MR. CRISP.
But though this gently cheering, and highly honourable connexion, by its kindly operation, offered the first mental solace to that portentous journey to Bath, which with a blight had opened the spring of 1783; that blight was still unhealed in the excoriation of its infliction, when a new incision of anguish, more deeply cutting still, and more permanently incurable, pierced the heart of Dr. Burney by tidings from Chesington, that Mr. Crisp was taken dangerously ill.
The ravages of the gout, which had long laid waste the health, strength, spirits, and life-enjoying nerves of this admirable man, now extended their baleful devastations to the seats of existence, the head and the breast; wavering occasionally in their work, with something of less relentless rigour, but never abating in menace of fatality.
Susanna,—now Mrs. Phillips,—was at Chesington at the time of the seizure; and to her gentle bosom, and most reluctant pen, fell the sorrowing task of announcing this quick-approaching calamity to Dr. Burney, and all his house: and in the same unison that had been their love, was now their grief. Sorrow, save at the dissolution of conjugal or filial ties, could go no deeper. The Doctor would have abandoned every call of business or interest,—for pleasure at such a period, had no call to make! in order to embrace and to attend upon his long dearest friend, if his Susanna had not dissuaded him from so mournful an exertion, by representations of the uncertainty of finding even a moment in which it might be safe to risk any agitation to the sufferer; whose pains were so torturing, that he fervently and perpetually prayed to heaven for the relief of death:—while the prayers for the dying were read to him daily by his pious sister, Mrs. Gast.
And only by the most urgent similar remonstrances, could the elder[62] or the younger[63] of the Doctor’s daughters be kept away; so completely as a fond father was Mr. Crisp loved by all.
But this Memorialist, to whom, for many preceding years, Mr. Crisp had rendered Chesington a second, a tender, an always open, always inviting home, was so wretched while withheld from seeking once more his sight and his benediction, that Dr. Burney could not long oppose her wishes. In some measure, indeed, he sent her as his own representative, by entrusting to her a letter full of tender attachment and poignant grief from himself; which he told her not to deliver, lest it should be oppressive or too affecting; but to keep in hand, for reading more or less of it to him herself, according to the strength, spirits, and wishes of his dying friend.
With this fondly-sad commission, she hastened to Chesington; where she found her Susanna, and all the house, immersed in affliction: and where, in about a week, she endured the heartfelt sorrow of witnessing the departure of the first, the most invaluable, the dearest Friend of her mourning Father; and the inestimable object of her own chosen confidence, her deepest respect, and, from her earliest youth, almost filial affection.
She had the support, however, of the soul-soothing sympathy of her Susanna; and the tender consolation of having read to him, by intervals, nearly the whole of Dr. Barney’s touching Farewell! and of having seen that her presence had been grateful to him, even in the midst of his sufferings; and of inhaling the balmy kindness with which his nearly final powers of utterance had called her “the dearest thing to him on earth!”
This wound, in its acuteness to Dr. Burney, was only less lacerating than that which had bled from the stroke that had torn away from him the early and adored partner of his heart. But the submissive resignation and patient philosophy with which he bore it, will best be exemplified by the following extract from a letter, written, on this occasion, to his second daughter; whose quick feelings had—as yet!—only once been strongly called forth; and that nearly in childhood, on her maternal deprivation; who knew not, therefore, enough of their force to be guarded against their invasion: and who, in the depth of her grief, had shut herself up in mournful seclusion; for,—blind to sickly foresight!—neither the age nor the infirmities of Mr. Crisp had worked upon her as preparatory to his exit.
His age, indeed, as it was unaccompanied by the smallest diminution of his faculties, though he had reached his seventy-sixth year, offered no mitigation to grief for his death; though a general one, undoubtedly, to its shock. What we lament, is what we lose; what we lose, whether young or old, is what we miss: it may justly, therefore, perhaps, be affirmed, that youth and beauty, however more elegiacally they may be sung, are only by the Lover and the Poet mourned over with stronger regret than age and goodness.