“‘Doctor Johnson returned home last night full of the praises of the book I had lent him; protesting there were passages in it that might do honour to Richardson. We talk of it for ever; and he, Doctor Johnson, feels ardent after the denouement. He could not get rid of the Rogue! he said. I then lent him the second volume, which he instantly read; and he is, even now, busy with the third.
“‘You must be more a philosopher, and less a father than I wish you, not to be pleased with this letter; and the giving such pleasure yields to nothing but receiving it. Long, my dear Sir, may you live to enjoy the just praises of your children! And long may they live to deserve and delight such a parent!’”
This packet was accompanied by intelligence, that Sir Joshua Reynolds had been fed while reading the little work, from refusing to quit it at table! and that Edmund Burke had sat up a whole night to finish it!!! It was accompanied, also, by a letter from Dr. Burney, that almost dissolved the happy scribbler with touching delight, by its avowal of his increased approbation upon a second reading: “Thou hast made,” he says, “thy old father laugh and cry at thy pleasure.... I never yet heard of a novel writer’s statue;[25]—yet who knows?—above all things, then, take care of thy head, for if that should be at all turned out of its place by all this intoxicating success, what sort of figure wouldst thou cut upon a pedestal? Prens y bien garde!’
This playful goodness, with the wondrous news that Doctor Johnson himself had deigned to read the little book, so struck, so nearly bewildered the author, that, seized with a fit of wild spirits, and not knowing how to account for the vivacity of her emotion to Mr. Crisp, she darted out of the room in which she had read the tidings by his side, to a small lawn before the window, where she danced, lightly, blithely, gaily, around a large old mulberry tree, as impulsively and airily as she had often done in her days of adolescence: and Mr. Crisp, though he looked on with some surprise, wore a smile of the most expressive kindness, that seemed rejoicing in the sudden resumption of that buoyant spirit of springing felicity, which, in her first visits to Liberty Hall—Chesington,—had made the mulberry tree the favourite site of her juvenile vagaries.
Dr. Burney sent, also, a packet from Mr. Lowndes, containing ten sets of Evelina very handsomely bound: and the scribbler had the extreme satisfaction to see that Mr. Lowndes was still in the dark as to his correspondent, the address being the same as the last;—
To Mr. Grafton,
Orange Coffee-House,
and the opening of the letter still being, Sir.
When Chesington air, kindness, and freedom, had completely chased away every symptom of disease, Dr. Burney hastened thither himself; and arrived in the highest, happiest spirits. He had three objects in view, each of them filling his lively heart with gay ideas; the first was to bring back to his own roof his restored daughter: the second, was to tell a laughable tale of wonder to the most revered friend of both, for which he had previously written to demand her consent: and the third, was to carry that daughter to Streatham, and present her, by appointment, to Mrs. Thrale, and—to Dr. Johnson!
No sooner had the Doctor reached Liberty Hall, than the two faithful old friends were shut up in the conjuring closet where Dr. Burney rushed at once into “the midst of things,” and disclosed the author of the little work which, for some weeks past, had occupied Chesington Hall with quotations, conjectures, and subject matter of talk.