“ ‘Yes,’ continued she; ‘and Sir Joshua Reynolds told Mr. Thrale he would give fifty pounds to know the author!’
“ ‘So, so—oh, vastly well!’ cried he, putting his hand on his forehead.
“ ‘Nay!’ added she, ‘Burke himself sat up all night to finish it!’
“This seemed quite too much for him; he put both his hands to his face, and waving backwards and forwards, said, ‘Oh, vastly well!—this will do for anything!’ with a tone as much as to say, Pray, no more! Then Mrs. Thrale bid him good night, longing, she said, to call Miss Thrale first, and say, ‘So you won’t speak to my daughter?—why, she is no author.’ ”
Some of the persons sketched in Miss Burney’s journal are less known to fame than those who have been mentioned, but they are not less cleverly drawn. There is Mr. Seward, one of the Streatham habitués, and the later author of Biographiana. Mr. Seward is a brewer’s son, who dabbles in letters, and seems like an earlier real-life version of Sir Charles Coldstream in Used Up. With “Mr. Dry,” as Miss Burney calls him, she playfully proposes to collaborate in a comedy, to be entitled Everything a Bore. There is a real tragic author, Dr. John Delap, who, while as absent-minded and as ignorant of the world as Parson Adams, is engaged upon a play called Macaria,[[44]] on the story of the wife and daughter of Hercules, which Fanny has to read and criticise—or rather eulogise. There is a very musical, precocious, and semi-French ten-year-old schoolgirl, Miss Birch, who sings sentimental airs from French operas, and says to her friends, “Que je vous adore!”—“Ah, permettez que je me mette à vos pieds!” etc., with a dying languor that is equally delightful and preposterous. And there is that finished and fascinating coquette of coquettes, Miss Sophy Streatfield of Tunbridge Wells, who knows Greek as well as Miss Elizabeth Carter or Mrs. Buller, is as lovely as Mrs. Crewe or Mrs. Sheridan, and has moreover a faculty for shedding tears so becoming to her lackadaisical cast of beauty that she is periodically required (like the water works at Vauxhall) to display her unique gift for the public delectation. Fanny’s description of Miss Streatfield’s mechanical grandes eaux is too good to be neglected. We must imagine her surrounded by attentive spectators, with Mrs. Thrale (like Mrs. Jarley) for exhibitor. “ ‘Yes, do cry a little, Sophy [in a wheedling voice], pray, do! Consider, now, you are going to-day, and it’s very hard if you won’t cry a little; indeed, S. S., you ought to cry.’ Now for the wonder of wonders. When Mrs. Thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a nurse soothing a baby, had run on for some time—while all the rest of us, in laughter, joined in the request—two crystal tears came into the soft eyes of the S. S., and rolled gently down her cheeks! Such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed.[[45]] She offered not to conceal or dissipate them: on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by everybody. She looked, indeed, uncommonly handsome, for her pretty face was not like Chloe’s [in Prior], blubbered; it was smooth and elegant, and neither her features nor complexion were at all ruffled; nay, indeed, she was smiling all the time.” It is melancholy to think that a lady who possessed in such perfection the attributes of Venus Victrix, should die unmarried. Yet this was the untoward fate of the “S. S.” “Everybody’s admiration, and nobody’s choice,” as one of her friends said, she survived until 1835, an ancient maiden lady, concerning whom we do not even know whether—like Pope’s Patty Blount—she retained to the last the charm of her wonderful blue eyes.
But Miss Streatfield is not the person upon whom Miss Burney concentrates her fullest powers of description. That honour is reserved for an unidentified Mr. B——y, to whom she devotes several pages. Mr. B——y, or “The General,” as she styles him, is an Irishman. He has been a Commissary in Germany; is between sixty and seventy, but means to pass for thirty; a professed admirer of the sex, whom he invariably calls “fair females”; garnishes his speech with French tags of the most hackneyed kind; quotes often and inaccurately; and although Fanny, afraid of painting too much en noir, declares him to be worthy and moral at bottom, seems to outward view to be nothing but a blundering, prejudiced, puffing, domineering busybody and bore. He is enraged with Reynolds for charging seventy guineas “to scratch out a head”; he is enraged with Garrick for living like a person of quality; he is enraged with Agujari for getting fifty pounds for a mere song; he is equally enraged with Rauzzini because the “fair females” sigh over him, and make a man sick. But the General’s standing topic is his health; his rooted antipathy, physicians; and his favourite story—which he tells three or four times a day—in this wise:—“ ‘Some years ago,’—he says—‘let’s see, how many? in the year ’71—ay, ’71, ’72—thereabouts—I was taken very ill, and, by ill luck, I was persuaded to ask the advice of one of these Dr. Gallipots:—oh, how I hate them all! Sir, they are the vilest pickpockets,—know nothing, sir! Nothing in the world! poor ignorant mortals! and they pretend—in short, sir, I hate them all; I have suffered so much by them, sir—lost four years of the happiness of my life—let’s see, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74—ay, four years, sir!—mistook my case, sir!—and all that kind of thing. Why, sir, my feet swelled as big as two horses’ heads! I vow I will never consult one of these Dr. Gallipot fellows again! lost me, sir, four years of the happiness of my life!—why, I grew quite an object!—you would hardly have known me!—lost all the calves of my legs!—had not an ounce of flesh left!—and as to the rouge—why, my face was the colour of that candle!—those Gallipot fellows!—why they robbed me of four years—let me see, ’71, ’72—’
“And then it all goes over again!
“This story is always a-propos; if health is mentioned, it is instanced to show its precariousness; if life, to bewail what he has lost of it; if pain, to relate what he has suffered; if pleasure, to recapitulate what he has been deprived of; but if a physician is hinted at, eagerly indeed is the opportunity seized of inveighing against the whole faculty.”
There is more, especially of the General grumbling over the newspaper; but enough has been given. In all these pictures, it may be noted, Miss Burney insists upon her fidelity to fact. “I never mix truth and fiction,” she tells “Daddy” Crisp. “I have other purposes for imaginary characters than filling letters with them.” “The world, and especially the Great world, is so filled with absurdity of various sorts, now bursting forth in impertinence, now in pomposity, now giggling in silliness, and now yawning in dullness, that there is no occasion for invention to draw what is striking in every possible species of the ridiculous.” As time went on, her opportunities for study rather increased than decreased. At the beginning of 1780, as already related, the question of her comedy was again partly revived. Then there were proposals for a tour in Italy with the Thrales which was afterwards abandoned. But in April she went with her friends to Bath, making acquaintance en route, at the Bear at Devizes, with the hostess’s clever son, who afterwards became Sir Thomas Lawrence. At Bath they lodge (like Smollett’s Mr. Bramble) in the South Parade, with Allen’s Prior Park, the meadows, and “the soft flowing Avon” in view; and are speedily absorbed in the fashionable diversions of the place. Prelates were preaching at the Abbey and St. James’s Churches; there were public breakfasts in the Spring Gardens; the Pump Room was crowded with company and the Walks with promenaders; Mrs. Siddons was playing Belvidera at Mr. Palmer’s Theatre in Orchard Street; and life was one endless round of fiddles, dinners, concerts, assemblies, balls, card-parties and scandal. Miss Burney’s canvas becomes more and more crowded, and less detailed, affording space only for occasional vignettes such as the following: “In the evening we had Mrs. L——, a fat, round, panting, short-breathed old widow; and her daughter, a fubsy, good-humoured, laughing, silly, merry old maid. They are rich folks, and live together very comfortably, and the daughter sings—not in your fine Italian taste! no, that she and her mother agree to hold very cheap—but all about Daphne, and Chloe, and Damon, and Phillis, and Jockey!” Or this,—on the same page,—“Mrs. K—— is a Welsh lady, of immense fortune, who has a house in the Crescent, and lives in a most magnificent style. She is about fifty, very good-humoured, well-bred, and civil, and her waist does not measure above a hogshead. She is not very deep, I must own; but what of that? If all were wits, where would be the admirers at them?”
Dr. Johnson did not take part in the Bath expedition. He would, indeed, have come; but Mrs. Thrale had discouraged his doing so, feeling sure that a watering-place life would have horribly wearied him, which is not only possible but extremely probable. Literature—that is to say the literature of 1780—was nevertheless fairly represented in Bladud’s ancient City. First and foremost there was Mrs. Thrale’s rival, Mrs. Montagu, with her attendant train of blue-stockings; there was Anstey of the New Bath Guide, whom—as we have seen—wiseacres had credited with Evelina; there was Mrs. Susannah Dobson, the translator of Petrarch; there was Melmoth of Pliny’s Letters; there was Miss Elizabeth Carter of Epictetus; there was Lady Miller of Batheaston and the famous Frascati vase wherein—according to Macaulay—“fools were wont to put bad verses,” but which, however, at this precise moment of time, was not en fonction.[[46]] To the failings of her confrères and consœurs, Miss Burney, it must be confessed, in her capacity of “faithful historian” is not always “very kind.” Of poor Lady Miller, who died a year later, she writes, “She is a round, plump, coarse-looking dame of about forty, and while all her aim is to appear an elegant woman of fashion, all her success is to seem an ordinary woman in very common life, with fine clothes on. Her habits are bustling, her air is mock-important, and her manners very inelegant.” Of Mrs. Dobson, she reports that “though coarse, low-bred, forward, self-sufficient, and flaunting, she seems to have a strong and masculine understanding, and parts that, had they been united with modesty, or fostered by education, might have made her a shining and agreeable woman; but she has evidently kept low company, which she has risen above in literature, but not in manners.” Of Miss Carter, on the contrary, then growing old, Miss Burney says, that she “never saw age so graceful in the female sex yet, her whole face seems to beam with goodness, piety and philanthropy.” Anstey she finds not very agreeable—“shyly important, and silently proud,” and moreover unable to forget that he is the author of a popular work; while Pliny Melmoth is written down as “intolerably self-sufficient.”