In the autumn of 1787, the newspapers began to make frequent mention of Miss Burney’s name. Paragraphs appeared regretting her long silence, and the employment to which it was supposed to be attributable.[[83]] Fanny had many regrets connected with her situation: she lamented her dependence on her odious colleague; she lamented the inferiority of most of her associates; she lamented her separation from her old friends; but we have no reason to think that she repined at the want of liberty to print and publish. At least we cannot discover any passage in her Diary indicating such a feeling. Presently the paragraphs proceeded to mingle rumours with regrets. The ‘World’ was informed that Miss Burney ‘had resigned her place about the Queen, and had been promoted to attend the Princesses, an office far more suited to her character and abilities.’ Then followed a contradiction. ‘The rumour of resignation was premature, and only arose from thoughts of the benefit the education of the Princesses might reap from Miss Burney’s virtues and accomplishments.’ Such speculations made it needful for their subject to explain herself to the Queen. Fanny hastened to repudiate all participation in the idea that it could be promotion to her to be transferred from the service of her Majesty to that of the Princesses; she disclaimed, with equal warmth, having the slightest wish for such a transference. There can be no doubt that she was perfectly sincere. The Queen, she felt, had some regard for her, and she had a decided attachment to the Queen. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘were there no Mrs. Schwellenberg!’
One cannot help wondering if the question whether some more worthy position at Court might not be found for Miss Burney occurred to the Queen, or to herself, at this interview. If such a thought did present itself, it does not seem to have been mentioned by either. Fanny had early conceived the notion that the Queen intended to employ her as an English reader. She was not altogether wrong. She had been occasionally called on to read, but the result did not prove very satisfactory. At the first trial her voice was quite unmanageable; when she had concluded, the Queen talked of the Spectator she had read, but forebore saying anything of any sort about the reader. Of a subsequent attempt we have this record: ‘Again I read a little to the Queen—two Tatlers; both happened to be very stupid; neither of them Addison’s, and therefore reader and reading were much on a par: for I cannot arrive at ease in this exhibition to her Majesty; and where there is fear or constraint, how deficient, if not faulty, is every performance!’ For the office of preceptress to the Princesses she was even less fitted than for that of reader to their mother. Probably Mrs. Goldsworthy and Miss Planta were much better qualified to instruct their young charges than Miss Burney would have been. This may be confessed without the slightest reflection on her extraordinary talents. She could afford to have it known that her education had been neglected. It was nothing that she had withdrawn rather ungraciously from Johnson’s Latin lessons. It was little that she did not understand a word of the German which the Royal Family commonly spoke among themselves. Hardly any Englishwomen in those days read Latin, or were acquainted with the language of Goethe and Wieland. But Miss Burney had not even a strong taste for reading. At the height of her fame, her knowledge of ordinary English authors was surprisingly limited. Queen Charlotte, who read a good deal in French and English, as well as in German, was disappointed by the scanty furniture of her attendant’s book-shelves. And whenever her Majesty or anyone else at Court mentioned any standard or current work in her presence, it almost invariably happened that she had not read it. One evening, Cowper’s ‘Task’ was referred to, and she was asked if she knew the poem; ‘Only by character,’ was her answer. She had not even that amount of acquaintance with Churchill’s Satires, the very existence of which seems to have been unknown to her. Akenside’s works she knew of only by some quotations which she had heard from Mr. Locke. It may, perhaps, be urged that Cowper was then quite a new writer, and that the fame of Mark Akenside and Charles Churchill, though bright when she was a child, had become dim before she grew up. Well, then, take Goldsmith. No poems were more popular than Oliver’s when Fanny began to see the world in Martin’s Street; yet we have her confession that she never read the ‘Traveller,’ or ‘The Deserted Village,’ till a friend made her a present of them in 1790.[[84]] This being so, we cannot wonder that she had never heard of Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck’ when Colonel Digby produced a copy of that work. She appears to have been barely aware of Cumberland’s ‘Observer,’ a production in which she herself and most of her friends were referred to, until the Queen read some passages to her, and afterwards lent her the volumes. She had not seen Hawkins’s ‘Life of Johnson’ when the King first mentioned it to her, and ‘talked it over with great candour and openness.’ Nor did she take much interest in literary questions. The Scotch ballad of ‘The Gaberlunzie Man,’ then lately printed in Germany, she threw aside almost contemptuously, though it had been lent her by the Queen. About Shakspeare her views were those of a most loyal subject. She reads Hamlet to Mrs. Delany, and this is her comment: ‘How noble a play it is, considered in parts! how wild and how improbable, taken as a whole! But there are speeches, from time to time, of such exquisite beauty of language, sentiment, and pathos, that I could wade through the most thorny of roads to arrive at them.’ The Queen, as Thackeray has observed, could give shrewd opinions about books, and we suspect she presently learned to value her second Robe-Keeper for her brightness of intelligence, her powers of description, and her lively humour, rather than for the solidity or the variety of her attainments.
[76]. Macaulay says that this promise of a gown was never performed; but he is mistaken. Miss Burney did get the gown after some delay. It was ‘a lilac tabby,’ whatever that may be, or may have been. (Diary, ii. 189.)
[77]. Thackeray.
[78]. Miss Goldsworthy, sub-governess of the Princesses.
[79]. ‘The last time I saw her (Mrs. Vesey) before I left London,’ writes Walpole, ‘Miss Burney passed the evening there, looking quite recovered and well; and so cheerful and agreeable that the Court seems only to have improved the ease of her manner, instead of stamping more reserve on it, as I feared. But what slight graces it can give will not compensate to us and the world for the loss of her company and her writings.’—Walpole to Hannah More, June 15, 1787.
[80]. What induced Macaulay to describe this gentleman as ‘half-witted,’ we are at a loss to conjecture. He possessed, as Miss Burney bears witness, remarkable cleverness, extraordinary attainments and great powers of conversation.
[81]. He had a wife to whom he was strongly attached.
[82]. Croker was told by the Right Hon. Joseph Planta, on the authority of Miss Planta, that Mrs. Schwellenberg was so despotic that she was better served, and more attended to than the Queen herself. Her servant always waited at the step of her door that she might not have to ring a bell; and a very constant expression of hers was, that if such and such a thing was good enough for her Majesty, it was not good enough for her.’—Jesse’s ‘George III.,’ vol. ii., App., p. 539.