“Little Burney’s quick discerning”
was duly bracketed with
“Carter’s piety and learning,”—
with the “pathetic pen” of Hannah More, the “pointed wit” of Mrs. Cowley (of The Belle’s Stratagem), with
“Smiling Streatfield’s ivory neck,
Nose and notions—à la Grecque,”
and all the varied virtues of Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Thrale, and Mrs. Montagu.[[52]] Her friends were naturally anxious that she should pursue her triumphs; and “Daddy” Crisp, while piously enjoining her not “to remit her ardour and industry to be perfect,” and sagaciously observing “that there had been more instances than one, where writers have wrote themselves down, by slovenliness, laziness, and presuming too much on public favour for what is past,”—was still very practically alive to the necessities of taking the tide at the flood. “This is the harvest time of your life,”—he wrote; “your sun shines hot; lose not a moment, then, but make your hay directly. ‘Touch the yellow boys,’—as Briggs says—‘grow warm’; make the booksellers come down handsomely—count the ready—the chink.” Nevertheless, it was fourteen years before Miss Burney published another novel; and we must now revert to the chronicle of her life.
There can be little doubt that the publication of Cecilia largely extended the circle of her acquaintance; and that the paternal coach must often have been in requisition to convey her to the houses of the “lyon-hunters.” “I begin to grow most heartily sick and fatigued”—she writes in December, 1782—“of this continual round of visiting, and these eternal new acquaintances.” Elsewhere there are indications that, for one who was not able to run milliners’ bills, the question of costume must have been an absorbing one. “Miss Burney”—said Mr. Cambridge—“had no time to write, for she was always working at her clothes.” Mr. Richard Owen Cambridge of Twickenham,—Walpole’s “Cambridge the Everything,”—now an elderly gentleman, was one of the new friends who seem to have specially attracted her; and there is an account in the Diary of a visit she made in the summer of 1783 to that pleasant house of his in the meadows by Richmond Bridge, to which so many old-world notabilities were wont to resort. One of the things she recalls is her host’s testimony—in spite of the Préjugé à la mode—to his love for his wife. “There is no sight so pleasing to me,” he told her, “as seeing Mrs. Cambridge enter a room; and that after having been married to her for forty years.” At Mrs. Vesey’s she met Cambridge’s near neighbour, Horace Walpole, whom she found extremely entertaining. Dr. Parr, Jonas Hanway, Tasso Hoole, Benjamin West, the Wartons, Mrs. Ord, Mrs. Buller, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Garrick, also flit through her pages, though it would be impossible to make record of them here. But among the “fair females”—as “the General” of the last chapter would have said,—may be mentioned, chiefly because she must be mentioned hereafter, Mme. de Genlis, then in this country. To this most fascinating and insidious personage, Miss Burney was at first much attracted. But the acquaintance—her niece and editor tells us—was not maintained; and Fanny afterwards made nearer and dearer French friends for whom the multifarious author of Adèle et Théodore was only “cette coquine de Brulard.”
Upon the dissolution of the Whig Ministry at the close of 1783, Burke, as Paymaster General, appointed Dr. Burney organist of Chelsea Hospital Chapel, at an increased salary of £50 per annum. It was not much, but it was enhanced by the courteous way in which it was done. In her father’s absence, Burke himself informed Miss Burney of what he styled his “last act in office.” Earlier—in the same year, 1783—had come her first serious bereavement since she had lost her mother,—the death of her kind old Mentor at Chessington. By this time, Mr. Crisp was seventy-six, and had long been a martyr to the gout to which he finally succumbed. During his last illness, Fanny wrote to him frequently and affectionately; and, when it grew grave, hastened to his bed-side. She was “the dearest thing to him on earth,” he told her with his last breath; and her sorrow at his loss was for the time overwhelming. In what was once the picturesque and rustic, but is now the “restored” and “enlarged” church at Chessington, is a mural tablet to his memory, with an epitaph in verse by Dr. Burney, which his daughter has printed.[[53]] To Fanny the loss of “Daddy” Crisp was incalculable, for he had been at once her most judicious admirer and her most stimulating critic, never failing to mingle blame with his praise—blame against which, after the manner of the criticised, she generally at first protested. He was a better counsellor than her father, who was too eager for publication to be always mindful of the necessity for finish. Yet, at the same time, Crisp was urgent that his favourite should trust her own instincts. “Who[m]soever you think fit to consult, let their talents and tastes be ever so great, hear what they say, allowed!—agreed!—but never give up or alter a tittle merely on their authority, nor unless it perfectly coincides with your own inward feelings. I can say this to my sorrow and to my cost. But mum!” Which last injunction was no doubt a reference to his own ill-starred Virginia.
More than a year later took place what may almost be regarded as another bereavement,—the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. With this much-discussed event,—perplexed, moreover, by no little piqué and wounded feeling,—we are concerned only in so far as it relates to Miss Burney. Gabriele Piozzi, who is sometimes contemptuously and erroneously described as a merely obscure “fiddler,” was a musician and professional singer of exceptional ability, who, according to contemporary prints, was earning some £1,200 per annum by his talents. He was a Roman Catholic, a handsome man “with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners,” of unimpeachable integrity, and about six months older than Mrs. Thrale, who, at her husband’s death, was forty. The Thrales first made his acquaintance at Brighton in 1780, and he speedily became a “prodigious favourite.” After her husband’s death, Mrs. Thrale’s liking for him gradually increased until it became a passion. Meanwhile, in 1782, with Johnson’s full concurrence, Streatham Place was let for three years to Lord Shelburne; and after leaving it in October of that year, the Doctor went with her for six weeks to her Brighton house—a fact which takes off something from the pathetic poignancy of the famous adieux to Streatham, regretful and melancholy as they must of necessity have been. Before 1782 had closed Mrs. Thrale had determined to marry Piozzi. But her daughters—to whom their father had left £20,000 each—were against the match; and after much mental perplexity, she decided to bid her lover farewell, and did so in January 1783. The sacrifice, however, proved beyond her powers; her health began to suffer; and a year later, with the tacit consent of her children, Piozzi was recalled from Milan, and she was married to him on the 23rd July, 1784, according to the rites of the Romish Church, by the Chaplain of the Spanish Ambassador. A second marriage followed on the 25th at St. James’s Church, Bath. Her correspondence with Johnson, upon what he regarded as this “ignominious” union, has been printed by Mr. Hayward, and her letters should be read as well as those of the Doctor.[[54]]