To Dante, therefore, he first delivered over what he could yet summon from his grief-worn faculties; and to initiate himself into the works, and nearly obsolete style, of that hardest, but most sublime of Italian poets, became the occupation to which, with the least repugnance, he was capable of recurring.
A sedulous, yet energetic, though prose translation of the Inferno, remains amongst his posthumous relics, to demonstrate the sincere struggles with which, even amidst this overwhelming calamity, he strove to combat that most dangerously consuming of all canker-worms upon life and virtue, utter inertness.
Of his children, James,[23] his eldest son, had already, at ten years of age, been sent to sea, a nominal midshipman, in the ship of Admiral Montagu.
The second son, Charles,[24] who was placed, several years later, in the Charterhouse, by Mr. Burney’s first and constant patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, was then but a child.
The eldest daughter was still a little girl; and the last born of her three sisters could scarcely walk alone. But all, save the seaman, who was then aboard his ship, were now called back to the paternal roof of the unhappy father.
None of them, however, were of an age to be companionable; his fondness for them, therefore, full of care and trouble, procured no mitigation to his grief by the pleasure of society: and the heavy march of time, where no solace is accepted from abroad, or attainable at home, gave a species of stagnation to his existence, that made him take, in the words of Young,
“No note of time,
Save by its loss!”
His tenderness, however, as a father; his situation as a man; and his duties as a Christian, drew, tore him, at length, from this retreat of lonely woe; and, in the manuscript already quoted from, which was written many years after the period of which it speaks, he says: “I was forced, ere long, to plunge into business; and then found, that having my time occupied by my affairs was a useful dissipation of my sorrows, as it compelled me to a temporary inattention to myself, and to the irreparable loss I had sustained.”
Still, however, all mitigation to his grief that was not imposed upon him by necessity, he avoided even with aversion; and even the sight of those who most had loved and esteemed the departed, was the sight most painful to him in sharpening his regrets, “which, therefore, no meeting whatsoever,” he says, “could blunt; since to love and admire her, had been universally the consequence of seeing and knowing her.”