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And now began a slavery of five years, of five years taken from the best part of
life, and wasted in menial drudgery or in recreations duller than even menial
drudgery, under galling restraints and amidst unfriendly or uninteresting
companions. The history of an ordinary day was this. Miss Burney had to rise and
dress herself early, that she might be ready to answer the royal bell, which
rang at half after seven. Till about eight she attended in the Queen's
dressing-room, and had the honor of lacing her august mistress's stays, and of
putting on the hoop, gown, and neckhandkerchief. The morning was chiefly spent
in rummaging drawers and laying fine clothes in their proper places. Then the
Queen was to be powdered and dressed for the day. Twice a week her Majesty's
hair was curled and craped; and this operation appears to have added a full hour
to the business of the toilette. It was generally three before Miss Burney was
at liberty. Then she had two hours at her own disposal. To these hours we owe
great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame
Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud
as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to
conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate,
Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair generally remained
together from five to eleven, and often had no other company the whole time,
except during the hour from eight to nine, when the equerries came to tea. If
poor Frances attempted to escape to her own apartment, and to forget her
wretchedness over a book, the execrable old woman railed and stormed, and
complained that she was neglected. Yet, when Frances stayed, she was constantly
assailed with insolent reproaches. Literary fame was, in the eyes of the German
crone, a blemish, a proof that the person who enjoyed it was meanly born, and
out of the pale of good society. All her scanty stock of broken English was
employed to express the contempt with which she regarded the author of Evelina
and Cecilia. Frances detested cards, and indeed knew nothing about them; but she
soon found that the least miserable way of passing an evening with Madame
Schwellenberg was at the card-table, and consented, with patient sadness, to
give hours, which might have called forth the laughter and the tears of many
generations, to the king of clubs and the knave of spades. Between eleven and
twelve the bell rang again. Miss Burney had to pass twenty minutes or half an
hour in undressing the Queen, and was then at liberty to retire, and to dream
that she was chatting with her brother by the quiet hearth in Saint Martin's
Street, that she was the centre of an admiring assemblage at Mrs. Crewe's, that
Burke was calling her the first woman of the age, or that Dilly was giving her a
check for two thousand guineas.
Men, we must suppose, are less patient than women; for we are utterly at a loss
to conceive how any human being could endure such a life, while there remained a
vacant garret in Grub Street, a crossing in want of a sweeper, a parish
workhouse, or a parish vault. And it was for such a life that Frances Burney had
given up liberty and peace, a happy fireside, attached friends, a wide and
splendid circle of acquaintance, intellectual pursuits in which she was
qualified to excel, and the sure hope of what to her would have been affluence.
There is nothing new under the sun. The last great master of Attic eloquence and
Attic wit has left us a forcible and touching description of the misery of a man
of letters, who, lured by hopes similar to those of Frances, had entered the
service of one of the magnates of Rome. "Unhappy that I am," cries the victim of
his own childish ambition: "would nothing content me but that I must leave mine
old pursuits and mine old companions, and the life which was without care, and
the sleep which had no limit save mine own pleasure, and the walks which I was
free to take where I listed, and fling myself into the lowest pit of a dungeon
like this? And, O God! for what? Was there no way by which I might have enjoyed
in freedom comforts even greater than those which I now earn by servitude? Like
a lion which has been made so tame that men may lead him about by a thread, I am
dragged up and down, with broken and humbled spirit, at the heels of those to
whom, in mine own domain, I should have been an object of awe and wonder. And,
worst of all, I feel that here I gain no credit, that here I give no pleasure.
The talents and accomplishments, which charmed a far different circle, are here
out of place. I am rude in the arts of palaces, and can ill bear comparison with
those whose calling, from their youth up, has been to flatter and to sue. Have
I, then, two lives, that, after I have wasted one in the service of others,
there may yet remain to me a second, which I may live unto myself?"
Now and then, indeed, events occurred which disturbed the wretched monotony of
Frances Burney's life. The Court moved from Kew to Windsor, and from Windsor
back to Kew. One dull colonel went out of waiting, and another dull colonel came
into waiting. An impertinent servant made a blunder about tea, and caused a
misunderstanding between the gentlemen and the ladies. A half-witted French
Protestant minister talked oddly about conjugal fidelity. An unlucky member of
the household mentioned a passage in the Morning Herald, reflecting on the
Queen; and forthwith Madame Schwellenberg began to storm in bad English, and
told him that he made her "what you call perspire!"
A more important occurrence was the King's visit to Oxford. Miss Burney went in
the royal train to Nuneham, was utterly neglected there in the crowd, and could
with difficulty find a servant to show the way to her bedroom, or a hairdresser
to arrange her curls. She had the honor of entering Oxford in the last of a long
string of carriages which formed the royal procession, of walking after the
Queen all day through refectories and chapels, and of standing, half dead with
fatigue and hunger, while her august mistress was seated at an excellent cold
collation. At Magdalen College, Frances was left for a moment in a parlor, where
she sank down on a chair. A good-natured equerry saw that she was exhausted, and
shared with her some apricots and bread, which he had wisely put into his
pockets. At that moment the door opened; the Queen entered; the wearied
attendants sprang up; the bread and fruit were hastily concealed. "I found,"
says poor Miss Burney, "that our appetites were to be supposed annihilated, at
the same moment that our strength was to be invincible."
Yet Oxford, seen even under such disadvantages, "revived in her," to use her own
words, "a consciousness to pleasure which had long lain nearly dormant." She
forgot, during one moment, that she was a waiting-maid, and felt as a woman of
true genius might be expected to feel amidst venerable remains of antiquity,
beautiful works of art, vast repositories of knowledge, and memorials of the
illustrious dead. Had she still been what she was before her father induced her
to take the most fatal step of her life, we can easily imagine what pleasure she
would have derived from a visit to the noblest of English cities. She might,
indeed, have been forced to travel in a hack chaise, and might not have worn so
fine a gown of Chambery gauze as that in which she tottered after the royal
party; but with what delight would she have then paced the cloisters of
Magdalen, compared the antique gloom of Merton with the splendor of Christ
Church, and looked down from the dome of the Ratcliffe Library on the
magnificent sea of turrets and battlements below! How gladly would learned men
have laid aside for a few hours Pindar's Odes and Aristotle's Ethics to escort
the author of Cecilia from college to college! What neat little banquets would
she have found set out in their monastic cells! With what eagerness would
pictures, medals, and illuminated missals have been brought forth from the most
mysterious cabinets for her amusement! How much she would have had to hear and
to tell about Johnson, as she walked over Pembroke, and about Reynolds, in the
antechapel of New College! But these indulgences were not for one who had sold
herself into bondage.
About eighteen months after the visit to Oxford, another event diversified the
wearisome life which Frances led at Court. Warren Hastings was brought to the
bar of the House of Peers. The Queen and Princesses were present when the trial
commenced, and Miss Burney was permitted to attend. During the subsequent
proceedings a day rule for the same purpose was occasionally granted to her; for
the Queen took the strongest interest in the trial, and when she could not go
herself to Westminster Hall, liked to receive a report of what had passed from a
person of singular powers of observation, and who was, moreover, acquainted with
some of the most distinguished managers. The portion of the Diary which relates
to this celebrated proceeding is lively and picturesque. Yet we read it, we own,
with pain; for it seems to us to prove that the fine understanding of Frances
Burney was beginning to feel the pernicious influence of a mode of life which is
as incompatible with health of mind as the air of the Pomptine marshes with
health of body. From the first day she espouses the cause of Hastings with a
presumptuous vehemence and acrimony quite inconsistent with the modesty and
suavity of her ordinary deportment. She shudders when Burke enters the Hall at
the head of the Commons. She pronounces him the cruel oppressor of an innocent
man. She is at a loss to conceive how the managers can look at the defendant,
and not blush. Windham comes to her from the manager's box, to offer her
refreshment. "But," says she, "I could not break bread with him." Then, again,
she exclaims, "Ah, Mr. Windham, how can you ever engage in so cruel, so unjust a
cause?" "Mr. Burke saw me," she says, "and he bowed with the most marked
civility of manner." This, be it observed, was just after his opening speech, a
speech which had produced a mighty effect, and which, certainly, no other orator
that ever lived, could have made. "My curtsy," she continues, "was the most
ungrateful, distant and cold; I could not do otherwise; so hurt I felt to see
him the head of such a cause." Now, not only had Burke treated her with constant
kindness, but the very last act which he performed on the day on which he was
turned out of the Pay Office, about four years before this trial, was to make
Dr. Burney organist of Chelsea Hospital. When, at the Westminster election, Dr.
Burney was divided between his gratitude for this favor and his Tory opinions,
Burke in the noblest manner disclaimed all right to exact a sacrifice of
principle. "You have little or no obligations to me," he wrote; "but if you had
as many as I really wish it were in my power, as it is certainly in my desire,
to lay on you, I hope you do not think me capable of conferring them, in order
to subject your mind or your affairs to a painful and mischievous servitude."
Was this a man to be uncivilly treated by a daughter of Dr. Burney, because she
chose to differ from him respecting a vast and most complicated question, which
he had studied deeply during many years, and which she had never studied at all?
It is clear, from Miss Burney's own narrative, that when she behaved so unkindly
to Mr. Burke, she did not even know of what Hastings was accused. One thing,
however, she must have known, that Burke had been able to convince a House of
Commons, bitterly prejudiced against himself, that the charges were well
founded, and that Pitt and Dundas had concurred with Fox and Sheridan, in
supporting the impeachment. Surely a woman of far inferior abilities to Miss
Burney might have been expected to see that this never could have happened
unless there had been a strong case against the late Governor-General. And there
was, as all reasonable men now admit, a strong case against him. That there were
great public services to be set off against his great crimes is perfectly true.
But his services and his crimes were equally unknown to the lady who so
confidently asserted his perfect innocence, and imputed to his accusers, that is
to say, to all the greatest men of all parties in the State, not merely error,
but gross injustice and barbarity.
She had, it is true, occasionally seen Mr. Hastings, and had found his manners
and conversation agreeable. But surely she could not be so weak as to infer from
the gentleness of his deportment in a drawing-room, that he was incapable of
committing a great State crime, under the influence of ambition and revenge. A
silly Miss, fresh from a boarding school, might fall into such a mistake; but
the woman who had drawn the character of Mr. Monckton should have known better.
The truth is that she had been too long at Court. She was sinking into a slavery
worse than that of the body. The iron was beginning to enter into the soul.
Accustomed during many months to watch the eye of a mistress, to receive with
boundless gratitude the slightest mark of royal condescension, to feel wretched
at every symptom of royal displeasure, to associate only with spirits long tamed
and broken in, she was degenerating into something fit for her place. Queen
Charlotte was a violent partisan of Hastings, had received presents from him,
and had so far departed from the severity of her virtue as to lend her
countenance to his wife, whose conduct had certainly been as reprehensible as
that of any of the frail beauties who were then rigidly excluded from the
English Court. The King, it was well known, took the same side. To the King and
Queen all the members of the household looked submissively for guidance. The
impeachment, therefore, was an atrocious persecution; the managers were rascals;
the defendant was the most deserving and the worst used man in the kingdom. This
was the cant of the whole palace, from Gold Stick in Waiting, down to the
Table-Deckers and Yeoman of the Silver Scullery; and Miss Burney canted like the
rest, though in livelier tones, and with less bitter feelings.
The account which she has given of the King's illness contains much excellent
narrative and description, and will, we think, be as much valued by the
historians of a future age as any equal portion of Pepys's or Evelyn's Diaries.
That account shows also how affectionate and compassionate her nature was. But
it shows also, we must say, that her way of life was rapidly impairing her
powers of reasoning and her sense of justice. We do not mean to discuss, in this
place, the question, whether the views of Mr. Pitt or those of Mr. Fox
respecting the regency were the more correct. It is, indeed, quite needless to
discuss that question: for the censure of Miss Burney falls alike on Pitt and
Fox, on majority and minority. She is angry with the House of Commons for
presuming to inquire whether the King was mad or not, and whether there was a
chance of his recovering his senses. "A melancholy day," she writes; "news bad
both at home and, abroad. At home the dear unhappy king still worse; abroad new
examinations voted of the physicians. Good heavens! what an insult does this
seem from Parliamentary power, to investigate and bring forth to the world every
circumstance of such a malady as is ever held sacred to secrecy in the most
private families! How indignant we all feel here, no words can say." It is
proper to observe, that the motion which roused all this indignation at Kew was
made by Mr. Pitt himself. We see, therefore, that the loyalty of the Minister,
who was then generally regarded as the most heroic champion of his Prince, was
lukewarm indeed when compared with the boiling zeal which filled the pages of
the backstairs and the women of the bedchamber. Of the Regency Bill, Pitt's own
bill, Miss Burney speaks with horror. "I shuddered," she says, to hear it
named." And again, "Oh, how dreadful will be the day when that unhappy bill
takes place! I cannot approve the plan of it." The truth is that Mr. Pitt,
whether a wise and upright statesman or not, was a statesman; and whatever
motives he might have for imposing restrictions on the regent, felt that in some
way or other there must be some provision made for the execution of some part of
the kingly office, or that no government would be left in the country. But this
was a matter of which the household never thought. It never occurred, as far as
we can see, to the Exons and Keepers of the Robes, that it was necessary that
there should be somewhere or other a power in the State to pass laws, to
preserve order, to pardon criminals, to fill up offices, to negotiate with
foreign governments, to command the army and navy. Nay, these enlightened
politicians, and Miss Burney among the rest, seem to have thought that any
person who considered the subject with reference to the public interest, showed
himself to be a bad-hearted man. Nobody wonders at this in a gentleman usher;
but it is melancholy to see genius sinking into such debasement.
During more than two years after the King's recovery, Frances dragged on a
miserable existence at the palace. The consolations which had for a time
mitigated the wretchedness of servitude were one by one withdrawn. Mrs. Delany,
whose society had been a great resource when the Court was at Windsor, was now
dead. One of the gentlemen of the royal establishment, Colonel Digby, appears to
have been a man of sense, of taste, of some reading, and of prepossessing
manners. Agreeable associates were scarce in the prison house, and he and Miss
Burney therefore naturally became attached to each other. She owns that she
valued him as a friend; and it would not have been strange if his attentions had
led her to entertain for him a sentiment warmer than friendship. He quitted the
Court, and married in a way which astonished Miss Burney greatly, and which
evidently wounded her feelings, and lowered him in her esteem. The palace grew
duller and duller; Madame Schwellenberg became more and more savage and
insolent; and now the health of poor Frances began to give way; and all who saw
her pale face, her emaciated figure, and her feeble walk, predicted that her
sufferings would soon be over.
Frances uniformly speaks of her royal mistress, and of the princesses, with
respect and affection. The princesses seem to have well deserved all the praise
which is bestowed on them in the Diary. They were, we doubt not, most amiable
women. But "the sweet Queen," as she is constantly called in these volumes, is
not by any means an object of admiration to us. She had undoubtedly sense enough
to know what kind of deportment suited her high station, and self-command enough
to maintain that deportment invariably. She was, in her intercourse with Miss
Burney, generally gracious and affable, sometimes, when displeased, cold and
reserved, but never, under any circumstances, rude, peevish, or violent. She
knew how to dispense, gracefully and skillfully, those little civilities which,
when paid by a sovereign, are prized at many times their intrinsic value; how to
pay a compliment; how to lend a book; how to ask after a relation. But she seems
to have been utterly regardless of the comfort, the health, the life of her
attendants, when her own convenience was concerned. Weak, feverish, hardly able
to stand, Frances had still to rise before seven, in order to dress the sweet
Queen, and to sit up till midnight, in order to undress the sweet Queen. The
indisposition of the handmaid could not, and did not, escape the notice of her
royal mistress. But the established doctrine of the Court was, that all sickness
was to be considered as a pretence until it proved fatal. The only way in which
the invalid could clear herself from the suspicion of malingering, as it is
called in the army, was to go on lacing and unlacing till she fell down dead at
the royal feet. "This," Miss Burney wrote, when she was suffering cruelly from
sickness, watching, and labor, "is by no means from hardness of heart; far
otherwise. There is no hardness of heart in any one of them; but it is
prejudice, and want of personal experience."
Many strangers sympathized with the bodily and mental sufferings of this
distinguished woman. All who saw her saw that her frame was sinking, that her
heart was breaking. The last, it should seem, to observe the change was her
father. At length, in spite of himself, his eyes were opened. In May 1790, his
daughter had an interview of three hours with him, the only long interview which
they had had since he took her to Windsor in 1786. She told him that she was
miserable, that she was worn with attendance and want of sleep, that she had no
comfort in life, nothing to love, nothing to hope, that her family and her
friends were to her as though they were not, and were remembered by her as men
remember the dead. From daybreak to midnight the same killing labor, the same
recreations, more hateful than labor itself, followed each other without
variety, without any interval of liberty and repose.
The Doctor was greatly dejected by this news; but was too good-natured a man not
to say that, if she wished to resign, his house and arms were open to her.
Still, however, he could not bear to remove her from the Court. His veneration
for royalty amounted in truth to idolatry. It can be compared only to the
groveling superstition of those Syrian devotees who made their children pass
through the fire to Moloch. When he induced his daughter to accept the place of
keeper of the robes, he entertained, as she tells us, a hope that some worldly
advantage or other, not set down in the contract of service, would be the result
of her connection with the Court. What advantage he expected we do not know, nor
did he probably know himself. But, whatever he expected, he certainly got
nothing. Miss Burney had been hired for board, lodging, and two hundred a year.
Board, lodging, and two hundred a year, she had duly received. We have looked
carefully through the Diary, in the hope of finding some trace of those
extraordinary benefactions on which the Doctor reckoned. But we can discover
only a promise, never performed, of a gown: and for this promise Miss Burney was
expected to return thanks, such as might have suited the beggar with whom Saint
Martin, in the legend, divided his cloak. The experience of four years was,
however, insufficient to dispel the illusion which had taken possession of the
Doctor's mind; and between the dear father and the sweet Queen, there seemed to
be little doubt that some day or other Frances would drop down a corpse. Six
months had elapsed since the interview between the parent and the daughter. The
resignation was not sent in. The sufferer grew worse and worse. She took bark;
but it soon ceased to produce a beneficial effect. She was stimulated with wine;
she was soothed with opium; but in vain. Her breath began to fail. The whisper
that she was in a decline spread through the Court. The pains in her side became
so severe that she was forced to crawl from the card-table of the old Fury to
whom she was tethered, three or four times in an evening for the purpose of
taking hartshorn. Had she been a negro slave, a humane planter would have
excused her from work. But her Majesty showed no mercy. Thrice a day the
accursed bell still rang; the Queen was still to be dressed for the morning at
seven, and to be dressed for the day at noon, and to be undressed at midnight.
But there had arisen, in literary and fashionable society, a general feeling of
compassion for Miss Burney, and of indignation against both her father and the
Queen. "Is it possible," said a great French lady to the Doctor, "that your
daughter is in a situation where she is never allowed a holiday?" Horace Walpole
wrote to Frances, to express his sympathy. Boswell, boiling over with
good-natured rage, almost forced an entrance into the palace to see her. "My
dear ma'am, why do you stay? It won't do, ma'am; you must resign. We can put up
with it no longer. Some very violent measures, I assure you, will be taken. We
shall address Dr. Burney in a body." Burke and Reynolds, though less noisy, were
zealous in the same cause. Windham spoke to Dr. Burney; but found him still
irresolute. "I will set the club upon him," cried Windham; "Miss Burney has some
very true admirers there, and I am sure they will eagerly assist." Indeed the
Burney family seem to have been apprehensive that some public affront such as
the Doctor's unpardonable folly, to use the mildest term, had richly deserved,
would be put upon him. The medical men spoke out, and plainly told him that his
daughter must resign or die.
At last paternal affection, medical authority, and the voice of all London
crying shame, triumphed over Dr. Burney's love of courts. He determined that
Frances should write a letter of resignation. It was with difficulty that,
though her life was at stake, she mustered spirit to put the paper into the
Queen's hands. "I could not," so runs the Diary, "summon courage to present my
memorial; my heart always failed me from seeing the Queen's entire freedom from
such an expectation. For though I was frequently so ill in her presence that I
could hardly stand, I saw she concluded me, while life remained, inevitably
hers."
At last with a trembling hand the paper was delivered. Then came the storm.
Juno, as in the Aeneid, delegated the work of vengeance to Alecto. The Queen was
calm and gentle; but Madame Schwellenberg raved like a maniac in the incurable
ward of Bedlam! Such insolence! Such ingratitude! Such folly! Would Miss Burney
bring utter destruction on herself and her family? Would she throw away the
inestimable advantage of royal protection? Would she part with privileges which,
once relinquished, could never be regained? It was idle to talk of health and
life. If people could not live in the palace, the best thing that could befall
them was to die in it. The resignation was not accepted. The language of the
medical men became stronger and stronger. Dr. Burney's parental fears were fully
roused; and he explicitly declared, in a letter meant to be shown to the Queen,
that his daughter must retire. The Schwellenberg raged like a wild cat. "A scene
almost horrible ensued," says Miss Burney. "She was too much enraged for
disguise, and uttered the most furious expressions of indignant contempt at our
proceedings. I am sure she would gladly have confined us both in the Bastille,
had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves, from a
daring so outrageous against imperial wishes." This passage deserves notice, as
being the only one in the Diary, so far as we have observed, which shows Miss
Burney to have been aware that she was a native of a free country, that she
could not be pressed for a waiting-maid against her will, and that she had just
as good a right to live, if she chose, in Saint Martin's Street, as Queen
Charlotte had to live at Saint James's.
The Queen promised that, after the next birthday, Miss Burney should be set at
liberty. But the promise was ill kept; and her Majesty showed displeasure at
being reminded of it. At length Frances was informed that in a fortnight her
attendance should cease. "I heard this," she says, "with a fearful presentiment
I should surely never go through another fortnight, in so weak and languishing
and painful a state of health. . . . As the time of separation approached, the
Queen's cordiality rather diminished, and traces of internal displeasure
appeared sometimes, arising from an opinion I ought rather to have struggled on,
live or die, than to quit her. Yet I am sure she saw how poor was my own chance,
except by a change in the mode of life, and at least ceased to wonder, though
she could not approve." Sweet Queen! What noble candor, to admit that the
undutifulness of people, who did not think the honor of adjusting her tuckers
worth the sacrifice of their own lives, was, though highly criminal, not
altogether unnatural!
We perfectly understand her Majesty's contempt for the lives of others where her
own pleasure was concerned. But what pleasure she can have found in having Miss
Burney about her, it is not so easy to comprehend. That Miss Burney was an
eminently skilful keeper of the robes is not very probable. Few women, indeed,
had paid less attention to dress. Now and then, in the course of five years, she
had been asked to read aloud or to write a copy of verses. But better readers
might easily have been found: and her verses were worse than even the Poet
Laureate's Birthday Odes. Perhaps that economy, which was among her Majesty's
most conspicuous virtues, had something to do with her conduct on this occasion.
Miss Burney had never hinted that she expected a retiring pension; and indeed
would gladly have given the little that she had for freedom. But her Majesty
knew what the public thought, and what became her own dignity. She could not for
very shame suffer a woman of distinguished genius, who had quitted a lucrative
career to wait on her, who had served her faithfully for a pittance during five
years, and whose constitution had been impaired by labor and watching, to leave
the Courts without some mark of royal liberality. George the Third, who, on all
occasions where Miss Burney was concerned, seems to have behaved like an honest,
good-natured gentleman, felt this, and said plainly that she was entitled to a
provision. At length, in return for all the misery which she had undergone, and
for the health which she had sacrificed, an annuity of one hundred pounds was
granted to her, dependent on the Queen's pleasure.
Then the prison was opened, and Frances was free once more. Johnson, as Burke
observed, might have added a striking page to his poem on the Vanity of Human
Wishes, if he had lived to see his little Burney as she went into the palace and
as she came out of it.
The pleasures, so long untasted, of liberty, of friendship, of domestic
affection, were almost too acute for her shattered frame. But happy days and
tranquil nights soon restored the health which the Queen's toilette and Madame
Schwellenberg's card-table had impaired. Kind and anxious faces surrounded the
invalid. Conversation the most polished and brilliant revived her spirits.
Traveling was recommended to her; and she rambled by easy journeys from
cathedral to cathedral, and from watering-place to watering-place. She crossed
the New Forest, and visited Stonehenge and Wilton, the cliffs of Lyme, and the
beautiful valley of Sidmouth. Thence she journeyed by Powderham Castle, and by
the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey to Bath, and from Bath, when the winter was
approaching, returned well and cheerful to London. There she visited her old
dungeon, and found her successor already far on the way to the grave, and kept
to strict duty, from morning till midnight, with a sprained ankle and a nervous
fever.
At this time England swarmed with French exiles, driven from their country by
the Revolution. A colony of these refugees settled at Juniper Hall, in Surrey,
not far from Norbury Park, where Mr. Lock, an intimate friend of the Burney
family, resided. Frances visited Norbury, and was introduced to the strangers.
She had strong prejudices against them; for her Toryism was far beyond, we do
not say that of Mr. Pitt, but that of Mr. Reeves; and the inmates of Juniper
Hall were all attached to the constitution of 1791, and were therefore more
detested by the royalists of the first emigration than Petion or Marat. But such
a woman as Miss Burney could not long resist the fascination of that remarkable
society. She had lived with Johnson and Windham, with Mrs. Montague and Mrs.
Thrale. Yet she was forced to own that she had never heard conversation before.
The most animated eloquence, the keenest observation, the most sparkling wit,
the most courtly grace, were united to charm her. For Madame de Stael was there,
and M. de Talleyrand. There too was M. de Narbonne, a noble representative of
French aristocracy; and with M. de Narbonne was his friend and follower General
D'Arblay, an honorable and amiable man, with a handsome person, frank
soldierlike manners, and some taste for letters.
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Critical And Historical Essays, Volume II, Thomas Babbington Macaulay,
1843 |
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