“July 1st, 1802.—I have this day taken leave, for this year, of my town business, which broke into three precious mornings of my week, shivered the lord knows how many links of the chain of my Cyclopedia, [Pg 331] and lost me even the interval of time from the trouble of collecting the broken fragments of my materials, and re-putting them together.
“In order to form some idea of the total absorption of my present life, by this Herculean labour, added to my usual hurricanes during the town season, a delightful letter of Twining himself, which I received some weeks ago, remains unanswered! I had a mind to see what I could really do in twelve months, by driving the quill at every possible moment that I could steal from business or repose, by day and by night, in bed and up; and, with all this stir and toil, I have found it impracticable to finish three letters of the alphabet!”
How fortunate—may it not be said how benign?—was the invisibility to coming events at the parental and filial moment of the late separation! an invisibility that spared from fruitless disturbance the greater part of that promised year that was to have ended with the balm of re-union, by hiding the fresh proof with which it was labouring to manifest the never-ending, yet never-awaited imperfection and fallacy of human arrangements.
But grievous, however procrastinated, was the light that too soon broke into that invisibility, when, almost at the moment of happy expectation, Dr. Burney had the shock of hearing that war was again declared with France! And dire, most dire and afflicting to his daughter, was the similar information, of learning that Buonaparte had peremptorily ordered Lord Whitworth to quit Paris in a specified number of hours: and that a brief term was dictatorially fixed for either following that Ambassador, or immoveably remaining in France till the contest should be over.
The very peculiar position, in a military point of view, in which M. d’Arblay now stood in his native country, made it impossible for him to leave it, at so critical a juncture, in the hurried manner that the imperious decree of the French Dictator commanded. It might seem deserting his post! He felt, therefore, compelled, by claims of professional observance, to abide the uncertain storm where its first thunder rolled; and to risk, at its centre, the hazards of its circulation, and the chances of its course.
The unhappiness caused by this decision was wholly unmixed with murmurs from Dr. Burney, whose justice and candour acknowledged it, in such a situation, to be indispensable.
War thus again broken forth, few and concise were the lines, not letters, that kept up any correspondence between Dr. Burney and Paris; passing unsealed when they came by the post; and even undirected, as accidental papers, when they were intrusted to private hands: so great was the dread in this English Memorialist of raising in the French Government any suspicion of cabal or conspiracy, by any sort of written intercourse with England.[68]
Nothing, therefore, at this time, can be drawn for these Memoirs from the letters of Dr. Burney: and every article or paragraph for the next two or three years, will be copied, or abridged, from the Doctor’s posthumous manuscripts.