| [86] | She never used this title—as she says in an unpublished letter, dated 26 June, 1827, to her nephew, Dr. C. P. Burney, where she adds to her signature, “otherwise La Comtesse Veuve Piochard D’Arblay”—“because I have had no Fortune to meet it, and because my Son relinquished his hereditary claims of succession—though he might, upon certain conditions, resume them—on becoming a Clergyman of the Church of England. But I have never disclaimed my Rights, as I owe them to no Honours of my own, but to a Partnership in those which belonged to the revered Husband who, for twenty-four years, made the grateful Happiness of my Life.” |
| [87] | In the previous year Mme. D’Arblay had lost her brother Charles. James, the Admiral, survived to 1821. |
| [88] | See ante, p. 87. |
| [89] | Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1891, i. 308-9. Rogers’ Table Talk, 1858, p. 192, adds a detail of the first visit. Mme. D’Arblay had not heard that Scott was lame; and, seeing him limp, hoped he had not met with an accident. He answered, “An accident, Madam, nearly as old as my birth.” |
| [90] | Ibid., ii. 190. |
| [91] | Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856, 179-80. |
| [92] | “It was not hard fagging that produced such a work as Evelina”—wrote “Daddy” Crisp in 1779—“it was the ebullition of true sterling genius—you wrote it because you could not help it—it came, and so you put it down on paper.” (Diary and Letters, 1892, i. 178.) |
| [93] | These expressions are from Cowper’s Progress of Error, written in 1780-1. |
| [94] | Diary and Letters, 1892, iv. 339. |