Charles Burney, the second son of Charles Burney, the author of The History of Music, was born at Lynn, Norfolk, in the early part of December (the exact date is uncertain) 1757. He was educated at the Charterhouse, and Caius College, Cambridge, but left the University without taking a degree. He afterwards became a student of King's College, Aberdeen, where he graduated M.A. in 1781. After leaving the College he devoted himself to educational work, and for a short time was an assistant master at Highgate School, which he left to join Dr. William Rose, the translator of Sallust, in his school at Chiswick. In 1786, having married Rose's second daughter in 1783, he opened a school of his own at Hammersmith, which he carried on until 1793, when he removed to Greenwich, and there established a very flourishing academy, which in 1813 he made over to his son, the Rev. Charles Parr Burney. Late in life (1807) Burney took orders, and was appointed to the Rectory of St. Paul's, Deptford, Kent, and in a short time after to the Rectory of Cliffe in the same county. In 1811 he was made Chaplain to the King, and in 1817, a few months before his death, he was collated to a prebendal stall in Lincoln Cathedral. He received the degree of LL.D. from the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow in 1792, the degree of M.A. was conferred on him by Cambridge University in 1808, and that of D.D. by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1812. Burney, who was the friend and companion of Dr. Parr and Professor Porson, wrote several works on the Greek and Latin Classics, as well as one or two of a theological nature. He died of apoplexy at Deptford on the 28th of December 1817, and a monument to his memory was erected in Westminster Abbey by a number of his old scholars.

Dr. Burney realised a considerable fortune by his scholastic work, and the money which he thus acquired enabled him to form a library of nearly thirteen thousand five hundred volumes of printed books, and five hundred and twenty manuscripts. Among the latter was the Towneley Homer, believed to be of the thirteenth century, and valued at six hundred guineas. The library was particularly rich in the Greek Classics, especially the dramatists; comprising as many as one hundred and sixty-six editions of Euripides, one hundred and two of Sophocles, and forty-seven of Æschylus, the margins of a large proportion of the classical books being covered with notes in Burney's hand, in addition to those by the Stephens, Bentley, Markland, and others. Another very interesting feature of the library was the large number of English newspapers it contained. These papers, which reached from the reign of James I. until nearly the end of that of George III., were bound in about seven hundred volumes, and now form the basis of the splendid collection in the British Museum. Dr. Burney also amassed from three to four hundred volumes containing materials for a history of the British Stage, and several thousand portraits of literary and theatrical personages. On the death of the Doctor his library was purchased for the British Museum for the sum of thirteen thousand five hundred pounds.