One of the things Huncamunca has to do in Tom Thumb is to express her anxiety to be married. It is not, however, this unbecoming aspiration (upon which Miss Burney was of course afterwards sufficiently rallied) that prompts the “Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh!” of Fielding’s parody of Thomson. But the point serves to remind us that, in this chapter, nothing has been said of Miss Burney’s admirers. Scattered through her Journal are various fugitive references to different gentlemen, old and young, who were evidently attracted by her vivacity and charm, shy and demure as she professed to be. But she had not yet realised her own ambition, and fallen seriously in love. “I am too much spoilt,” she says, “by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a character merely inoffensive.” These words were written of an importunate suitor, with the unpromising name of Thomas Barlow, who made his appearance early in May, 1775. He seems to have been very much in earnest, indeed,—to use the expression of Mr. Toots, of whom he somehow contrives to remind us,—to have been “perfectly sore” with devotion. His ardent, or (as he terms it) “ardurous” Pen addresses to Miss Burney several long-winded and very alembicate epistles, but she will have none of him, although, strange to say, nearly all her family, including the paternal Crisp,—who was particularly urgent that she should not lose a chance of establishing herself,—favour Mr. Barlow’s pretensions. But, as she very sensibly tells Mr. Crisp, she is “determined never to marry without having the very highest value and esteem for the man who should be her lord.” And Mr. Barlow, besides that he is “extremely precipitate,” does not “hit her fancy.” So there is no more to say.

Upon the whole, when it is remembered that this retiring but observant young lady of five-and-twenty had a travelled sailor brother, and two sisters who had been educated at Paris;—that she had seen the town and country both in London and King’s Lynn;—that she had read Richardson and Marivaux and Sterne, if not Fielding;—that she knew Sir Joshua and Nollekens, and was familiar with the acting of Garrick, both on and off the stage;—that she had heard Agujari at her best, and the Gabrielli at her worst;—that she had been introduced to Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale;—that she had conversed with Otaheitan Omai, eaten roast apples with Abyssinian Bruce, and been allowed to inspect what Horace Walpole calls the “infamous diamonds” of the veneered barbarian, Alexis Orloff,—it will, we think, be admitted that her experience of things in general had been of a very varied kind. If to this be added that she was a copious and diligent diarist;—the sworn “anecdote-monger” of a distant correspondent;—and the faithful secretary of a scribbling father—it must also be granted that she was by no means ill-equipped for the production of that work of fiction to the story of which the ensuing chapter is devoted.

[12] Catherine Hyde was still living in Fanny Burney’s day; and Fanny saw her at Covent Garden Theatre in January, 1773, when Mason’s Elfrida was being acted. “I had the pleasure to see Prior’s celebrated fair ‘Kitty, beautiful and young,’ now called Kitty, beautiful and old, in the stage box.” (Early Diary, 1889, i. p. 184.)
[13] “There are now,” said Cunningham, writing as far back as 1849, “at least 2 square miles of brick and mortar between it [Queen Square] and the view.” (Handbook for London, ii. p. 686.)
[14] See ante, p. 19.
[15] In Recreations and Studies of A Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century [Thomas Twining], 1882, there are several letters from Twining to Burney and vice versa, some of which will be hereafter cited.
[16] “So much of his [Garrick’s] drollery belongs to his voice, looks and manner,” says the Diary, “that writing loses it almost all.” Yet more than forty years afterwards, in her Memoirs of her father (1832, i. pp. 352-3), she expanded the above, about seven lines in the original, to a page and three quarters. It is clear that she worked from the Diary, for some of the expressions are identical. But many decorative particulars are added to the record of Garrick’s visit, which are not in the first account. We have preferred the earlier, if less picturesque, narrative. Boswell, of course, has nothing of this anecdote; which was not printed until long after his death.
[17] The fate of Cowper’s “gentle savage” was pathetic. Painted by Reynolds and patronised by Lord Sandwich,—lionised by Lady Townshend and the Duchess of Devonshire,—he was suffered to go back once more to his own people, among whom he had neither status nor importance. He died soon after, having shown himself (says Vancouver) both “vain and silly.” And no wonder!
[18] Agujari, according to Grove’s Dictionary of Music, was the highest and most extended soprano on record. Her voice reached “from the middle of the harpsichord to two notes above it,” says Miss Burney.