traction, and no fortune. The expense of a growing family and an ill state of health, for which the air of London was pronounced injurious by the 'poetic Esculapius,' (vol. i., p. 85,) Dr. Armstrong, induced Mr. Burney to accept the place of organist at Lynn in Norfolk, where he resided nine or ten years, and where most, if not all, of the children of his first marriage were born. It was during his residence at Lynn that, in the year 1755, he addressed a letter to Dr. Johnson, offering to subscribe for six copies of the Dictionary, which led first to some short and transient visits to the lexicographer, and many years after, to that familiar intercourse and friendship which, after all, is the most memorable circumstance in Burney's life.

We must here pause for a moment to complain of a defect in Madame d'Arblay's work even more serious than that of her style -the suppression of dates. We say suppression; because we cannot attribute to accidental negligence the silence of the biographer as to the time of her father's first coming to London

of his marriage-of his migration to Lynn-of the birth of his children, and particularly of Madame d'Arblay herself of the death of his first wife of his second marriage; and, in short, of all the leading events of the earlier part of his life. It can hardly be personal vanity which produces this silence; yet certainly no spinster of a doubtful age can have a greater aversion to accuracy in matters of date than is exhibited by this lady, who admits that she has been above fifty-five years an author and forty years a wife. But though we readily acquit Madame d'Arblay of being led by personal vanity to this studied concealment of dates, yet we shall by and by have occasion to show, that literary vanity may have been the motive of this omission, which, in a biographical work, is peculiarly puzzling and provoking;—for the present we proceed with the life of the Doctor.

In 1760 Burney with his wife and a family of six or seven children returned to London, and began a course of musical tuition, which appears to have soon become extensive and profitable in a very remarkable degree. Johnson, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, records that he gave fifty-seven lessons in one week, but Madame d'Arblay never condescends to such minutiæ about him-unless, indeed, when she has had some share in the transaction. Within a couple of years, however, his prosperity was clouded by the loss of his wife. She was seized with a painful inflammatory disorder, which ended suddenly in a deadly case of mortification.'

'Twelve stated hours of morbid bodily repose became, from that tremendous moment of baleful relief, the counted boundary of her earthly existence.'-vol. i., p. 138.

To

To alleviate his grief for so great a loss, Mr. Burney made a visit to Paris, whence he brought back a translation and adaptation of Rousseau's 'Devin du Village,' which his friend Garrick soon after produced under the title of the Cunning Man,' with equivocal success. In the society of his friends, and in the active exertion of his profession, Mr. Burney wisely sought for consolation-more wisely we think than his biographer describes the effect of the remedial process :

For in that dilapidated state of sorrow's absorption, where the mind is wholly abandoned to its secret sensations, all that innately recurs to it can spring only from its own concentrated sources; and these, though they may vary the evil by palliatives, offer nothing curative.'vol. i., p. 172.

About this time he had the good fortune to renew his acquaintance with a Mr. Crisp, who seems to have been an eccentric goodnatured man, and between whom and Burney's children, and particularly Madame d'Arblay, an almost parental and filial affection appears to have grown up. Indeed the extravagant and bombastic eulogy of which Madame d'Arblay, bountiful to all, is lavish towards Mr. Crisp, is a prominent and almost ludicrous feature of the book. Crisp had a taste for the fine arts, and had just returned from Italy, and Burney found great amusement in his conversation;—and amusing it must have been, if we are to judge of it by the specimen which Madame d'Arblay gives in his description of the Apollo Belvedere :

That unrivalled production, of which the peerless grace, looking softer, though of marble, than the feathered snow, and brightly radiant, though, like the sun, simply white, strikes upon the mind rather than the eye, as an ideal representative of ethereal beauty.'P. 175.

Crisp, though kind and amiable with his intimates, seems to have been of a proud and ascetic temper. Mortified by the failure of a tragedy, called Virginia, and finding himself obliged, by pecuniary difficulties, to reduce his appearance in society, he resolved to retire from the world, and he fixed himself in a dilapidated old house, called Chessington Hall, in a then wild part of Surrey, where he hid himself for many years with such constancy that he passed for dead. Into this solitude, however, Burney was admitted: here he had a bed and a study; here he spent all the hours of recreation he could steal from his profession; here he composed the greater part of his literary works; and here his daughter Fanny, a constant and favourite guest, improved her health, enlarged her understanding, and cultivated her taste, under the guidance of the intelligent recluse, whom she, more affectionately than elegantly, called her daddy.'

These occasional and secluded visits did not however console Burney for the want of domestic society,

'Six heartless, nearly desolate, years of lonely conjugal chasm, had succeeded to double their number of nearly unparalleled conjugal enjoyment and the void was still fallow and hopeless!-when the yetvery-handsome-though-no-longer-in-her-bloom Mrs. Stephen Allen, of Lynn, now become a widow, decided, for promoting the education of her eldest daughter, to make London her winter residence.' -p. 189.

Burney was applied to for assistance in the musical line,' as Madame D'Arblay, with unusual simplicity, phrases it, and soon offered himself in the conjugal line, and was accepted. The first Mrs. Burney had, on her death-bed, generously and considerately recommended a second marriage, and had suggested a Miss Dorothy Young, another of her Lynn friends; but Dorothy was not handsome, and

Mr. Burney, sacred as he held the opinions and wishes of his Esther, was too ardent an admirer of beauty to dispense, in totality, with that attractive embellishment of the female frame.'P. 193.

Madame D'Arblay, though enthusiastically devoted to the memory of her mother, is too just and too dutiful to complain of her father's re-marriage, and indeed-rather too eloquently-defends it.

Those who judge of the sincerity of pristine connubial tenderness merely by its abhorrence of succession, take a very unenlightened, if not false, view of human grief; unless they limit their stigma to an eager or a facile repetition of those rites which, on their first inaugu-. ration, had seemed inviolable and irreplaceable.

So still, in fact, they may faithfully, though silently continue, even under a subsequent new connexion. The secret breast, alive to memory though deprived of sympathy, may still internally adhere to its own choice and fondness; notwithstanding the various and imperious calls of current existence may urge a second alliance.'—p. 191. The marriage seems to have been not unacceptable to the young families of either of the parties, and probably was not unhappy, though very little mention is made of the second Mrs. Burney in the remainder of the work-her maiden name is not told, nor the number of their children; in short, she is a cypher in Madame d'Arblay's history of the family-the doctor's own memoirs would probably have been more communicative. The almost single occasion in which she is mentioned, is worth noticing, not for her sake indeed, but for that of Mrs. Greville :

When the new Mrs. Burney recited, with animated encomiums, various passages of Sterne's seducing sensibility, Mrs. Greville, shrugging her shoulders, exclaimed:-"A feeling heart is certainly a right heart; nobody will contest that: but when a man chooses to walk about the world with a cambrick handkerchief always in his hand, that he may always be ready to weep, either with man or beast,-he only turns me sick."-p. 201.

This alludes, no doubt, to the story of the Dead Ass'—the affected sensibility of which suited so little with what was rumoured of Sterne's conduct towards his own widowed and indigent parent-that it was said, by Horace Walpole we believe, that a dead donkey was to him of more interest than a living mother.'

About this time Burney met with a severe mortification, in not obtaining the place of Master of the King's Band.' David Hume interested himself in his favour with his friend Lord Hertford, the then Chamberlain-but the place had been already disposed of. Madame D'Arblay does not state on what pretensions or grounds Burney had raised his hopes to such a height, that their disappointment should have affected him as if he had suffered some grievous injustice. He had at this period published none of his literary works, and the only musical production noticed by his biographer was the abortive translation of the Devin du Village-no claim certainly to the first honorary reward of musical excellence.

a

In 1769 Burney received another rebuff' in not being employed to compose the music of Gray's ode, for the Duke of Gloucester's installation, as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Indignant at this slight, he would not honour that university by applying to it for a degree, and he accordingly repaired to Oxford, and there, in the same year, became a doctor of music. In this year too he revised and enlarged a translation, made (if we rightly understand Madame d'Arblay's circumlocutory statement) by his late wife, of Maupertuis's Letter on Comets, and published it under the title of An Essay towards a History of Comets this was his first publication. In 1770 he made musical tour' to France and Italy, and in a year or two after another to Germany, of both of which he published accounts, which are said to have received from Dr. Johnson the high praise of his having had them in his eye when writing his Journey to the Hebrides:* though we confess we do not see in what the resemblance consists, unless, as Madame d'Arblay's account leads us to suspect, he alluded to the shape and form.' (vol. ii., p. 78.) His German tour concluded with an odd accident:-during the passage from Calais he suffered so intolerably from sea-sickness, that on his arrival at Dover he would not leave his cot, but fell into a profound sleep, from which he was awakened by a recurrence of the disorder, and found that the packet was on her way back to France; so that his incapacity to sustain one voyage subjected him to two others. Soon after this, Dr. Burney, who had resided successively in Poland-street and Queen-square, removed to the house No. 6, St. Martin's Street, which had been Sir Isaac Newton's, and whose observatory at the top of the

* Croker's Boswell, vol. v., p. 65.

house

house Burney repaired. This residence subjected him to the visits of sundry foreigners who, about this time, catching from Voltaire and Algarotti, an enthusiasm about Newton, were ambitious of making pilgrimages to the residence of the great philosopher, of whose real merits they had about as just an idea as the guides who had inspired them. Amongst these was the Duke de Chaulnes, better known in his own country as Duke de Pecquigny-a strange, eccentric man-a great traveller and a clever chemist. Having visited Egypt and China, he at last bethought himself of seeing London, especially Newton-House' and Dr. Johnson. His invitation to Burney to meet Johnson at dinner is amusing:

"The Duke of Chaulnes' best compliments to Doctor Burney: he desires the favour of his company to dinner with Doctor Johnson on Sunday next, between three and four o'clock, which is the hour convenient to the excellent old doctor, the best piece of man,* indeed, that the duke ever saw."'-vol. ii. p. 338.

ner.

Neither Boswell, nor Mrs. Thrale, nor Johnson's own letters, mention this acquaintance with M. de Chaulnes ; it was no doubt very transient, and confined probably to a few visits and this dinThe dinner, however, owing to Johnson's deplorable state of health, disappointed all parties. We heartily wish that Boswell had been present: he would probably have enlivened it; and at all events we should like to have had his description of the meeting between this very extraordinary duke and the best piece of man he ever saw.'

6

In 1776 Burney published the first volume of his History of Music; the second volume followed in 1779, and the third and fourth in 1789. He also published in 1785 an account of the commemoration of Handel, and in 1796 a life of Metastasio,

In 1783, the friendship of Mr. Burke, then Paymaster of the Forces, made Dr. Burney's declining life comfortable, by the office of Organist of Chelsea College, with apartments in the building, and a salary, the increase of which to the sum of 50%. was the last act of Mr. Burke's official life. It would be unjust to Madame D'Arblay not to extract the following letter, in which Mr. Burke attributes to her a considerable share in his kindness towards her father.

• To Dr. Burney.

"I had yesterday the pleasure of voting you, my dear Sir, a salary of fifty pounds a year, as organist to Chelsea Hospital. But as every increase of salary made at our Board is subject to the approbation of the Lords of the Treasury, what effect the change (of ministry) now

*In this odd phrase we almost suspect a misprint of' piece' for paste, which at first sight would seem quite as odd, but the French have a phrase la meilleure pâte d'homme, which may have been running in the duke's head.

made