The tribute of a grateful heart.
O! small the tribute, were it weigh’d
With all she feels—or half she knows!
But noble minds are best repaid
From the pure spring whence bounty flows.
P.S.—The little bearer begs a kiss
From dear papa, for bringing this.
In the middle of March, after their unusually long stay at Kew, the royal family moved to Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be received by the townsfolk with an ovation of welcome. In June, to complete the cure, he went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere on the journey hailed with acclamations and demonstrations that might well have turned a weak head. At Weymouth, the exuberant loyalty of the people was embarrassing. All the shops and bathing-machines placarded God Save the King, a device repeated on the bonnets and waists of the bathing-women, as indeed on dresses all over England. “All the children,” reports Miss Burney, “wear it in their caps—all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors in their voices; for they never approach the house without shouting it aloud—nor see the King, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers.… Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up ‘God save great George our King!’” It was now that occurred the ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged Mayor presenting an address, and not being able to kneel, to the scandal of the officials. And here, the “Royals” having gone on a day’s visit to Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years Miss Burney had a holiday, which she spent with a friend in a “romantic and lovely excursion” to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near the neck of Portland Island, a peep into which she might have found more romantic, had some couple of miles not been a Georgian lady’s limit on foot.
After a tour through the loyal West country, the Court returned to its routine of London and Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer. But henceforth Miss Burney’s diary has little to say about Kew; and after another year we lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The life of a glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon her health and spirits: “Lost to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was worn with want of rest and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance.” Her chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent philandering with the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Colonel Digby—the “Mr. Fairly” of her journals—a favourite with the King, too, to whom he could “say anything in his genteel roundabout way.” This gentleman the lady clearly admired none the less when he became a widower, though to us she presents him rather too much in the character of a priggish novel hero, full of edifying reflections and opinions. But the sentimental friend turned out not impeccable, for he married Another, the “Miss Fuzilier,” about whom his fellow-servant had often rallied him; and she cannot conceal that this choice seemed unworthy of him. Her health was so evidently breaking down that her literary friends cried out on the sacrifice; even the newspapers gossiped about her condition; and the meddlesome Mr. Boswell declared that he would set the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were not allowed to resign.
This she was most loth to do. She tried taking “the bark,” but that did little good. The Rev. Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she found “too violent” in its effect, while grateful to him for his interest in her. “Why,” said he, “to tell the truth, I don’t quite know how I could have got on at Kew, in the King’s illness, if it had not been for seeing you in a morning. I assure you they worried me so, all round, one way or other, that I was almost ready to go off. But you used to keep me up prodigiously. Though, I give you my word, I was afraid sometimes to see you, with your good-humoured face, for all it helped me to keep up, because I did not know what to say to you, when things went bad, on account of vexing you.”