“The whole party were engaged to dine at Mrs. Montague’s. Dr. Johnson said he had received the most flattering note he had ever read, or that anybody had ever read, by way of invitation. ‘Well! so have I too,’ cried Mrs. Thrale; ‘so if a note from Mrs. Montague is to be boasted of, I beg mine may not be forgot.’

“ ‘Your note,’ cried Dr. Johnson, ‘can bear no comparison with mine; I am at the head of the Philosophers, she says.’

“ ‘And I,’ cried Mrs. Thrale, ‘have all the Muses in my train!’

“ ‘A fair battle,’ said my father. ‘Come, compliment for compliment, and see who will hold out longest!’

“ ‘Oh, I am afraid for Mrs. Thrale,’ cried Mr. Seward, ‘for I know Mrs. Montague exerts all her forces, when she attacks Dr. Johnson.’

“ ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs. Thrale, ‘she has often, I know, flattered him, till he has been ready to faint.’

“ ‘Well, ladies,’ said my father, ‘you must get him between you to-day, and see which can lay on the paint thickest, Mrs. Thrale or Mrs. Montague.’

“ ‘I had rather,’ cried the Doctor, drily, ‘go to Bach’s Concert.’ ”

The talk then shifted to Garrick, who, having retired from the stage in the previous year, had been recently reading his farce of Lethe to the King and Queen. Dr. Johnson spoke of his old friend and pupil with his wonted candour, and not without touches of critical humour which must have been highly relished by that still-sore author of Virginia to whom Miss Burney’s budget was addressed. Of Garrick’s popular faults Johnson said—“Garrick is accused of vanity; but few men would have borne such unremitting prosperity with greater, if with equal moderation. He is accused, too, of avarice; but, were he not, he would be accused of just the contrary; for he now lives rather as a prince than an actor; but the frugality he practised, when he first appeared in the world, and which, even then, was perhaps beyond his necessity, has marked his character ever since; and now, though his table, his equipage and manner of living, are all the most expensive, and equal to those of a nobleman, yet the original stain still blots his name! Though, had he not fixed upon himself the charge of avarice, he would long since have been reproached with luxury and with living beyond his station in magnificence and splendour.” Another of the Doctor’s animadversions serves to explain an aspect of the actor’s character which has already been illustrated in this chapter.^[28] “Garrick never enters a room,” he said, “but he regards himself as the object of general attention, from whom the entertainment of the company is expected; and true it is, that he seldom disappoints them; for he has infinite humour, a very just proportion of wit, and more convivial pleasantry, than almost any other man. But then off as well as on the Stage, he is always an Actor; for he thinks it so incumbent on him to be sportive, that his gaiety becomes mechanical from being habitual, and he can exert his spirits at all times alike, without consulting his real disposition to hilarity.”^[29]

Previous to Dr. Johnson’s visit to St. Martin’s Street, Miss Burney had been staying at Chessington, whence, to the disgust of Mr. Crisp, she had been hastily recalled to meet her uncle, Mr. Richard Burney of Worcester, whose son Charles her sister Hetty had married. She then went on a visit to her uncle at Barborne (familiarly “Barebones”) Lodge, a little out of Worcester; and here she took part in some private theatricals, playing Mrs. Lovemore in what was apparently the first three-act form of Murphy’s Way to Keep Him, a comedy in which there are manifest traces of that pioneer sentimental drama, La ChaussÉe’s PrÉjugÉ À-la-mode—the prejudice in question being, that it is a mistake to love one’s wife. She seems, by her own account, to have been terribly nervous (in green and gray); but to have acquitted herself creditably in the crucial third Act. She afterwards appeared as Huncamunca in Fielding’s burlesque of Tom Thumb, the rival character of Glumdalca being taken by her cousin James, and that of Lord Grizzle by Edward Burney the artist. The Tom Thumb of the piece was the youngest of the family, Ann or Nancy, a child of seven, the daughter of Charles Burney and Hetty. By this time Miss Burney had entirely got over her stage fright, and entered thoroughly into her part of Tom Thumb’s fiancÉe.

One of the things Huncamunca has to do in Tom Thumb is to express her anxiety to be married. It is not, however, this unbecoming aspiration (upon which Miss Burney was of course afterwards sufficiently rallied) that prompts the “Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh!” of Fielding’s parody of Thomson. But the point serves to remind us that, in this chapter, nothing has been said of Miss Burney’s admirers. Scattered through her Journal are various fugitive references to different gentlemen, old and young, who were evidently attracted by her vivacity and charm, shy and demure as she professed to be. But she had not yet realised her own ambition, and fallen seriously in love. “I am too much spoilt,” she says, “by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a character merely inoffensive.” These words were written of an importunate suitor, with the unpromising name of Thomas Barlow, who made his appearance early in May, 1775. He seems to have been very much in earnest, indeed,—to use the expression of Mr. Toots, of whom he somehow contrives to remind us,—to have been “perfectly sore” with devotion. His ardent, or (as he terms it) “ardurous” Pen addresses to Miss Burney several long-winded and very alembicate epistles, but she will have none of him, although, strange to say, nearly all her family, including the paternal Crisp,—who was particularly urgent that she should not lose a chance of establishing herself,—favour Mr. Barlow’s pretensions. But, as she very sensibly tells Mr. Crisp, she is “determined never to marry without having the very highest value and esteem for the man who should be her lord.” And Mr. Barlow, besides that he is “extremely precipitate,” does not “hit her fancy.” So there is no more to say.

Upon the whole, when it is remembered that this retiring but observant young lady of five-and-twenty had a travelled sailor brother, and two sisters who had been educated at Paris;—that she had seen the town and country both in London and King’s Lynn;—that she had read Richardson and Marivaux and Sterne, if not Fielding;—that she knew Sir Joshua and Nollekens, and was familiar with the acting of Garrick, both on and off the stage;—that she had heard Agujari at her best, and the Gabrielli at her worst;—that she had been introduced to Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale;—that she had conversed with Otaheitan Omai, eaten roast apples with Abyssinian Bruce, and been allowed to inspect what Horace Walpole calls the “infamous diamonds” of the veneered barbarian, Alexis Orloff,—it will, we think, be admitted that her experience of things in general had been of a very varied kind. If to this be added that she was a copious and diligent diarist;—the sworn “anecdote-monger” of a distant correspondent;—and the faithful secretary of a scribbling father—it must also be granted that she was by no means ill-equipped for the production of that work of fiction to the story of which the ensuing chapter is devoted.

---

[12]

Catherine Hyde was still living in Fanny Burney’s day; and Fanny saw her at Covent Garden Theatre in January, 1773, when Mason’s Elfrida was being acted. “I had the pleasure to see Prior’s celebrated fair ‘Kitty, beautiful and young,’ now called Kitty, beautiful and old, in the stage box.” (Early Diary, 1889, i. p. 184.)

[13]	“There are now,” said Cunningham, writing as far back as 1849, “at least 2 square miles of brick and mortar between it [Queen Square] and the view.” (Handbook for London, ii. p. 686.)

[14]	See ante, p. 19.

[15]	In Recreations and Studies of A Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century [Thomas Twining], 1882, there are several letters from Twining to Burney and vice versa, some of which will be hereafter cited.

[16]

“So much of his [Garrick’s] drollery belongs to his voice, looks and manner,” says the Diary, “that writing loses it almost all.” Yet more than forty years afterwards, in her Memoirs of her father (1832, i. pp. 352-3), she expanded the above, about seven lines in the original, to a page and three quarters. It is clear that she worked from the Diary, for some of the expressions are identical. But many decorative particulars are added to the record of Garrick’s visit, which are not in the first account. We have preferred the earlier, if less picturesque, narrative. Boswell, of course, has nothing of this anecdote; which was not printed until long after his death.

[17]

The fate of Cowper’s “gentle savage” was pathetic. Painted by Reynolds and patronised by Lord Sandwich,—lionised by Lady Townshend and the Duchess of Devonshire,—he was suffered to go back once more to his own people, among whom he had neither status nor importance. He died soon after, having shown himself (says Vancouver) both “vain and silly.” And no wonder!

[18]	Agujari, according to Grove’s Dictionary of Music, was the highest and most extended soprano on record. Her voice reached “from the middle of the harpsichord to two notes above it,” says Miss Burney.

[19]	He is generally called “Count.” But in her letters, diary, and Memoirs, Fanny styles him “Prince.”

[20]	Early Diary, 1889, ii. 121.

[21]	Memoirs of the Margravine of Anspach, 1826, ii. 125.

[22]

Dr. Burney evidently had mild qualms about these Sunday concerts. When after the first occasion here referred to, Dr. King and Dr. Ogle supped at St. Martin’s Street, he said that he hoped for absolution from them if there was any crime in having music on a Sunday. To which Dr. Ogle replied discreetly that music was an excellent thing any and every day; and Dr. King evasively—“Have we not music at church?”

[23]	The second volume appeared in 1782, and the third and fourth volumes, completing the work, in 1789.

[24]	In September, 1785, Miss Sally Payne married Captain James Burney, Fanny’s brother.

[25]	Early Diary, 1889, ii. 153; Birkbeck Hill’s Johnson’s Letters, 1892, ii. 5, and note.

[26]	The editor of the Early Diary “strongly suspects” that these words in the altered ms. were originally “dirty fists.” There are other indications that later corrections have somewhat modified the portrait.

[27]	The Bach referred to was Bach’s son, John Christian Bach, or (as he was called) “English” Bach. He was a famous harpsichord player, who, with Abel of the viol de gamba, conducted Mrs. Cornelys’ concerts in Soho Square.

[28]	See ante, pp. 38-40.

[29]	Early Diary, 1889, ii. pp. 153-60.

---

At the beginning of 1778, English Literature, and especially that branch of it which consists of fiction, seems to have been suffering from a kind of sleeping sickness. The great masters who had followed upon Richardson’s success with Pamela, were gone,—as was Richardson himself. Fielding, whose last novel of Amelia had appeared in 1751, was dead; and his far younger rival, Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker came twenty years later, was also dead. Sterne was dead; Goldsmith was dead; and both Tristram Shandy and the Vicar of Wakefield had been a considerable time before the public. Johnson, whose Rasselas dated from 1759, and Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto dated from 1764, were the only living writers of fiction of any eminence, for it is impossible to give a very high place to the Julia de RoubignÉ of Sterne’s tearful imitator, Henry Mackenzie, or to the Champion of Virtue, which Walpole’s disciple, Miss Clara Reeve, afterwards re-named The Old English Baron. Both of these, however, belong to 1777. Apart from them, there is nothing that rises above the average level of the

which formed the staple product of the Circulating Library,—those “Ventures of Jack this, and the History of Betsy t’other, and Sir Humphrys, and women with hard Christian names,” which exercised the Nurse in Colman’s Polly Honeycombe. “And then”—says the Author in his Prologue—

Of these latter and minor performances, perhaps the only one which—for the moment—deserves a passing mention is the Excursion of Mrs. Frances Brooke, already referred to in Chapter i. as the popular author of Lady Julia Mandeville. The Excursion has a certain faint interest from the fact that, preceding Evelina only by a few months, it deals, to some extent, with a similar theme, since the heroine is described as “a young lady of family but small fortune, with a mind sensible and improved, but totally ignorant of the world,” who “launches out from the country, steering, without a pilot or compass, through the rocks and shelves of a London life.” One of her perils is, of course, a heartless young nobleman, educated by his father “upon the detestable plan” of my Lord Chesterfield, whose Miscellaneous Works had then just been issued by Dr. Maty. Fanny Burney knew Mrs. Brooke’s books, and had indeed made her personal acquaintance, both in the studio of Miss Catherine Reid, the “English Rosalba,” and at the Opera House in the Haymarket, of which Mrs. Brooke was co-lessee with the actress, Mary Ann Yates. “Mrs. Brooke is very short and fat, and squints”—writes Fanny of their first interview, “but has the art of showing agreeable ugliness. She is very well bred, and expresses herself with much modesty upon all subjects; which in an authoress, a woman of known understanding, is extremely pleasing.” But save and except the very superficial resemblance referred to above, there is no trace of any connection between the Excursion and Evelina. Indeed, as for the Excursion, although Sylvanus Urban contrives to give it a review of two or three columns,—a far longer notice than he afterwards, and very tardily, accorded to Evelina,—it is not more readable to-day than the same author’s Lady Julia Mandeville, or her translations from the French,—that is to say, it is not readable at all.

It has already been stated in Chapter i., that, amid the fuel of Miss Burney’s Poland Street holocaust, was “an entire work of fiction.” This was The History of Caroline Evelyn, of which we know no more than is told us in the Preface to The Wanderer and the Memoirs of Dr. Burney. It was “the last of the little works that was immolated,” and contained the history of Evelina’s mother, who, as appears from the later novel dealing with her daughter’s entrance into the world, was the only child of a gentleman of birth and education named Evelyn. Mr. Evelyn having been unwise enough to marry a good-looking waitress at a tavern, had in consequence migrated to France, where he died. His daughter Caroline, after being brought up carefully by his old tutor, the Rev. Mr. Villars, was sent for to Paris by her vulgar mother, who, by this time had married again, her second husband being a Frenchman named Duval. Oppressed by Mme. Duval, and menaced with an unsuitable partner, Miss Evelyn rashly consented to marry, without witnesses, a profligate young baronet, Sir John Belmont, who brought her back to England. Here after the approved fashion of profligate young baronets in novels, he, in due time, destroyed the marriage certificate, denying that the ceremony had ever taken place. His broken-hearted wife sought an asylum with her old guardian, Mr. Villars, and subsequently died in giving birth to Evelina.

Such is the History of Caroline Evelyn, as it is summarised in the opening letters of her daughter’s story; and such, we may imagine, in expanded form, must have been the matter of the manuscript which was burnt. Whatever was the precise date of its destruction, it must obviously have been a very juvenile performance. It was certainly written before its author had begun her Journal—in other words, before she had begun, not only to record her thoughts and feelings, but to take intelligent stock of the variations of humanity; and it must also have been written before she had been subjected to the discipline of acting as private secretary to her father. As to the plot, there was nothing in that beyond the ability of an imaginative schoolgirl. Unfortunate heroine, heartless parent, profligate baronet, private marriage, burnt certificate,—these were the conventional material of contemporary fiction, if indeed they did not come direct from Grandison or Clarissa. What would be interesting to know is, whether the History of Caroline Evelyn contained any promise of character-drawing, still more of social satire and humourous incident. We suspect it did not. In all likelihood, it was merely a sentimental exercise in the taste which then represented the degradation of the Richardsonian method, as modified by French imitators; and perhaps aimed at nothing more than mild rivalry of the existing biographies of Miss Polly Willis, Miss Lucy Wellers, Miss Charlotte Villars, and the rest of the ingenious works enumerated at the end of the Preface to Polly Honeycombe.

There is no doubt that when Fanny Burney made dutiful sacrifice of the History of Caroline Evelyn, she sincerely intended, in her own words, “to extinguish for ever in its ashes her scribbling propensity.” But qui a bu, boira. As we have seen, the checked impulse almost immediately found its outlet in keeping a journal; and to keep a journal was but, in another form, to exercise the prohibited gift and to gratify the old ambition. The fire which “consumed her productions, extirpated neither the invention nor the inclination that had given them birth”; and, as time went on, she felt herself more and more disposed to revert to her first conception, and to brood over the singular situation in which Miss Evelyn’s daughter must find herself “between the elegant connections of her mother, and the vulgar ones of her grandmother.” Irresistibly and almost insensibly, she felt the whole story forming itself gradually in her mind, and calling urgently to be written down, long before a syllable was committed to paper. When she actually began to write, is not clear. It was in 1768 that the diary opened; but there are no hints of the composition of Evelina for some time to come. Probably it was written by fits and starts; and grew but very gradually into shape, making its greatest progress during its writer’s visits to Chessington, or in the leisure procured during her father’s two absences on the continent. And much of it was no doubt penned in Newton’s old observatory, remote from her step-mother’s watchful eye.

It must have been in 1776, after the publication of the first volume of Dr. Burney’s History of Music, that Fanny began definitely to think of print. Having been long accustomed to act as secretary for her father, she grew apprehensive lest her ordinary script should be recognised at press; and she therefore proceeded to transcribe her work “in a feigned hand.” “The fear of discovery,” she writes, “or of suspicion in the house, made the copying extremely laborious to me; for in the daytime, I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greatest part of many nights, in order to get it ready.” By the time two volumes were completed, she was sufficiently tired out—with “all this fagging”—to wish to know whether her labour was likely to be in vain. She accordingly wrote a letter to Dodsley of Pall Mall, without signature, offering him what she had already prepared, and promising to transmit the remainder in the following year. The reply was to be addressed to the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket, under cover to an imaginary “Mr. Grafton.” Dodsley’s answer was to the effect that he could not consider the work without being informed of the author’s name. Thereupon Fanny, and her only confidantes, her sisters, after sitting in committee upon this discouraging reply, decided that it would be wiser to try a less fashionable publisher. They fixed upon Mr. Thomas Lowndes of 77 Fleet Street, who expressed a desire to see the manuscript. It was accordingly carried to Fleet Street, “in the dark of the evening,” by Fanny’s brother Charles, who, having been admitted to the secret, was disguised for the occasion by his sisters in appropriate costume. But the bookseller’s reply, though one which might have been expected, was a disappointment. Mr. Lowndes informed his correspondent at the Orange Coffee House, that, while (with some reservations) he approved the instalment submitted, he could not think of printing the book until it was finished; and that he would consequently await the author’s pleasure, hoping to receive it as soon as it was ready for type.

Here was a blow which, for the moment, suspended all further progress. “I had hardly time,” says Fanny, “to write half a page in a day; and neither my health nor inclination would allow me to continue my nocturnal scribbling for so long a time, as to write first, and then copy, a whole volume.”^[30] Nevertheless, she must have gone on with it at intervals. In March, 1777, when, as already related, she went to Chessington, she was certainly at work upon it. “Distant as you may think us from the great world,” she writes to her sister Susan, “I sometimes find myself in the midst of it, though nobody suspects the brilliancy of the company I occasionally keep.” This is a transparent reference to the characters of the book upon which she was engaged. In April, she went to Worcester; and before starting, appears to have determined that the time had arrived when she must divulge her secret to her father. Hitherto she had never taken any serious step without his knowledge; and on this occasion had refrained from obtaining his concurrence, first from an unwillingness to acknowledge her authorship, and secondly, from a dread that he might ask to see what she had written. Upon this latter head, however, she was speedily reassured. Although Dr. Burney—who, we must remember, was wholly without previous information on the subject—treated the communication very lightly, he was evidently surprised. In amused compliance with his daughter’s urgent appeal for secrecy, he nevertheless forbore even to ask the title of the book, or to make any further enquiries. He only requested to be informed, from time to time, of its progress towards completion; and then left Fanny to follow her own devices. Probably he thought no more of the matter. Preoccupied with his own affairs, he can have attached but slight importance to the intelligence conveyed to him; and certainly never dreamed that his daughter’s attempt would be attended with success. And so Fanny, having liberated her mind, and eased her filial conscience, set off for Worcester.

When she got back to St. Martin’s Street, she finished the preparation of vol. iii., which was handed to Mr. Lowndes, who, in a few days, offered £20 for the manuscript,—“an offer which was accepted with alacrity, and boundless surprise at its magnificence,” by the anonymous author.^[31] The next we hear of the book is in the middle of January, 1778. About this date, Edward Burney, the artist, who had been promoted to the post of confidential agent in place of his cousin Charles, then in the country, arrived with news that a parcel was waiting for “Mr. Grafton” at the Orange Coffee House. It proved to contain a printed but incomplete and unbound copy of Evelina, which was accompanied by a letter from Mr. Lowndes, requesting that a “List of Errata” might be supplied without delay. This was accordingly done; and the book was returned to the publisher, by whom, shortly afterwards, it was advertised in the London Chronicle for January 27-9, and elsewhere, as on sale, in three volumes, 12mo, price 7s. 6d. sewed, and 9s. bound, under the title of Evelina; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Mrs. Burney read out the announcement at the St. Martin’s Street breakfast table; but, being ignorant of the circumstances, naturally failed to detect the signs of intelligence which passed between Fanny and her sisters. Whether Dr. Burney was present, is not recorded; but as he did not know the name of the book, what was to its writer the earliest notification of its public appearance would probably have escaped his attention. For some weeks nothing more was heard of the matter, although, in March, the sisters and their cousin Edward, making enquiry at Bell’s Library in the Strand, found that Evelina was in circulation; and that, as Fanny puts it, “a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy in her bureau, was now to be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms for the small tribute of three pence.” After this, Dr. Burney fell ill of fever. Having helped to nurse him, Fanny herself had inflammation of the lungs; and, in May, went off to Chessington to recruit. It was at Chessington that she received, at this late hour, the first copy of her book, for which she had hitherto applied unsuccessfully to Mr. Lowndes. He now forwarded a set “most elegantly bound” (which may be taken as an indication that it was growing in popularity), and this copy was apparently followed by ten further copies. Some time, however, was still to elapse before Evelina became thoroughly well known, and we may occupy the interval with an examination of its contents.^[32]

The plot is neither very original nor very intricate. With the parentage and early history of the heroine, Evelina Anville or, more properly, Belmont, the reader has already been made acquainted. At the beginning of the story, her low-born grandmother, Mme. Duval, having ignored her for seventeen years, has begun to show disquieting signs of seeking to obtain control over her, much to the dismay of her guardian, the excellent Mr. Villars. But nothing happens until Mr. Villars, having permitted Evelina to visit his and her friend, Lady Howard, at Howard Grove, is unwillingly persuaded to let her accompany Lady Howard’s daughter, Mrs. Mirvan, on a visit to London. Mrs. Mirvan is going to town to meet her husband, a Captain in the Navy, newly returned from a seven-years’ absence on a distant station. They take lodgings in Queen-Anne-Street, Cavendish Square. From this point Evelina mainly holds the pen. Almost as a matter of course, one of the first persons they encounter is Mme. Duval, travelling with a Frenchman named Du Bois. (Du Bois, it may be mentioned in parenthesis, was the name of Fanny’s Huguenot grandfather.) To Mrs. Mirvan’s aristocratic acquaintances, Mme. Duval speedily opposes her own vulgar connections, the Branghtons, a silversmith’s family on Snow-Hill, with whom, in due time, originates the suggestion that “Miss,” as they call Evelina, shall endeavour to obtain recognition by her father,—an idea which obviously has its source in their desire to secure Mme. Duval’s fortune for themselves. At the instance of Mme. Duval, then staying at Howard Grove, Lady Howard writes to Sir John Belmont, who returns an answer from the studious ambiguity of which it is impossible to extract anything but a rather contemptuous negative. The Mirvans, who have been temporising with Mme. Duval in order to keep Evelina with them as long as possible, are now obliged to surrender her for a time to her objectionable grandmother, by whom she is carried to London and her Snow-Hill cousins. Eventually she returns to Mr. Villars. But during her stay in Holborn, she has become acquainted with one of the Branghtons’ lodgers, a young Scotchman in destitute circumstances, named Macartney, whom she saves from suicide. In Paris Macartney has fallen in love with a beautiful English girl, the alleged daughter of a baronet, who turns out to be Sir John Belmont himself. This girl is a certain Bessie Green, who has been palmed off upon his paternal remorse as Caroline Evelyn’s child. Finally, at Bath, things come right. While Evelina is there on a visit, her father arrives to drink the waters, accompanied by the pseudo-Miss Belmont. But Evelina’s striking resemblance to her dead mother is unmistakable; she is at once acknowledged by Sir John Belmont with appropriate heroics, and at the close of volume three, bestows her hand upon Lord Orville, the best of a fair number of eligible and ineligible suitors.

This, reduced to an outline, is the plot of Miss Burney’s story; and that it has any special novelty of construction, can scarcely be contended. Nor, although she has adopted the “epistolary Style” of Richardson, can it be said to bear any great likeness to the work of that master. There is no endeavour after mental analysis; or—it may be added—any obtrusive evidence of prolixity. The book does not, like the novels of Fielding and Smollett, deal with humanity in the rough; but rather with humanity in the circumscribed arena of domestic life. Its distinctive merit consists in the skill and graphic power of the character drawing; in the clever contrast of the different individualities; in the author’s keen if somewhat crude sense of the ridiculous; and, above all, in the sprightliness and vivacity of her narrative, especially when she writes in the person of the heroine. And this last, in great measure, is due to the fact that in Evelina Miss Burney has portrayed her younger self. Until the publication of the Early Diary, this, though conjectured, was not clearly established. But a perusal of the letters to Mr. Crisp, of the Teignmouth and Worcester Journals, and of half a dozen of the reported conversations, shows clearly that Evelina Anville, narrating her adventures to Mr. Villars, was using very much the same pen as Frances Burney had employed for those nouvelles À-la-main which, from time to time, she despatched to “Daddy” Crisp at Chessington. The writer who describes the theatricals at Barborne Lodge, or recounts the long conversations with Mr. Barlow, is precisely the same person who, in the novel, reproduces the small talk in the tea-room at the Pantheon, or records the rough-and-tumble misadventures of Mme. Duval at Ranelagh. All these people and places Miss Burney had seen; or if she had not, it needed little but her perceptive faculty, her sense of humour, and her dramatising gift, to enable her to invent similar characters, and exhibit them in action.

It is possible, of course, that, in some cases, Miss Burney leaned upon her predecessors, especially where her own experiences fell short. Lord Orville, it has been suggested, is a recollection of the hero of Sir Charles Grandison; Sir Clement Willoughby, of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen or Mr. Greville in the same novel. That she should think of these then-established types would, indeed, be only natural. But while Richardson drew his male heroes mainly from his moral consciousness, Miss Burney has rectified her puppets from her personal recollections. Lord Orvilles, perhaps, were not very common in her environment. Still, to say nothing of King in Lord Ogleby (she knew the Clandestine Marriage by heart), she had seen and heard a live fine gentleman in Fulke Greville; and in Mr. Anthony Chamier and Mr. Charles Boone had conversed with some flesh-and-blood specimens of men of the world, who helped to make her characters, objectively at all events, more convincingly real than those of Richardson. For Lord Orville—though somewhat shadowy—is really a nobleman; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a not-inconceivable specimen of the genus “agreeable rake.” As to the impertinent fop, Mr. Lovel, one can imagine that she would have little difficulty in constructing him—with an added sprinkle of malice—out of the “scraps and heel-taps” of her coxcomb cousin, Richard Burney of Worcester, or of that other fantastic feather-head, the Spanish traveller, Mr. Twiss. But the Lovels, and the Orvilles, and the Willoughbys, clever as they are, would scarcely have made the fortune of Evelina; still less would the benedictory Mr. Villars, the exemplary Lady Howard, Mrs. Mirvan and her daughter, or that melancholy concession to sentimentalism, Mr. Macartney. These belong to the working machinery of the story; its prominent interest, apart from its accurate pictures of contemporary character and manners, is concentrated upon the two antagonists, Captain Mirvan and Mme. Duval, and upon the inimitably vulgar Branghton group, which includes the Holborn beau, Mr. Smith.

Madame Duval, in particular, is drawn with remarkable vigour, though it is difficult to imagine how, at any period of her life, an educated man could possibly have married her. Her illiterate English with its cheap French tags, her Ma fois and her Shakespearean superlatives, all combine to make a most graphic broad-comedy portrait. She would perhaps have been better for a touch, which Goldsmith would certainly not have omitted, of tenderness somewhere; as it is, the only sign of anything approaching that quality is her solicitude for M. Du Bois, the poor French gentleman who accompanies her,—one hardly knows why,—for he has no very definite purpose in the book beyond swelling the list of Evelina’s admirers, and opposing his courtesy and unobtrusive good manners to the rudeness of his immediate associates. But though no softer traits make us admire Mme. Duval, one can at least be sorry for her. A certain amount of horse-play—and even the ruining of a new Lyons silk costume—are perhaps permissible in a roaring farce; but to drag an elderly woman forcibly along the high road, shake her furiously, deposit her in a ditch (bumping her vigorously the while), and then tie her feet together, leaving her “almost roaring, and in the utmost agony of rage and terror”—certainly seems to be going to unusual lengths in the pursuit of practical joking, even with a person who has so far forgotten herself as to spit in your face. If Mme. Duval was not a person of “position” in one sense, she was at least (as the Colonel says in Punch) a person of exceedingly “uncomfortable position” in another. Yet, as Miss Burney has depicted the episode, we must presume that she has actually depicted something she had heard of or seen. And there is no doubt that there was an under side to the often superficial and conventional refinement of her day,—a side of absolute heartlessness and insensibility, begotten of brutal pastimes, butcherly penal laws, and a cynical disregard for the value of human life. Even in that admirable comedy of Goldsmith which Miss Burney had seen played not so very many years before the appearance of Evelina, there are traces of this, though Goldsmith was the most amiable of men. Yet even Goldsmith allows Tony Lumpkin to tell an audience that, after jolting two ladies, one of them his own mother, to a jelly, he has finally lodged them in a horsepond; and everyone seems to think the joke an excellent one. Nor are there any indications that Johnson or Reynolds ever commented upon the callous barbarity of the proceeding.

This being so, we could perhaps hardly expect any superfine delicacy from the rough sailor whom Miss Burney has invented for Mme. Duval’s discomfiture. Captain Mirvan is an officer of the Oakum and Hatchway type rather than of the Lieutenant Bowling order. His twin aversions are a fop and a Frenchman; and he meets them both; or rather, in place of the latter, he meets an Englishwoman naturalised in France, which does as well. Indeed, it is a little curious that, in his hatred of “Madam Frog,” as he calls Evelina’s grandmother, Captain Mirvan entirely overlooks the fact that Mme. Duval is really nothing more than a vulgar English barmaid. Captain Mirvan is excellently conceived, but only partially exhibited. To say nothing of the fact that he is a seaman on shore, it would have been impossible for Evelina to depict him except in expurgated form. She herself allows as much to Mr. Villars. “Notwithstanding the attempts I so frequently make of writing some of the Captain’s conversation, I can only give you a faint idea of his language; for almost every other word he utters, is accompanied by an oath, which, I am sure, would be as unpleasant for you to read, as for me to write. And, besides, he makes use of a thousand sea-terms, which are to me quite unintelligible.” Miss Burney had a brother who was a lieutenant in the navy, and no doubt was sufficiently instructed as to the manners and customs of the mariners of Cook’s day. She moreover appreciated to the full their delight in hoaxes and practical jokes. As regards their oaths and asseverations no one can blame her reticence,—a reticence which was commended even by her contemporaries. But it is permissible to criticism to observe that a Georgian ship-captain ad usum Delphini, and deprived in great measure of his picturesque nautical jargon is an artistic contradiction which it is difficult to invest with complete and convincing reality. It is no doubt owing in part to the absence of his uncouth amphibious atmosphere that Captain Mirvan’s baiting of Mme. Duval leaves such an unpleasantly cold-blooded impression upon the modern reader. On ship-board, and in his own element, he was no doubt a brave man and a smart officer. On shore, he is an unmitigated bear; and since Mme. Duval was in a way his guest, an absolutely inconceivable host.

Of the Branghton family, Miss Burney has given, at the outset, a rather fuller introductory description than she usually gives of her characters. The father, Mme. Duval’s nephew, is a silversmith on Snow-Hill, a man about forty, intelligent, but contracted and prejudiced, having spent his life in the city, and contemptuous of all who reside elsewhere. His son is “weaker in his understanding, and more gay in his temper; but his gaiety is that of a foolish, over-grown schoolboy, whose mirth consists in noise and disturbance. He disdains his father for his close attention to business, and love of money; though he seems himself to have no talents, spirit, or generosity, to make him superior to either. His chief delight appears to be tormenting and ridiculing his sisters, who, in return, most heartily despise him.” The elder girl is not ill-looking; but is proud, ill-tempered and conceited. “She hates the city, though without knowing why; for it is easy to discover she has lived no where else.” The younger sister, Polly, is “rather pretty, very foolish, very ignorant, very giddy and very good natured.” This worshipful family, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, live at the shop in the city, and let some of the rooms. One of the garrets is occupied by the already mentioned Scotch poet, Macartney, while the dining room is in possession of the Holborn beau, who, besides keeping a foot-boy of his own, is—according to Miss Polly Branghton—“quite like one of the quality, and dresses as fine, and goes to balls and dances, and everything quite in taste.” Mr. Smith, with his underbred gentility and his awkward sprightliness, is the most vivid of the portraits in the book.

With enforced associates of this type, it is easy to conceive that Evelina is continually involved in vexation and embarrassment, and even landed in some equivocal situations. The Branghtons take her to the Opera, but carry her to the shilling gallery. They take her to Vauxhall, where, unlike Goldsmith’s pawnbroker’s widow, she does contrive to see the famous waterworks. But by the heedlessness of her cousins, she is decoyed into the dubious Dark Walks, where she is rescued from a gang of rakes by Sir Clement Willoughby, only to be subsequently subjected by him to impertinent gallantries on his own account. After this, she goes to a ball at the Long Room at Hampstead with Mme. Duval, where she has the greatest difficulty in avoiding to “hop a dance” with the importunate Holborn beau, who, in the phrase of his circle is “as fine as fivepence.” At Marylebone Gardens an explosion of M. TorrÉ’s fireworks terrifies her into seeking the protection of some very undesirable companions of her own sex, in whose compromising company, to her intense annoyance, she is discovered both by Lord Orville and Sir Clement Willoughby. Finally, after she has been pestered by the attentions of Mr. Smith, and threatened by Mme. Duval with young Branghton as a husband, the full measure of her mortification is filled at Kensington Gardens, where, in a soaking shower, her cousins contrive to borrow Lord Orville’s coach, in her name, although against her will. As a result the coach is badly injured in taking these discreditable connections to Snow Hill. There are other consequences to this misadventure, but they cannot be touched upon here.

These scenes at the old London pleasure resorts of Evelina’s century—as was admitted by her contemporaries—are depicted with full knowledge, and with a spirit and animation not to be found elsewhere, though it is difficult to make quotation from them without presenting them imperfectly. One passage, however, which Johnson admired, we may venture to cite, with the caveat that a brick is not a building. The party are in the Great Room at Vauxhall, looking at one of Hayman’s paintings;—we may assume it, from the reference to Neptune, to be that which commemorated Admiral Hawke’s defeat of the French in Quiberon Bay. Evelina has asked M. Du Bois for an explanation of the subject: Mme. Duval invokes the assistance of Mr. Smith, who, for the moment, is sorely crestfallen at the superior ease and splendour of Sir Clement Willoughby:—

“ ‘Don’t ask him [M. Du Bois]’—she cries—‘your best way is to ask Mr. Smith, for he’s been here the oftenest. Come, Mr. Smith, I daresay you can tell us all about them.’

“ ‘Why, yes, Ma’am, yes,’ said Mr. Smith: who, brightening up at this application, advanced towards us, with an air of assumed importance, which, however, sat very uneasily upon him, and begged to know what he should explain first: ‘For I have attended,’ said he, ‘to all these paintings, and know everything in them perfectly well; for I am rather fond of pictures, Ma’am; and, really, I must say, I think a pretty picture is a—a very—is really a very—is something very pretty——’

“ ‘So do I too,’ said Madame Duval, ‘but pray now, Sir, tell us who that is meant for,’ pointing to a figure of Neptune.

“ ‘That!—Why, that, Ma’am, is,— . . . I can’t think how I come to be so stupid, but really I have forgot his name;—and yet, I know it as well as my own too,—however, he’s a General, Ma’am, they are all Generals.’

“I saw Sir Clement bite his lips; and, indeed, so did I mine.

“ ‘Well,’ said Madame Duval, ‘it’s the oddest dress for a general ever I see!’

“ ‘He seems so capital a figure,’ said Sir Clement to Mr. Smith, ‘that I imagine he must be Generalissimo of the whole army.’

“ ‘Yes, Sir, yes,’ answered Mr. Smith, respectfully bowing, and highly delighted at being thus referred to, ‘you are perfectly right;—but I cannot for my life think of his name;—perhaps, Sir, you may remember it?’

“ ‘No, really,’ replied Sir Clement, ‘my acquaintance among the generals is not so extensive.’

“The ironical tone of voice in which Sir Clement spoke, entirely disconcerted Mr. Smith; who again retiring to a humble distance, seemed sensibly mortified at the failure of the attempt to recover his consequence.”

After volume two, we hear little of Mme. Duval or the Branghtons; and Captain Mirvan only appears at the end of the book for the exposure of the fop, Mr. Lovel, which he accomplishes with his customary cruelty. Croker thought this latter part “very tedious,” but his objection was not shared by Miss Burney’s first readers. There are, it is true, no characters in it as broadly drawn as Captain Mirvan and Mme. Duval; but those that are new, have all the trick of the time. Lord Merton and Mr. Coverley are typical examples of the Georgian man of pleasure, and the race of old women by which they settle their wager, could easily, painful as it seemed to the lookers-on, have been paralleled from the annals of the day. Indeed, something of the kind was devised by Garrick for the diversions of his Hampton Villa. Lady Louisa Larpent is an excellent specimen of the die-away, lackadaisical lady of quality who must have abounded at the old watering places, while the remorseless Mrs. Selwyn, secure in her age and independent means, and devoting herself entirely to the reckless gratification of her caustic humour, is again a thoroughly recognisable society type. In fact, these latter personages are truer to the social conditions of the day than even “Madam French” and the Captain, and only failed of equal applause because they were less novel. So far from being tedious, the last volume seems to us the most easily written. The intrigue, slight as it is, is artfully entangled, and the style has the additional freedom which might be expected from the fact that there was now a definite publisher in sight, as soon as the work should be brought to an end.

Prefixed to Evelina is a votive poem of five quatrains, a “Dedication addressed to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews,” and a Preface. The verses, although headed “To **** *****,” are of course intended for Dr. Burney.

they conclude, and it would be idle to pretend that their affection is not more manifest than their poetical merit. The “Dedication” and the “Preface,” on the contrary, are well invented; and moreover, shew plainly that, in serious or impersonal prose, the Johnsonian standard, afterwards so obtrusive in the writer’s work, was already present to her mind. Speaking, in the Preface, of her predecessors in fiction, she says, “I yet presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked; whence, though they may have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers; and, though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren.” Again, “Whatever may be the fate of these letters, the writer is satisfied they will meet with justice; and commends them to the press, though hopeless of fame, yet not regardless of censure.” These are sentences which, with their balanced turn, and contrast of clauses, might have come direct from Rasselas or the Rambler. The same Preface contains a passage to which we are probably indebted for much of that old persistent misconception as to the author’s age, of which Croker (“no one could lash a woman like Rigby!”) made such paltry capital. “To draw characters from nature, though not from life, and to mark the manners of the times, is the attempted plan of the following letters. For this purpose, a young female, educated in the most secluded retirement, makes, at the age of seventeen [the italics are ours], her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life.” Here, no doubt, is the source and origin of the story which Croker had “always seen and heard stated.” To any unprejudiced mind, it must be obvious that Miss Burney is referring, not to her own age, but to that of her heroine; and this is confirmed—if confirmation were needed—by her Diary. “I have not pretended,” she writes in March, 1778, “to shew the world what it actually is, but what it appears to a girl of seventeen:—and so far as that, surely any girl who is past seventeen may safely do?” And yet, as late as 1871, a critic was found to quote the words of the “Preface” and to contend, in Croker’s interest, that Miss Burney was speaking of herself.^[33]

The first of the Reviews to answer the appeal in the Dedication was not either of those to which the author had referred. In the London Review for February there was a tiny notice of three lines. But, considering that it came from, or was approved by, the critic whom Macaulay stigmatises as the “envious Kenrick,” it was not unfriendly. “There was much more merit” in Evelina’s history, it said, “as well respecting style, character and incident, than was generally to be found among our modern novels.” The Monthly Review (Mr. Ralph Griffiths) was the next to take up the book, making its report in April. This was not long; but it was excellent. It pronounced Evelina to be “one of the most sprightly, entertaining, and agreeable productions” of the kind which had of late fallen under its notice. It praised the “great variety of natural incidents,” and declared the characters to be “agreeably diversified, conceived and drawn with propriety, and supported with spirit.” “The whole,” it went on, “is written with great ease, and command of language. From this commendation, however, we must except the character of a son of Neptune, whose manners are rather those of a rough uneducated country squire, than those of a genuine sea captain.” For the Critical Review Miss Burney had to wait until September, when Sylvanus Urban also joined the concert. The notice in the Critical Review was the longest of all. It compared the writer with Richardson. It considered the first and third volumes to be the best, and it praised Mme. Duval and Captain Mirvan as, in great measure, original. With respect to the author, whom it speaks of as “he,” it was still wholly in the dark; and it commended the knowledge of the world and the experience of life which the book contained. Mr. Urban contented himself with a long extract from the “Preface,” and concluded, “Such is the just account given of this work by the author; to which we shall only add that these vols. will afford a pleasing innocent amusement, exhibiting, in an easy style, many such characters as occur in the world, not raised so high as to be extravagant, nor sunk so low as to be disgusting.”

There is no definite evidence that Miss Burney had any knowledge either of Kenrick’s or Griffiths’ review, when, in May, she went to Chessington. While she was at “Daddy” Crisp’s—as already related—the first bound copy was received from Lowndes. But those in the secret had kept it well, and it was not until June that it was really revealed. In March, Fanny’s cousin Richard, recovering from an illness, had heard Evelina read aloud, and was taken into confidence; while in May, his sister Bessy, one of the actors in the Worcester theatricals, had, in her own phrase, “smoked” Fanny in the new book, which was beginning to be talked about. But Fanny’s father, to whom Evelina was dedicated, was still wholly ignorant of the matter, and his diffident daughters did not dare to undeceive him. At last, at the beginning of June, Charlotte writes jubilantly that Papa has been looking at the review in the Monthly, and has bought a copy of Evelina. He has been much affected by the Ode, and is reading the book to Lady Hales and another friend. He thinks the Preface and Dedication “vastly strong and well written,” Susan reports to the author. The account of public places (he declares) is “very animated, and natural, and not common”; and in his opinion, Lowndes has had a very good bargain. By June 16 he has finished it. It is “the best novel he knows,” says the proud father, “excepting Fielding’s,” and in some respects it is better even than his. His only objection is to Mirvan’s treatment of Lovel, which is “a brutality which does not make one laugh.” Villars and Lord Orville he admired greatly; and he has “blubbered” over the scenes at the end between Evelina and Sir John Belmont. As to his lady auditors, they are still crying. For Fanny’s sake (“Poor Fan’s such a prude”), he will keep the secret snug; but he evidently does not apprehend that its disclosure would bring her any discredit. “For a young woman’s work, I look upon it to be really wonderful!”

All this Susan Burney recapitulates with abundant decorative detail to the delighted author at Chessington, whose foremost anxiety had been as to her father’s opinion. She herself has been reading the book aloud to Mr. Crisp, who, good, easy man, has no suspicions, but is interested, and tantalised into greater curiosity by having to wait patiently for the successive volumes. Presently Evelina is recommended by a lady to Mrs. Thrale, who “likes it vastly—is extremely pleased with it.” Whatever human nature there may be in Mme. Riccoboni,^[34] she tells Mrs. Burney, who has been praising that writer, there is human life in Evelina, and the manners of the time. “It’s writ (she says) by somebody that knows the top and the bottom, the highest and lowest of mankind.” Thereupon Mrs. Burney borrows it to read; and long letters go off to Fanny embodying the remarks of both parents over the book as they study it slowly in bed in the morning. Finally, as Dr. Burney has obtained Fanny’s leave to tell Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Burney also has to be told. And then—crown of all things!—comes a congratulatory letter from Mrs. Thrale herself, praising Evelina for “probability of story, elegance of sentiment, and general power over the mind, whether exerted in humour or pathos.” But “the cream of the correspondence,” as Tony Lumpkin calls it, is not for once in a postscript. It is in the middle. Dr. Johnson has read the first two volumes, and protests there are “passages in the book which might do honour to Richardson.” He is hungering for the dÉnoÛment, and is now hard at work on volume three. This astounding intelligence has such an effect upon the author that, in her own words, “it almost crazed her with agreeable surprise.” It gave her such a flight of spirits that she then and there “danced a jigg to Mr. Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation,—to his no small amazement, and diversion.” She was an expert emulator of the light-heeled Nancy Dawson; and the scene of this impromptu performance—as she told Sir Walter Scott forty-eight years afterwards—was a mulberry tree in the garden at Chessington.^[35]

“Daddy” Crisp was now almost the only person out of the secret; and he had to be enlightened. Dr. Burney took this duty upon himself when he came down to Chessington in August to fetch away his daughter; and the old man’s pride and surprise and delight were unbounded.

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[30]	This suggests that, at the beginning of 1777, the third volume was not yet composed.

[31]	After the third edition (1779) Lowndes paid her another £10, making £30 in all (Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 151).

[32]	Diary and Letters, 1892, i. 10; Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 149; Early Diary, 1889, ii. 239 n.

[33]	Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, 1871, p. 325.

[34]	Marie-Jeanne de Heurles de Laboras, Mme. Riccoboni, d. 1792, translated Fielding’s Amelia and Kelly’s False Delicacy into French, and continued Marivaux’ Marianne. She wrote several sentimental novels, one of which Mrs. Brooke Englished as Lady Catesby’s Letters.

[35]	Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1891, i. 309.

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Once—so runs the story—when Miss Burney was dining with Sir Joshua Reynolds at that pleasant villa upon Richmond Hill which had been built for him by Chambers the architect, she chanced to see him looking at her in a peculiar way. “I know what you are thinking about,”—she said. “Ay,” he replied, “you may come and sit to me now whenever you please.” He had at last caught her special attitude,—her distinctive phase. “I hope he will take your picture,” “Daddy” Crisp had said, when she first made the artist’s acquaintance;—“who knows, but the time may come when your image may appear . . . like Garrick with the Comic and Tragic Muse contending for you?” Thalia and Melpomene were certainly to contend for the author of Evelina, and that at no distant date. There is however no picture of Fanny Burney in the Reynolds Gallery. Hoppner painted her later; but Hoppner is not Sir Joshua. Her best likeness, one of two from the same hand, is by her cousin, Edward Burney, who, it is hinted, surveyed his model—

and—it is also hinted—possibly slightly flattered her.

Edward Burney’s portrait, which is prefixed to the Diary and Letters of 1842-6, had been mezzotinted two years earlier by Charles Turner on a larger scale. It is said to represent Miss Burney at the age of thirty, having been painted at Chessington in August 1782. She wears a hat and feathers; and her hair is frizzed out in the approved fashion of the day. Her attitude is conventional:—she sits demurely erect, with formally posed hands. But her eyes are brimming with latent animation; and the corners of the lips are lifted with a lurking sense of fun. Of the sitter’s stature the picture gives little indication. She is reported, however, to have been extremely slight and frail of make—“a small cargo for the Chessington coach,” said Mr. Crisp. It was perhaps owing to this that she preserved so long her youthful and almost girlish appearance. As to her eyes, which, in the portrait, look large and luminous, we have her own assurance that they were greenish gray; and from the fact that she was called “the dove” by one of her Tunbridge friends, we must assume that they resembled those of Mrs. Delany, who is praised by her adoring husband for “what Solomon calls ‘dove’s eyes.’ ” Her complexion was brown; and she is affirmed to have been rather French-looking. Beautiful of feature, perhaps, she could scarcely be called. But it is admitted that she had great charm of expression, and a countenance which was quick to betray every passing emotion. “Poor Fanny’s face”—said her father—“tells us what she thinks whether she will or no”; and she confirms this herself by lamenting her lack of power to command her features. She “rouged” readily—to use her own euphemism for blushing. For the rest, she was all her life ailing and delicate. But like many valetudinarians, she succeeded in surviving her robuster relatives. She out-lasted all her sisters except one; and she lived to the age of eighty-seven.^[36]

When Dr. Burney fetched his daughter from Chessington, it had been arranged that they should stop at Streatham Place on their way back to town. This they did; and Fanny’s diary gives a full account of what she pronounces to be “the most consequential day she had spent since her birth.” Mrs. Thrale was very gracious, and very discreet, only mentioning Evelina in order to refer to Dr. Johnson’s genuine admiration for the book. Mr. Seward, whom we remember as one of the visitors to St. Martin’s Street, was not by any means so considerate, bluntly blurting out his praises in the most embarrassing manner. At dinner a place was left next Miss Burney for Dr. Johnson, who presently appeared. The Doctor was as delicate as Mrs. Thrale, only touching indirectly and circuitously upon the burning topic. Asked by Mrs. Thrale to have some little pies of mutton, he declared gallantly that sitting next Miss Burney made him too proud to eat mutton. Later, after some rambling talk about the wear and tear of Garrick’s face, he went on to speak of Dr. Burney’s rival, Sir John Hawkins, whom he can scarcely be said to have extolled. He believed him “an honest man at the bottom; but to be sure,” he continued, “he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.” Giving an instance of Sir John’s “unclubbable” character, he added that it reminded him of a lady with whom he had once travelled, who, stopping at an inn in her own coach and four, called for—a pint of ale! quarrelling moreover with the waiter for not giving full measure. And here came in another adroit allusion to Evelina. “Mme. Duval”—said the Doctor—“could not have done a grosser thing!”—a sentiment which of course convulsed the company, and threw the young person at his side into the most delicious confusion. Altogether the visit was delightful; and when Fanny and her father got into the chaise to go, it was a settled thing that she was to come again to Streatham, and for a much longer stay.

When she reached St. Martin’s Street, there were further honours in store for her. Hetty had lately met Frances Reynolds, who was full of the new novel, “though without a shadow of suspicion as to the scribbler.” This, of itself, was not much; but Miss Reynolds also announced that her brother, Sir Joshua, having begun it when “he was too much engaged to go on with it, was so much caught, that he could think of nothing else, and was quite absent all the day, not knowing a word that was said to him; and, when he took it up again, found himself so much interested in it, that he sat up all night to finish it!” He would give fifty pounds, he had subsequently declared, to know the author, and other people were equally inquisitive. After this interesting piece of intelligence, Fanny thought she would herself go to Mr. Thomas Lowndes, and ascertain in what way that gentleman was satisfying the eagerness of enquirers. As she could not trust herself to speak, her step-mother went with her. They began by buying a copy, and then asked Mr. Lowndes—a pompous and consequential personage who happened to be in the shop—if he could tell them who wrote it. No, he replied, he did not know himself. Pressed further, he said that the author was a gentleman of the other end of the town; and, in response to renewed cross-questioning on Mrs. Burney’s part, affirmed that he was a master of his subject, and well versed in the manners of the times. Moreover, that he (Mr. Lowndes) had at first thought Evelina was by Horace Walpole, who had once published a book in the same “snug manner,”^[37] but he did not think so now. (Other people, it may be noted, had attributed it to Christopher Anstey of the New Bath Guide, then some dozen years old,—a work which Miss Anville and Lord Orville peruse together at Mrs. Beaumont’s.) Finally, out of sheer inability to satisfy his interrogator, Mr. Lowndes hinted darkly, “with a most important face,” that he had been told that the authorship of Evelina was a piece of real secret history, which could consequently never be known. This final piece of information was too much for the listener, who “was obliged to look out at the shop-door” for the remainder of the interview. To the modern student Fanny’s investigations would have been more satisfying if they had thrown some definite light on the progress of the book from the publisher’s point of view. In spite of various statements to the contrary, it seems clear that when, in August, 1778, she and her step-mother went to Fleet Street, Mr. Lowndes was still selling the first impression. The second edition is dated 1779; and in October, 1796, the author wrote that “the first edition of Evelina was of eight hundred, the second of five hundred, and the third of a thousand” copies. On the other hand, Lowndes, who should certainly have been acquainted with the facts, informed Dr. Burney, in an unpublished letter of 1782, that he only printed a first edition of five hundred. Whichever be the correct version of the story, it is pretty clear that the sale for the first twelve months can scarcely be regarded as extraordinary.^[38]

Before the end of August Mrs. Thrale called at St. Martin’s Street, and carried off her new friend to Streatham Place; and at Streatham Place Fanny practically remained for the rest of 1778. The inviting white house with its wooded park, or enclosure, where—to use Susan Burney’s expression—the “cattle, poultry, and dogs all ran freely about without annoying each other,” has now long been a thing of the past, having been pulled down in 1863. Its site was the southern side of the lower common between Streatham and Tooting. It was a three-storied building, with many cheerful rooms which Fanny’s records make familiar to us. The saloon was hung with sky blue; and there was a parlour for the more crowded dinner parties, decorated with prints by Hogarth and others which, probably inaccurately, are described as being “pasted” on the walls. The library, also used frequently as a breakfast room, had been built by Mr. Thrale about 1773, and was kept stocked with books by Johnson, who here—said Mrs. Thrale—“talked Ramblers,” while she read aloud the last proofs of the Lives of the Poets. Above the book-cases, hung the famous Thrale Gallery, dispersed in 1816,—portraits by Sir Joshua of Johnson, of Burke, of the artist himself, of Goldsmith, Garrick, Murphy, Baretti, Dr. Burney and other visitors to the house. Over the fireplace, and also by Reynolds, was the double picture of Mrs. Thrale and Queenie, which was exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884. In the grounds, besides plantations, and high-walled kitchen gardens with ice-houses and pineries, there was an encircling shrubbery which bordered a gravelled walk of nearly two miles. There was also a spring pond, dug by Thrale, which, apparently in imitation of Duck Island in St. James’s Park, boasted its Dick’s Island; and there was “a cool summer-house,” where Johnson wrote and studied, and Fanny read, or essayed to read, Irene. It must have been a most delightful country-house, meriting fully the Doctor’s grateful eulogy that “none but itself could be its parallel.” “I have found nothing,” he wrote from Lichfield in 1767, “that withdraws my affections from the friends whom I left behind, or which makes me less desirous of reposing at that place which your kindness and Mr. Thrale’s allows me to call my home.” “These are as good people,” he said to Miss Burney in the first days of her visit, “as you can be with; you can go to no better house; they are all good nature; nothing makes them angry.”

He himself seems to have softened with his environment. Although, as Fanny says, the freedom with which he condemned what he disapproved was astonishing, and his strength of language would to most persons be intolerable, he presented, upon the whole, a far more benignant aspect than that in which he is usually exhibited by Boswell. He is Johnson in clover, and en belle humeur; happier and more at ease than he is elsewhere, and therefore more agreeable. To the yet undisclosed author of Evelina he is especially gracious, and even affectionate. He kisses her hand; makes her sit by him; pays her elaborate compliments; and no one, when he pleased, could do that better. “Harry Fielding,” he protested, “never drew so good a character” as her Mr. Smith. “Such a fine varnish of low politeness!—such a struggle to appear a gentleman! Madam [to Mrs. Thrale], there is no character better drawn anywhere—in any book, or by any author”—an extravagance which almost leads one particular author present to “poke herself under the table.” He bursts out with sudden quotations from Evelina:—with Miss Branghton’s, “Only think, Polly! Miss has danced with a Lord!”—he rallies poor Mr. Seward on his resemblance to the Holborn beau.—“Why you only want a tambour waistcoat, to look like Mr. Smith!” Then he is heard grumbling to himself over a letter from Fanny’s medical adviser, Dr. Jebb, whose penmanship is that of a tradesman. “Mr. Branghton would have written his name with just such beastly flourishes!” But perhaps the acme of his amiable speeches is his frank comparison of “dear little Burney,” as he comes to call her, with Fielding and Richardson. “Richardson,” he said, “would have been really afraid of her; there is merit,” he went on, “in Evelina which he could not have borne. No; it would not have done! unless, indeed, she would have flattered him prodigiously. Harry Fielding, too, would have been afraid of her; there is nothing so delicately finished in all Harry Fielding’s works as in Evelina.” Then, shaking his head at her, he exclaimed, “O, you little character-monger you!”—an appellation which must be admitted to be singularly appropriate. On another occasion, he declared that she was his “hero.” “Dr. Goldsmith was my last; but I have had none since his time, till my little Burney came.”^[39] “I admire her”—he said again, and to her face—“for her observation, for her good sense, for her humour, for her discernment, for her manner of expressing them, and for all her writing talents.” Decidedly it was good to be praised by Johnson; and one may well forgive Miss Burney for doubting whether she could possibly live up to his laudation.

Visitors to Streatham Place came and went so freely that it is difficult to chronicle them. Among the rest was that accomplished esprit fort, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, to whom Mrs. Thrale could not deny herself the pleasure of exhibiting her own special prize and discovery, the author of Evelina. Mrs. Montagu came to Streatham by invitation, accompanied by her friend, Miss Gregory. Dr. Johnson was very anxious that “Burney” should attack the “Queen of the Blue Stockings,” much as, in his own hot youth, he had hawked at all established wits. But Mrs. Thrale, finding that Mrs. Montagu knew nothing of Evelina, disclosed the secret of the authorship so abruptly, that Fanny fairly took to her heels and fled. Hence she saw less of the great lady than she would otherwise; and between the extreme blame of “Daddy” Crisp and the extreme praise of Mrs. Thrale, was not perhaps greatly prepossessed in favour of Mrs. Montagu, who, moreover, had been so ill-advised as never to have heard of Evelina. But Mrs. Montagu was very well-bred and polite; and easily fell in with Dr. Johnson’s suggestion that Miss Burney should accompany the rest of those present to the housewarming with which she hoped shortly to open her new abode in Portman Square,—that famous mansion of the feather-hangings celebrated by Cowper’s—

It was in reference to a suggestion by Mrs. Montagu that Fanny’s dedication was good enough to have been written by her father—a suggestion which, with all her filial affection, Fanny could scarcely be expected to welcome very warmly—that Johnson uttered one of his common-sense deliverances on criticism. “You must not mind that”—he said of Mrs. Montagu’s impolitic remark,—“for such things are always said where books are successful. There are three distinct kinds of judges upon all new authors or productions; the first are those who know no rules, but pronounce entirely from their natural taste and feelings; the second are those who know and judge by rules; and the third are those who know, but are above the rules. These last are those you should wish to satisfy. Next to them rate the natural judges; but ever despise those opinions that are formed by the rules.” Of this second class, his own “Dick Minim” is an admirable exemplification.^[40]

In January, 1779, Miss Burney was again at St. Martin’s Street, her sister Susan being from home. St. Martin’s Street has a mysterious visit from “a square old gentleman, well-wigged, formal, grave and important,” who suddenly asks her if she is not Evelina, and turns out to be Dr. Francklin, chaplain to the Royal Academy. Then she is invited to Sir Joshua’s to meet Mrs. and Miss [Mary] Horneck (Goldsmith’s “Jessamy Bride”), soon to be married to Colonel Gwyn. The ladies had said that they would walk a hundred and sixty miles to see her, so there was nothing to excuse her for not stepping across the Fields to No. 47. Here she met another admirer, Peg Woffington’s witty and eccentric sister, Mrs. Cholmondeley; and Lord Palmerston, father of the Victorian premier; and Burke’s brother William, the “honest William” of Goldsmith’s Retaliation. All, and especially Sir Joshua, were most cordial, though Mrs. Cholmondeley’s “pointed speeches,” Duval Ma foi’s, and references to Evelina generally, would have been embarrassing, even to a less nervous person than the author. Mrs. Cholmondeley, among other things, had been to Lowndes for information, getting nothing from that windbag but intelligence that a gentleman had betted that the writer of Evelina was a man, while she, Mrs. Cholmondeley, felt equally convinced it was a woman. “But now”—she added—“we are both out; for it’s a girl!”—which must be accepted as unanswerable testimony to Fanny’s youthful appearance at six-and-twenty.

This interview with Mrs. Cholmondeley, who had been one of the book’s earliest and most energetic trumpeters (it was she, indeed, who had first recommended it “among the wits”), was of course, followed by an invitation, which proved a most important one. For at Mrs. Cholmondeley’s in Hertford Street she met, not only the beautiful “St. Cecilia” of Reynolds, with her almost equally beautiful sister, Miss Linley; but she met “St. Cecilia’s” husband, the all-conquering author of the recently-produced School for Scandal and manager of Drury Lane, Richard Brinsley Sheridan himself, of whom she writes admiringly. He has “a good though I don’t think a handsome face. He is tall, and very upright, and his appearance and address are at once manly and fashionable, without the smallest tincture of foppery or modish graces. In short, I like him vastly, and think him every way worthy his beautiful companion,”—to whom, Fanny adds, he was manifestly much devoted. By and by, Sheridan introduced himself to Miss Burney, and was most agreeable. He had been telling her father, he said, that he had long expected to see in her “a lady of the gravest appearance, with the quickest parts.” He expressed the highest admiration for Evelina, adding that he hoped she (Miss Burney) did not intend to throw away her pen. He was very curious to know what she was about, and Sir Joshua observed that she must succeed in “anything in the dialogue way.” Mr. Sheridan assented. He thought “she should write a comedy.” “And you,” said the kind Sir Joshua presently, “would take anything of hers, would you not?—unsight, unseen?” “Yes,” he answered with quickness, “and make her a bow and my best thanks into the bargain.” Here was a piece of news to post off to Susan!

As a matter of fact, Miss Burney was already engaged upon a dramatic essay. Both her father and “Daddy” Crisp were anxious that, before interest cooled, she should follow up her first success by some other work; and from the date of Mrs. Thrale’s first letter to Dr. Burney,^[41] that lady had been pressing her to write for the stage. She had the same conviction as Reynolds that something “in the dialogue way” would suit her young friend. Evelina—Mrs. Thrale thought—ran so naturally into conversations that it absolutely and plainly pointed that path to her. If she could not do better than Hannah More, who got nearly four hundred pounds for her foolish play,^[42] she deserved to be whipped—said this kindly enthusiast. Dr. Johnson, after see-sawing immoderately, proposed, in a fit of untimely levity, that her first work should be entitled, Streatham: A Farce; but he, too, heartily approved. Mrs. Montagu, who was consulted, though she was sympathetic, was not so sure. She advanced the case of Fielding, who failed upon the stage. And “Daddy” Crisp was still more half-hearted. He wrote to Fanny an admirable letter upon the subject. While he was urgent that she should do something, he was by no means satisfied that the something in question should be a comedy. In a second letter he developed his ideas. She had gained much: she had much to lose. And play-writing—for her—had its peculiar difficulties. Her delicacy (and she was a prude, she knew herself) would debar her from those frequent lively freedoms without which comedy would lose wonderfully of its salt and spirit. All the same he would evidently not have her try the bloodless and prevalent sentimental comedy. About Fielding, he agreed with Mrs. Montagu. Finally, though he did not wholly desire to discourage her from the attempt, he thought that, in entering upon it, she must surrender a part of her strength. And here we may use his actual words:—“In these little entertaining elegant histories [such as Evelina], the writer has his full scope; as large a range as he pleases to hunt in—to pick, cull, select whatever he likes: he takes his own time—he may be as minute as he pleases, and the more minute the better, provided that taste, a deep and penetrating knowledge of human nature and the world, accompany that minuteness. When this is the case, the very soul, and all its most secret recesses and workings, are developed and laid as open to the view, as the blood-globules circulating in a frog’s foot, when seen through a microscope. The exquisite touches such a work is capable of (of which Evelina is, without flattery, a glaring instance), are truly charming. But of these great advantages, these resources, you are strangely curtailed the moment you begin a comedy. There, everything passes in dialogue,—all goes on rapidly—narrative and descriptive, if not extremely short, becomes intolerable. The detail which in Fielding, Marivaux, and CrÉbillon, is so delightful, on the stage would bear down all patience. There all must be compressed into quintessence; the moment the scene ceases to move on briskly, and business seems to hang, sighs and groans are the consequence. Dreadful sound!—In a word, if the plot, the story of the comedy does not open and unfold itself in the easy, natural, unconstrained flow of the dialogue—if that dialogue does not go on with spirit, wit, variety, fun, humour, repartee,—and all in short into the bargain—serviteur!—good-bye t’ ye!”

This is excellently said, and shows once again how precept may excel practice,—though, to be sure, “Daddy” Crisp’s Virginia was a tragedy, and not a comedy. In a later letter Fanny’s Mentor modified his views to the extent of admitting that it was possible, with due contrivance and dexterity, to display light principles without light expressions; but he stuck to the proposition that he would never allow his Fannikin “to sacrifice a grain of female delicacy for all the wit of Congreve and Vanbrugh put together,”—and in this she was entirely of his mind. These letters preceded the interview with Sheridan; and as we have already said, she had probably begun to work on a comedy still earlier.^[43] When, in February, she got back to Streatham, she made the acquaintance of Arthur Murphy, in whose Way to Keep Him she had acted at Barborne Lodge. He, too, volunteered the suggestion that she should write for the stage. Comedy, in his opinion, was the forte of Evelina, and he offered his skilled assistance. He subsequently gave her some rules by which she was too far advanced in her work to profit—rules which, Johnson consolingly told her, she would do just as well without. In May her play is finished, though “on account of the various Maecenases who would expect to be consulted,” the greatest secrecy is observed. Murphy applauds; and so does Mrs. Thrale. Johnson apparently was not consulted. But when it is carried off by Dr. Burney to “Daddy” Crisp, the verdict of Fanny’s “highest court” is unfavourable. Indeed, in what she calls a “hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle,” they go as far as to recommend its suppression. Not only did it recall the Femmes Savantes of MoliÈre (which Fanny had never read), but they regarded the plot and incidents as insufficient to hold the attention of the audience. Fanny took her disappointment bravely, and at once threw her work aside. Later on, when it became necessary to explain matters to Sheridan, there was some talk of remodelling, and with this object the fourth act was almost entirely re-written. But Crisp, who was appealed to, stood to his guns. He thought the capital defect of an ill-planned fable beyond remedy, though he admitted the wit of the play.

Here the matter seems to have rested; and all we know of the suppressed piece is, that it was entitled The Witlings, and that the dramatis personae included, among others, a quotation-loving Lady Smatter (in whom Mrs. Thrale professed to recognise her own portrait), Mrs. Voluble, Mrs. Wheedle, Mrs. Sapient, Dabbler, Censor, and a “great oaf, Bobby.” There was also—and the point is memorable in view of the title of Miss Burney’s next novel—a Cecilia, the loss and restoration of whose fortune were matters in debate. Whether Dr. Burney and his friend were right in their judgment of The Witlings, cannot now be affirmed or denied in the absence of the MS. Probably they were right; though they do not seem to have borne in mind how material a part the acting bears in the success of a piece; and at Sheridan’s theatre, Miss Burney’s comedy would certainly have been splendidly represented. King, Dodd, Palmer, Parsons, Mrs. Abington, and Miss Pope—would all probably have taken part in it. But Fanny’s advisers, it is clear, were also actuated by another reflection, of which Murphy knew nothing: they feared the effect upon the author of a possible fiasco. “My great scruple all along has been the consideration of the great stake you are playing for,”—writes Mr. Crisp,—“how much you have to lose, and how unequal your delicate and tender frame of mind would be to sustain the shock of a failure of success, should that be the case.” This is perhaps not a critical reason; but, at the same time, it is a reason beyond criticism. And “Daddy” Crisp shows plainly that it was The Witlings he doubted,—not Fanny’s ability to produce comedy. For, in an earlier letter, he had suggested to her a fresh effort, based upon certain of her own experiences as narrated to her father.

It was early in 1779 that Miss Burney made the acquaintance of Sheridan at Mrs. Cholmondeley’s; and it was not until the beginning of 1780 that The Witlings was practically abandoned. In the interim, at Streatham and elsewhere, Fanny seems to have spent her time very agreeably. In May, she went with the Thrales to Brighton, returning, apparently, early in June, owing to the sudden illness of Mr. Thrale. But in October they were again at Brighton, taking Knole Park (Lord Dorset’s) and its magnificent galleries in their way, and making a short stay at Tunbridge Wells, where Miss Burney pours scorn upon the famous Pantiles as a fashionable pleasure walk. “It has no beauty in itself, and borrows none from foreign aid, as it has only common houses at one side, and little millinery and Tunbridge-ware shops at the other, and at each end is choked up by buildings that intercept all prospect.” At Brighton, no doubt in the interests of Evelina, Mrs. Thrale at once inscribed their names at the booksellers’ shops upon the Steyne. At this date there were no great notabilities at Brighthelmstone, as Fanny styles the place, save “that celebrated wit and libertine,” the Hon. Mr. Beauclerk, and his wife, Lady Di; Cumberland the dramatist and his family; and Mrs. Musters, whose son married Byron’s first love, Mary Chaworth. The Miss Cumberlands were reckoned “the flashers of the place,” and Fanny gives an account of their father which reads like a scene from the Critic. “Sir Fretful Plagiary” was already prejudiced against her on account of her success; and when he called on Mrs. Thrale, he showed it. As soon as she had quitted the room he said to Mrs. Thrale, with a spiteful tone of voice,

“ ‘Oh, that young lady is an author, I hear!’

“ ‘Yes,’ answered Mrs. Thrale, ‘author of Evelina.’

“ ‘Humph—I am told it has some humour!’

“ ‘Ay, indeed! Johnson says nothing like it has appeared for years!’

“ ‘So,’ cried he, biting his lips, and waving uneasily in his chair, ’so, so!’

“ ‘Yes,’ continued she; ‘and Sir Joshua Reynolds told Mr. Thrale he would give fifty pounds to know the author!’

“ ‘So, so—oh, vastly well!’ cried he, putting his hand on his forehead.

“ ‘Nay!’ added she, ‘Burke himself sat up all night to finish it!’

“This seemed quite too much for him; he put both his hands to his face, and waving backwards and forwards, said, ‘Oh, vastly well!—this will do for anything!’ with a tone as much as to say, Pray, no more! Then Mrs. Thrale bid him good night, longing, she said, to call Miss Thrale first, and say, ‘So you won’t speak to my daughter?—why, she is no author.’ ”

Some of the persons sketched in Miss Burney’s journal are less known to fame than those who have been mentioned, but they are not less cleverly drawn. There is Mr. Seward, one of the Streatham habituÉs, and the later author of Biographiana. Mr. Seward is a brewer’s son, who dabbles in letters, and seems like an earlier real-life version of Sir Charles Coldstream in Used Up. With “Mr. Dry,” as Miss Burney calls him, she playfully proposes to collaborate in a comedy, to be entitled Everything a Bore. There is a real tragic author, Dr. John Delap, who, while as absent-minded and as ignorant of the world as Parson Adams, is engaged upon a play called Macaria,^[44] on the story of the wife and daughter of Hercules, which Fanny has to read and criticise—or rather eulogise. There is a very musical, precocious, and semi-French ten-year-old schoolgirl, Miss Birch, who sings sentimental airs from French operas, and says to her friends, “Que je vous adore!”—“Ah, permettez que je me mette À vos pieds!” etc., with a dying languor that is equally delightful and preposterous. And there is that finished and fascinating coquette of coquettes, Miss Sophy Streatfield of Tunbridge Wells, who knows Greek as well as Miss Elizabeth Carter or Mrs. Buller, is as lovely as Mrs. Crewe or Mrs. Sheridan, and has moreover a faculty for shedding tears so becoming to her lackadaisical cast of beauty that she is periodically required (like the water works at Vauxhall) to display her unique gift for the public delectation. Fanny’s description of Miss Streatfield’s mechanical grandes eaux is too good to be neglected. We must imagine her surrounded by attentive spectators, with Mrs. Thrale (like Mrs. Jarley) for exhibitor. “ ‘Yes, do cry a little, Sophy [in a wheedling voice], pray, do! Consider, now, you are going to-day, and it’s very hard if you won’t cry a little; indeed, S. S., you ought to cry.’ Now for the wonder of wonders. When Mrs. Thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a nurse soothing a baby, had run on for some time—while all the rest of us, in laughter, joined in the request—two crystal tears came into the soft eyes of the S. S., and rolled gently down her cheeks! Such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed.^[45] She offered not to conceal or dissipate them: on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by everybody. She looked, indeed, uncommonly handsome, for her pretty face was not like Chloe’s [in Prior], blubbered; it was smooth and elegant, and neither her features nor complexion were at all ruffled; nay, indeed, she was smiling all the time.” It is melancholy to think that a lady who possessed in such perfection the attributes of Venus Victrix, should die unmarried. Yet this was the untoward fate of the “S. S.” “Everybody’s admiration, and nobody’s choice,” as one of her friends said, she survived until 1835, an ancient maiden lady, concerning whom we do not even know whether—like Pope’s Patty Blount—she retained to the last the charm of her wonderful blue eyes.

But Miss Streatfield is not the person upon whom Miss Burney concentrates her fullest powers of description. That honour is reserved for an unidentified Mr. B——y, to whom she devotes several pages. Mr. B——y, or “The General,” as she styles him, is an Irishman. He has been a Commissary in Germany; is between sixty and seventy, but means to pass for thirty; a professed admirer of the sex, whom he invariably calls “fair females”; garnishes his speech with French tags of the most hackneyed kind; quotes often and inaccurately; and although Fanny, afraid of painting too much en noir, declares him to be worthy and moral at bottom, seems to outward view to be nothing but a blundering, prejudiced, puffing, domineering busybody and bore. He is enraged with Reynolds for charging seventy guineas “to scratch out a head”; he is enraged with Garrick for living like a person of quality; he is enraged with Agujari for getting fifty pounds for a mere song; he is equally enraged with Rauzzini because the “fair females” sigh over him, and make a man sick. But the General’s standing topic is his health; his rooted antipathy, physicians; and his favourite story—which he tells three or four times a day—in this wise:—“ ‘Some years ago,’—he says—‘let’s see, how many? in the year ’71—ay, ’71, ’72—thereabouts—I was taken very ill, and, by ill luck, I was persuaded to ask the advice of one of these Dr. Gallipots:—oh, how I hate them all! Sir, they are the vilest pickpockets,—know nothing, sir! Nothing in the world! poor ignorant mortals! and they pretend—in short, sir, I hate them all; I have suffered so much by them, sir—lost four years of the happiness of my life—let’s see, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74—ay, four years, sir!—mistook my case, sir!—and all that kind of thing. Why, sir, my feet swelled as big as two horses’ heads! I vow I will never consult one of these Dr. Gallipot fellows again! lost me, sir, four years of the happiness of my life!—why, I grew quite an object!—you would hardly have known me!—lost all the calves of my legs!—had not an ounce of flesh left!—and as to the rouge—why, my face was the colour of that candle!—those Gallipot fellows!—why they robbed me of four years—let me see, ’71, ’72—’

“And then it all goes over again!

“This story is always a-propos; if health is mentioned, it is instanced to show its precariousness; if life, to bewail what he has lost of it; if pain, to relate what he has suffered; if pleasure, to recapitulate what he has been deprived of; but if a physician is hinted at, eagerly indeed is the opportunity seized of inveighing against the whole faculty.”

There is more, especially of the General grumbling over the newspaper; but enough has been given. In all these pictures, it may be noted, Miss Burney insists upon her fidelity to fact. “I never mix truth and fiction,” she tells “Daddy” Crisp. “I have other purposes for imaginary characters than filling letters with them.” “The world, and especially the Great world, is so filled with absurdity of various sorts, now bursting forth in impertinence, now in pomposity, now giggling in silliness, and now yawning in dullness, that there is no occasion for invention to draw what is striking in every possible species of the ridiculous.” As time went on, her opportunities for study rather increased than decreased. At the beginning of 1780, as already related, the question of her comedy was again partly revived. Then there were proposals for a tour in Italy with the Thrales which was afterwards abandoned. But in April she went with her friends to Bath, making acquaintance en route, at the Bear at Devizes, with the hostess’s clever son, who afterwards became Sir Thomas Lawrence. At Bath they lodge (like Smollett’s Mr. Bramble) in the South Parade, with Allen’s Prior Park, the meadows, and “the soft flowing Avon” in view; and are speedily absorbed in the fashionable diversions of the place. Prelates were preaching at the Abbey and St. James’s Churches; there were public breakfasts in the Spring Gardens; the Pump Room was crowded with company and the Walks with promenaders; Mrs. Siddons was playing Belvidera at Mr. Palmer’s Theatre in Orchard Street; and life was one endless round of fiddles, dinners, concerts, assemblies, balls, card-parties and scandal. Miss Burney’s canvas becomes more and more crowded, and less detailed, affording space only for occasional vignettes such as the following: “In the evening we had Mrs. L——, a fat, round, panting, short-breathed old widow; and her daughter, a fubsy, good-humoured, laughing, silly, merry old maid. They are rich folks, and live together very comfortably, and the daughter sings—not in your fine Italian taste! no, that she and her mother agree to hold very cheap—but all about Daphne, and Chloe, and Damon, and Phillis, and Jockey!” Or this,—on the same page,—“Mrs. K—— is a Welsh lady, of immense fortune, who has a house in the Crescent, and lives in a most magnificent style. She is about fifty, very good-humoured, well-bred, and civil, and her waist does not measure above a hogshead. She is not very deep, I must own; but what of that? If all were wits, where would be the admirers at them?”

Dr. Johnson did not take part in the Bath expedition. He would, indeed, have come; but Mrs. Thrale had discouraged his doing so, feeling sure that a watering-place life would have horribly wearied him, which is not only possible but extremely probable. Literature—that is to say the literature of 1780—was nevertheless fairly represented in Bladud’s ancient City. First and foremost there was Mrs. Thrale’s rival, Mrs. Montagu, with her attendant train of blue-stockings; there was Anstey of the New Bath Guide, whom—as we have seen—wiseacres had credited with Evelina; there was Mrs. Susannah Dobson, the translator of Petrarch; there was Melmoth of Pliny’s Letters; there was Miss Elizabeth Carter of Epictetus; there was Lady Miller of Batheaston and the famous Frascati vase wherein—according to Macaulay—“fools were wont to put bad verses,” but which, however, at this precise moment of time, was not en fonction.^[46] To the failings of her confrÈres and consoeurs, Miss Burney, it must be confessed, in her capacity of “faithful historian” is not always “very kind.” Of poor Lady Miller, who died a year later, she writes, “She is a round, plump, coarse-looking dame of about forty, and while all her aim is to appear an elegant woman of fashion, all her success is to seem an ordinary woman in very common life, with fine clothes on. Her habits are bustling, her air is mock-important, and her manners very inelegant.” Of Mrs. Dobson, she reports that “though coarse, low-bred, forward, self-sufficient, and flaunting, she seems to have a strong and masculine understanding, and parts that, had they been united with modesty, or fostered by education, might have made her a shining and agreeable woman; but she has evidently kept low company, which she has risen above in literature, but not in manners.” Of Miss Carter, on the contrary, then growing old, Miss Burney says, that she “never saw age so graceful in the female sex yet, her whole face seems to beam with goodness, piety and philanthropy.” Anstey she finds not very agreeable—“shyly important, and silently proud,” and moreover unable to forget that he is the author of a popular work; while Pliny Melmoth is written down as “intolerably self-sufficient.”

Some of the Bath visitors were naval officers who—it should be observed—did not at all accept Captain Mirvan’s portrait as typical of their profession. One of them, Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Captain Cotton, pretended “in a comical and good-humoured way” to resent it highly; and so—he told the author—did all the Captains in the Navy. Admiral Byron, too,—the Byron of the “narrative” in Don Juan,—though he admired Evelina, was “not half pleased with the Captain’s being such a brute.” But Miss Burney herself is unconvinced and impenitent. “The more I see of sea-captains, the less reason I have to be ashamed of Captain Mirvan; for they have all so irresistible a propensity to wanton mischief,—to roasting beaux, and detesting old women, that I quite rejoice I showed the book to no one ere printed, lest I should have been prevailed upon to soften his character.” What the sea-captains, and the Bathonians generally thought of their critic, is not related, save in a sentence from Thraliana:—“Miss Burney was much admired at Bath (1780); the puppy-men said, ‘She had such a drooping air and such a timid intelligence’; or ‘a timid air,’ I think it was, and ‘a drooping intelligence’; never sure was such a collection of pedantry and affectation as filled Bath when we were on that spot.” The almost imperceptible feline touch in this passage serves to remind us that, in the padlocked privacy of her personal records, Mrs. Thrale did not scruple (like Dr. Johnson) to mingle praise with blame when occasion required. From other entries in Thraliana, Fanny seems to have sometimes vexed her friend by her prudish punctiliousness and dread of patronage, as well as by her perhaps more defensible preference for her own family. “What a blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else?” . . . “If I did not provide Fanny with every wearable—every wishable, indeed—it would not vex me to be served so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of St. Martin’s Street, makes one at once merry and mortified.” There were other reasons, as we shall learn presently, why Dr. Burney was anxious that Fanny should come back.^[47]

Meanwhile, early in June, the Bath visit came to a premature conclusion. Returning from a visit to Lady Miller, Mrs. Thrale received intelligence of the Gordon riots. Her house in the Borough had been besieged by the mob, and only saved from destruction by the assistance of the Guards and the presence of mind of the superintendent, Mr. Perkins. Streatham Place was also threatened, and emptied of its furniture. What was worse, Mr. Thrale, then in a very unsatisfactory state of health, had been falsely denounced as a papist; and as there were also rioters at Bath, Mrs. Thrale and Fanny decided that it would be best to quit that place, and travel about the country. They started for Brighton; but before they got to Salisbury, London was again, in Dr. Burney’s words, “the most secure residence in the kingdom.” For the remainder of the year 1780, Fanny seems to have stayed quietly at St. Martin’s Street and Chessington. In March, 1781, she came to town to find the Thrales settled for the time in a hired house in Grosvenor Square and talking vaguely of continental travel—to Spa, to Italy, and elsewhere. But Mr. Thrale was obviously growing worse; and in April he died suddenly of apoplexy, “on the morning of a day on which half the fashion of London had been invited to an intended assembly at his house.” His death threw an infinity of additional care upon his already over-burdened widow; but, as soon as she was able, she again summoned Miss Burney to Streatham Place, where off and on, she lived until September. Then “Daddy” Crisp, descending from his Surrey retreat, bore her away perforce to Chessington; and at Chessington she continued to stay until the beginning of 1782, when she returned to Newton House in order to be present at her sister Susan’s marriage at St. Martin’s Church to Captain Molesworth Phillips of the Marines, a comrade, in Cook’s last voyage, of James Burney. After this, Fanny remained for some time quietly at home.

The reason why Dr. Burney wished to get his daughter away from Streatham Place, and why, at last, Mr. Crisp fetched her thence,—may perhaps be guessed. She had begun to work upon another novel; and her long absences from home seriously interfered with its progress. During the latter half of 1780, she had written steadily; but, in the following year, her renewed intercourse with Mrs. Thrale once more interrupted her labours; and her two fathers grew anxious that she should lose no further time. Of the advantages up to a certain point of her connection with the Streatham circle, both of them had been fully aware—Crisp especially. “Your time,” he had written to her in April, 1780, “could not be better employed, for all your St. Martin’s daddy wanted to retain you for some other purpose. You are now at school, the great school of the world, where swarms of new ideas and new characters will continually present themselves before you,—

            ‘which you’ll draw in,

As we do air, fast as ’tis ministered.’ ”^[48]