(Farewell to performances, if the palm, denied, sends one home lean, but, granted, flourishing.)
Lamb has not quite represented the poet's meaning, which is a profession of independence in regard to popular applause.
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Page 91. Sonnet to Miss Burney….
First printed in the Morning Chronicle, July 13, 1820. The Burney family began to be famous with Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), the musician, the author of the History of Music, and the friend of Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Among his children were the Rev. Charles Burney (1757-1817), the classical scholar and owner of the Burney Library, now in the British Museum; Rear-Admiral James Burney (1750-1821), who sailed with Cook, wrote the Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, and became a friend of Lamb; Frances Burney, afterwards Madame d'Arblay (1752-1840), the novelist, author of Evelina, Camilla and Cecilia; and Sarah Harriet Burney (1770?-1844), a daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife, also a novelist, and the author, among other stories, of Geraldine Fauconberg. "Country Neighbours; or, The Secret," the tale that inspired Lamb's sonnet, formed Vols. II. and III. of Sarah Burney's Tales of Fancy. Blanch is the heroine.
The good old man in Madame d'Arblay's Camilla is Sir Hugh Tyrold, who adopted the heroine.
Page 91. To my Friend The Indicator.
Printed in The Indicator, September 27, 1820, signed ****, preceded by these words by Leigh Hunt, the editor:—
Every pleasure we could experience in a friend's approbation, we have felt in receiving the following verses. They are from a writer, who of all other men, knows how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom. …The receipt of these verses has set us upon thinking of the good-natured countenance, which men of genius, in all ages, have for the most part shewn to contemporary writers.
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