Highly satisfied with this arrangement, Mr. Burney now visited the delightful capital of France; made himself acquainted with its antiquities, curiosities, public buildings, public places, general laws, and peculiar customs; its politics, its resources, its festivities, its arts and its artists; as well as with the arbitrary tyrannies, and degrading oppressions towards the lower classes, which, at that epoch, were, to an English looker-on, incomprehensibly combined, not with murmurs nor discontent, but with the most lively animal spirits, and the freshest glee of national gaiety.
But his chosen haunts were the Public Libraries, to which an easiness of access, at that time deplorably unknown in England, encouraged, nay, excited, the intelligent visitor, who might be mentally inclined to any literary project, to hit upon some subject congenial to his taste; by rousing in him that spirit of emulation, which ultimately animates the humbly instructed, to soar to the heights that distinguish the luminous instructor.
Collections of books, even the most multitudinous and the most rare, may hold, to the common runner through life, but an ordinary niche in places of general resort; nevertheless, the Public Libraries, those Patrons of the Mind, must always be entered with a glow of grateful pleasure, by those who, instinctively, meditate upon the vast mass of thought that they contain.
To wander amidst those stores, that commit talents to posterity as indubitably as the Herald’s Register transmits names and titles; to develop as accurately the systems of nations, the conditions of communities, the progress of knowledge, and the turn of men’s minds, two or three thousand years ago, as in this our living minute; to visit, in fact, the Brains of our fellow-creatures,—not alone with the harrowing knife to dissect physical conformation, but, with the piercing eye of penetration to dive into the recesses of human intelligence, the sources of imagination, and the springs of genius; and there, in those sacred receptacles of mental remains, to survey, in clear, indestructible evidence, all of the soul that man is able to bequeath to man— —
Views such as these of the powers of his gifted, though gone fellow-creatures, seen thus abstractedly through their intellectual attributes; purified equally from the frailties and selfishness of active life, and the sickly humours and baleful infirmities of age; seen through the medium of learned, useful, or fanciful productions; and beheld in so insulated a moment of vacuity of any positive plan of life, instinctively roused the dormant faculties of the subject of these memoirs, by setting before him a comprehensive chart of human capabilities, which involuntarily incited a conscious inquiry: what, peradventure, might be his own share, if sought for, in such heavenly gifts?
And it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable and indescribable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiencies—namely, the class of authors.
For this was the real, though not yet the ostensible epoch, whence may be traced the opening of his passion for literary pursuits.
And from this period, to the very close of his long mortal career, this late, though newly chosen occupation, became all that was most consoling to his sorrows, most diversifying to his ideas, and most animating to his faculties.
Some new stimulus had been eminently wanting to draw a man of his natively ardent and aspiring character from the torpid blight of availless misery; which, in despoiling him of all bosom felicity, had left only to an attempt at some untried project and purpose, any chance for the restoration of his energies.
He did not immediately fix on a subject for any work, though he had the wisdom, at once, and the modesty, to resolve, since so tardily he entered such lists, to adopt no plan that might wean him from his profession—for his profession was his whole estate! but rather to seek one that might amalgamate his rising desire of fame in literature, with his original labours to be distinguished as a follower of Orpheus.