GEORGE THE THIRD.
Such was the cloud that obscured the spring horizon of Dr. Burney in 1788; but which, severely as it damped and saddened him, was but as a point in a general mass, save from his kind grief for his heart-afflicted daughter, compared with the effect produced upon him by the appalling hurricane that afterwards ensued; though there, he himself was but as a point, and scarcely that, in the vast mass of general woe and universal disorder, of which that fatal storm was the precursor.
The war of all the elements, when their strife darts with lightnings, and hurls with thunder, that seem threatening destruction all around, is peace, is calm, is tameness and sameness, to that which was caused by the first sudden breaking out of a malady nameless, but tremendous, terrific, but unknown, in the King—that father of his people, that friend of human kind.
To mourn here was but the nation’s lot; daily to rise in the most anxious expectation; nightly to go to rest in the most fearful dismay, was but the universal fate, from the highest peer to the lowest peasant of Great Britain. With one heart the whole empire seemed to beat for his sufferings; and to unite with one voice in supplication for his recovery.
This malady, however, so baleful in itself, so affrighting in its concomitants, so agitating in its effects, is now become not a page but a volume of history. All recurrence to it here would, therefore, be superfluous; especially as Dr. Burney, though amongst the most poignantly interested in its progress, from the loyalty of his character joined to the situation of his daughter, had no intelligence upon the subject but such as was public: for the Memorialist received the commands of her Majesty, immediately upon the breaking out of alarm, not to touch upon this calamity in a single letter sent from the Lodge, even to her father: an order which she strictly obeyed, till, first, the evil had become publicly known, and, next, was worn away.
This event, then, is foreign to all domestic memoirs; and to such as are political, Dr. Burney’s can have no pretensions. It will rapidly, therefore, be passed over, in consonance with the intentions of the Doctor, manifested by an entire omission of any intervening memorandums, from his grief at the illness, to his joy at the recovery of his Sovereign; a joy which, however diversified by the endless shadings of multitudinous circumstances, was almost universally felt by all ranks, all classes, all ages; and hailed by a chorus of sympathy, that resounded in songs of thanksgiving and triumph throughout the British empire.
The Heavens then,—as far as the Heavens with the transitory events of living man may be assimilated—once again were clear, transparent, and bright with lustre to every loyal heart in the King’s dominions. The royal sufferer, renovated in health, mental and corporeal, re-instated in his exalted functions, and restored to the benediction of his family, the exercise of his virtues, and the enjoyment of his beneficence; suddenly emerged from an enveloping darkness of mystery and seclusion, to an unexampled eclât of popularity; reverberating from every voice, beating in every heart; streaming from every eye, to hail his sight, wherever even a glimpse of him could be caught, with a joy that seemed to shed over his presence a radiance celestial.
Who, in the fair front of humble individual rejoicers, stood more prominent in vivacity of exultation than Dr. Burney? whose whole soul had been nearly monopolized by the alternating passions of fear, hope, pity, or horror, successively awakened by the changeful rumours that coloured, or discoloured, all intelligence during the illness.