Note of Dr. Burney’s, in a memorandum book of this year, 1797:
“I beg that my pilgrimage to Litchfield, in 1797, may somewhere be recorded in my Memoirs, from memorandums made on the spot, after visiting the house where Dr. Johnson was born, and his father kept a bookseller’s shop; the house where Garrick lived, and his elder brother died; and seeking in vain for the birth-place, or at least residence, of Dr. James.”
POEM ON ASTRONOMY.
Upon the return of Dr. Burney to Chelsea, his astronomical project became his greatest amusement as well as occupation. In a memorandum upon its idea he writes:
“Very early in life I collected all the books I could attain upon this subject. I was already, therefore, in possession of a good number; to which I now added whatever I could procure from [Pg 250] France, as well as in England. And with these, having the free run of Sir Joseph Bankes’ scientific library, with that of the Royal Society, and of the Museum, I obtained such ample materials, that I took my daughter d’Arblay’s advice, and, in little more than a year from the time that I began the work, I had made a rough sketch of an historical and didactic Poem on Astronomy.”
This enterprise, shortly afterwards, so grew upon his fancy, that, to use again his own words,
“Every spare minute I now devote to astronomy and its history, which I try incessantly to versify, but find very difficult to render poetical. This probably, however, may be the case with most didactic poems.”
In another letter to the Hermitage on this subject, in which he describes his various whirls of business and engagements, he sportively cries:
“And, after fulfilling them all, instead of going to sleep, like a mere dull mortal, I take a flight upon Pegasus to the moon, or to some planet, or fixed star.”