This, of course, led to a great deal of discussion, in the midst of which the queen said,
“Do you know Dr. Burney, Mrs. Delany?
“Yes, ma'am, extremely well,” answered Mrs. Delany.
“I think him,” said the queen, “a very agreeable and entertaining man.”
There, my dear father! said I not well just now, O most penetrating queen?
So here ends my Windsor journal, part the first. Tomorrow morning I go for my week to Thames Ditton.
AN ANTICIPATED ROYAL INTERVIEW.
Windsor, Wednesday, Dec. 14—Yesterday I returned to my dear Mrs. Delany, from Thames Ditton, and had the great concern of finding her very unwell. Mr. Bernard Dewes, one of her nephews, and his little girl, a sweet child of seven years old, were with her, and, of course, Miss Port. She had been hurried, though only with pleasure, and her emotion, first in receiving, and next in entertaining them, had brought on a little fever.
She revived in the afternoon, and I had the pleasure of reading to her a play of Shakspeare's, that she had not heard for forty years, and which I had never read since I was a child,—“The Comedy of Errors;”—and we found in it all the entertainment belonging to an excellent farce, and all the objections belonging to an indifferent play, but the spirit with which she enters into every part of everything she hears, gives a sort of theatric effect to whatever is read to her; and my spirits rise in her presence, with the joy of exciting hers.