[61] Diary and Letters, 1892, ii. 189, 213, 277, 439. Several writers have pointed out this unaccountable lapse in the famous Edinburgh essay on Madame D’Arblay. It may be added that another gift from the Queen, a gold watch set with pearls, is in the possession of Mrs. Chappel of East Orchard, Shaftesbury.
[62] Miss Burney probably quoted from memory, as the couplet in the Epilogue to the printed play runs as follows:— “And oft let soft Cecilia win your praise; While Reason guides the clue, in Fancy’s maze.”
[63] Charlotte Burney was by this time married to Clement Francis, a surgeon practising at Aylsham, about five miles from Windham’s seat at Felbrigge. Mrs. Ellis, quoting from “a family account,” says “Clement Francis had been Secretary to Warren Hastings in India, and while there he read, and was so charmed with Evelina, that he was seized with a desire to make the authoress his wife, and, with that intent, came home from India and obtained an introduction to Dr. Burney and his family, but the result was that he married the younger sister—Charlotte” (Early Diary, 1889, ii. 273 n.).
[64] This was by the copious William Combe, author of Dr. Syntax. The full title is—Original Love Letters, between a Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Condition, Dublin, 1794, two vols.
[65] Not of pity, but of fear. According to his own after-account at Lord Jersey’s table, the King, under some sudden impatience of control, had seized him by the collar, and thrust him violently against the wall.
[66] “Upon one occasion he is said to have talked unceasingly for sixteen hours” (Auckland Correspondence, ii. 244, quoted in Jesse’s Life and Reign of George III., 1867, iii. 58).
[67] At a later date she puts the matter in a nutshell. “I am inexpressibly grateful to the Queen, but I burn to be delivered from Mrs. Schwellenberg.” She argued, and argued justly, that, unless the desire of further intercourse was reciprocal, she ought only to belong to Mrs. Schwellenberg officially, and at official hours. But “Cerbera” was an old and faithful servant of the Royal Family; and it was obviously difficult to explain the state of affairs to Her Majesty, one of whose objects moreover had been to give Mrs. Schwellenberg a pleasant companion in her old age.
[68] This appreciation she never lost. She speaks of herself later as “having resigned royal service without resigning royal favour” (Diary and Letters, 1892, iv. 7).
[69] “I have exhausted all the types of character with which I am familiar”—Thackeray told the Rev. Whitwell Elwin in 1856. “I can’t jump further than I did in The Newcomes” (Some XVIIIth Century Men of Letters, 1903, i. 156).