Like his father, and others of his family, Charles Burney was a very sociable man. He lived much with Parr and with Porson, and, like those eminent scholars, he had the good and catholic taste which embraced in its appreciations, and with like geniality, old wine, as well as old books. He was less wise in nourishing a great dislike to cool breezes. ‘Shut the door,’ was usually his first greeting to any visitant who had to introduce himself to the Doctor’s notice; and it was a joke against him, in his later days, that the same words were his parting salutation to a couple of highwaymen who had taken his purse as he was journeying homewards in his carriage, and who were adding cruelty to robbery by exposing him to the fresh air when they made off.
Choice Books in Burney’s Library.
Some of Dr. Burney’s choicest books were obtained when the Pinelli Library was brought to England from Italy. The prime ornament of his manuscript Collection, a thirteenth century copy of the Iliad, of great beauty and rich in scholia, was bought at the sale of the fine Library of Charles Towneley, Collector of the Marbles.
Although classical literature was the strength of the Burney Collection, it was also rich in some other departments. Of English newspapers, for example, he had brought together nearly seven hundred volumes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching from the reign of James the First to the reign of George the Third. No such assemblage had been theretofore formed, I think, by any Collector. He had also amassed nearly four hundred volumes containing materials for a history of the British Stage, which materials have subsequently been largely used by Mr. Genest, in his work on that subject. For Burney’s life-long study of the Greek drama had gradually inspired him with a desire to trace what, in a sense, may be termed its modern revival, in the grand sequel given to it by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He had also collected about five thousand engraved theatrical portraits, and two thousand portraits of literary personages.
A large number of his printed books contained marginal manuscript notes by Bentley, Casaubon, Burmann, and other noted scholars. And in a series of one hundred and seventy volumes Burney had himself collected all the extant remains and fragments of Greek dramatic writers—about three hundred in number. These remains he had arranged under the collective title of Fragmenta Scenica Græca.
A splendid vellum manuscript of the Greek orators, in scription of the fourteenth century, had been obtained from Dr. Clarke, by whom it had been acquired during Lord Elgin’s Ottoman Embassy, and brought into England. It supplied lacunæ which are found wanting in all other known manuscripts. It completed an imperfect oration of Lycurgus, and another of Dinarchus. Another MS. of the Greek orators, of the fifteenth century, is only next in value to that derived from Clarke’s researches in the East, of 1800. There is also a very fine manuscript of the Geography of Ptolemy, with maps compiled in the fifteenth century, and two very choice copies of the Greek Gospels, one of which is of the tenth, and the other of the twelfth centuries.
In Latin classics, the Burney Manuscripts include a fourteenth century Plautus, containing no fewer than twenty plays—whereas a manuscript containing even twelve plays has long been regarded as a rarity. A fifteenth century copy of the mathematical tracts collected by Pappus Alexandrinus, a Callimachus of the same date, and a curious Manuscript of the Asinus Aureus of Apuleius, are also notable. The whole number of Classical Manuscripts which this Collector had brought together was stated, at the time of his death, to be three hundred and eighty-five.
Dr. Burney died on the twenty-eighth of December, 1817, having just entered upon his sixty-first year. He was buried at Deptford, amidst the lamentations of his parishioners at his loss.
Doctor Burney’s Character.
For in Burney, too, the scholar and the Collector had not been suffered to dwarf or to engross the whole man. His parishioners assembled, soon after his death, to evince publicly their sense of what Death had robbed them of. The testimony then borne to his character was far better, because more pertinent, laudation, than is usually met with in the literature of tombstones. Those who had known the man intimately then said of him: ‘His attainments in learning were united with equal generosity and kindness of heart. His impressive discourses from the pulpit became doubly beneficial from the influence of his own example.’ The parishioners agreed to erect a monument to his memory, ‘as a record of their affection for their revered pastor, monitor, and friend; of their gratitude for his services, and of their unspeakable regret for his loss.’