| [32] | Diary and Letters, 1892, i. 10; Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 149; Early Diary, 1889, ii. 239 n. |
| [33] | Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, 1871, p. 325. |
| [34] | Marie-Jeanne de Heurles de Laboras, Mme. Riccoboni, d. 1792, translated Fielding’s Amelia and Kelly’s False Delicacy into French, and continued Marivaux’ Marianne. She wrote several sentimental novels, one of which Mrs. Brooke Englished as Lady Catesby’s Letters. |
| [35] | Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1891, i. 309. |
CHAPTER IV
THE SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR
Once—so runs the story—when Miss Burney was dining with Sir Joshua Reynolds at that pleasant villa upon Richmond Hill which had been built for him by Chambers the architect, she chanced to see him looking at her in a peculiar way. “I know what you are thinking about,”—she said. “Ay,” he replied, “you may come and sit to me now whenever you please.” He had at last caught her special attitude,—her distinctive phase. “I hope he will take your picture,” “Daddy” Crisp had said, when she first made the artist’s acquaintance;—“who knows, but the time may come when your image may appear . . . like Garrick with the Comic and Tragic Muse contending for you?” Thalia and Melpomene were certainly to contend for the author of Evelina, and that at no distant date. There is however no picture of Fanny Burney in the Reynolds Gallery. Hoppner painted her later; but Hoppner is not Sir Joshua. Her best likeness, one of two from the same hand, is by her cousin, Edward Burney, who, it is hinted, surveyed his model—
“in the light
Of tender personal regards,”—
and—it is also hinted—possibly slightly flattered her.