From another letter:—
‘I have not time nor space to lengthen my letter, or I should tell you of a long conversation I had last Sunday at Lady Lucan’s blue-stocking conversazione with Lord Macartney about you. He has just come from Ireland and wanted to know whether you were recovered—whether you come to London this winter, as he wished to communicate some memorandums he made in perusing your “Irish Tour” while he was in Ireland. He is a charming man, to my mind.
‘Poor Fanny[[144]] has been very ill indeed, and we have been in expectation of her coming to nurse, but she will risk the dying at her Majesty’s feet to show her zeal before she can be spared, I suppose.
‘I have had the great Haydn here, and think him as good a creature as great Musician. As to operas, the Pantheon advertises to open as a theatre; it is the most elegant in Europe, Pacchierotti says, but it has great enemies. The Haymarket folks have not yet obtained a licence, at which they affect surprise, though they were told so before their building was a foot high. Old Mingotti is come over with her scholar Madame Lobo, the intended first woman of the Haymarket. It will be a busy and memorable season in the history of tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee quarrels.
‘Adieu!
‘Believe me,
‘Yours very affectionately,
‘Charles Burney.’
‘Chelsea College: Sept. 21, 1791.
‘My dear Friend,—I am quite ashamed of not answering your kind and hearty letter of invitation sooner. But a listless and irresolute disposition has made my mind for some time past as flimsy as a dish-clout, and I must confess that I have invariably "left undone those things which I ought to have done"—“for there was no health in me,” indeed, not enough to enable me “to do many things which I ought not to have done.” Original sin and depravity just enabled me to read when I should have written, and to lie in bed when I should have got up, &c. I wished to commit other guess crimes than those, to have rambled over a great part of the kingdom and revelled with distant friends. But prudence, in the shape of rheumatism, and in many other hideous shapes, prevented me. Yet, in spite of all these admonitions, I had a month’s mind to accept of your hospitable offer. But we have guests at our apartments now, my two aged sisters, and, when they depart, winter will begin to show his sour face and chain me to my chimney corner till after Christmas, when I shall be unfettered, merely to be dragged into the hurry and din of London, which are every year more and more insupportable. I have long ceased to like the country, except in long days and fine weather, and, in winter, prefer London with all its horrors and fatigues to rural amusements. Indeed, autumn with all its golden glow and variegated charms for landscape painters is to me a constant memento mori, with its withered leaves tumbling about my ears; and all my most severe attacks of rheumatism have been during the equinoctial winds and rains; so that I am afraid of trusting myself far from home at this season of the year, as one can be sick and cross nowhere so comfortably as at home.