1807.
In the ensuing year, 1807, the diary of the Doctor contains the following narration of the Countess of Mount Edgecumbe:
“December 21.—I have lost my oldest and most partial musical friend, the Countess Dowager of Mount Edgecumbe, relict of the third Lord and first Earl, and mother of the present Earl. She was daughter of Dr. John Gilbert, Archbishop of York. I knew and was known to her when she was Miss Gilbert, and at the head of lady musicians. She was always of the Italian school, and spoke both Italian and French well and fluently: she was one of the great patronesses of Giardini and Mengotti, in their days of renown; and generously never ceased serving [Pg 376] and supporting them when they were superseded by newer rivals. She was a correspondent in Italian with Martinelli. She played with great force and precision all the best modern compositions of the times; and in so high and spirited a style, that no other lady, or hardly professor, in England, durst attempt them. She kept her box at the opera till very late in life: and then, when, from the bustle and noise of entry and exit, she relinquished it, she still sustained her own private study and practice on the harpsichord. And, to the very last, when told of any musical phenomena, vocal or instrumental, she was curious and eager to hear them at private or subscription concerts. She went to Tunbridge Wells last summer, when her frame was extremely impaired, and her faculties no longer of their original brightness. Previously to setting out, she honoured me, in as infirm and decayed a state as herself, with a visit; condescendingly clambering up my flight of stairs to nearly the summit of Chelsea Hospital, protesting, with her old and very agreeable liveliness, that the exertion did her nothing but good: and then, almost on her knees, beseeching me to go also to Tunbridge Wells, as she was sure its waters would be highly beneficial to me. I was then, however, so unwell and feeble, that I feared going even to Bulstrode. I could not, therefore, satisfy this kind and noble lady with the least prospect of following her, and partaking of her offered hospitality.
“Daughter of so eminent a divine, she had been brought up with a firm belief and veneration in religion; and she was persuaded that all the calamities of the war were inflicted upon us as the scourge of our iniquities, for our admission of jacobinical principles at the opening of the French Revolution. It was a very remarkable circumstance, that pulsation stopped, and her heart ceased to beat, three days before she expired.”
About this period, also, or somewhat later, Dr. Burney had to lament the loss of his constant and respectable friend, Mrs. Ord; which, though not of a sort to prey upon his feelings, like those privations that bereaved him of the objects of his taste, as well as connexion, caused yet a considerable breach in his habits of friendly intercourse, and of such enlivening parties and projects, as constitute the major, though not the higher portion of our rotatory comforts.
The whole tenor of the life of Mrs. Ord, and of her minutest as well as most important actions, was under the concentrated guidance of a laudable ambition to merit general esteem. And so sagely directed were her movements for the attainment of their object, that she was one of those few beings whom censure passed by as unimpeachable.
She was sincerely attached to Dr. Burney and his family, and was sincerely lamented by all to whom her worth and virtues were known.
Towards the close of this year, 1807, Dr. Burney had an infliction which nearly robbed him of his long-tried, and hitherto almost invulnerable force of mind, for bearing the rude assaults of misfortune: this was a paralytic stroke, which, in casting his left hand into a state of torpor, threw his heart, head, and nerves into one of ceaseless agitation, from an unremitting expectance of abrupt dissolution.
His absent daughter was spared from participating in the pain of this terrifying interval; and the despotic difficulty so often repined at of foreign correspondence, might here have seemed a benediction, had it been to political rigidity alone that she had been indebted for this exemption from availless anguish: but her generous father had made it his first care to prohibit, and peremptorily, all parts of his house from sending any communication, any hint whatsoever of his apprehensive state to Paris: and his exhortation, with the same earnestness, though not the same authority, was spread to every writing class of friend or acquaintance.
His own account of this trying event, written in the following year, in answer to his daughter’s alarm at his silence, will shew the full and surprising return of his spirits and health upon his recovery: