ROYAL CAUTIONS AND CONFIDENCES.
Nov. 1.—We began this month by steadily settling ourselves at Kew. A very pleasant circumstance happened to me on this day, in venturing to present the petition of an unfortunate man who had been shipwrecked; whose petition was graciously attended to, and the money he solicited was granted him. I had taken a great interest in the poor man, from the simplicity and distress of his narration, and took him into one of the parlours to assist him in drawing up his memorial.
The queen, when, with equal sweetness and humanity, she had delivered the sum to one of her pages to give to him, said to me, “Now, though your account of this poor man makes him seem to be a real object, I must give you one caution: there are so many impostors about, who will try to speak to you, that, if you are not upon your guard, you may be robbed yourself before you can get any help: I think, therefore, you had better never trust yourself in a room alone with anybody you don't know.”
I thanked her for her gracious counsel, and promised, for the future, to have my man always at hand.
I was afterwards much touched with a sort of unconscious confidence with which she relieved her mind. She asked me my opinion of a paper in the “Tatler,” which I did not recollect; and when she was dressed, and seated in her sitting-room, she made me give her the book, and read to me this paper. It is an account of a young man of a good heart and sweet disposition, who is allured by pleasure into a libertine life, which he pursues by habit, but with constant remorse, and ceaseless shame and unhappiness. It was impossible for me to miss her object: all the mother was in her voice while she read it, and her glistening eyes told the application made throughout.[223] My mind sympathised sincerely, though my tongue did not dare allude to her feelings. She looked pensively down when she had finished it, and before she broke silence, a page came to announce the Duchess of Ancaster.
THE QUEEN TIRED OF HER GEWGAWS.
Nov. 3.—In the morning I had the honour of a conversation with the queen, the most delightful, on her part, I had ever yet been indulged with. It was all upon dress, and she said so nearly what I had just imputed to her in my little stanzas, that I could scarce refrain producing them; yet could not muster courage. She told me, with the sweetest grace imaginable, how well she had liked at first her jewels and ornaments as queen,—“But how soon,” cried she, “was that over! Believe me, Miss Burney, it is a pleasure of a week,—a fortnight, at most,—and to return no more! I thought, at first, I should always choose to wear them, but the fatigue, and trouble of putting them on, and the care they required, and the fear of losing them,—believe me, ma'am, in a fortnight's time I longed again for my own earlier dress, and wished never to see them more!”
She then still more opened her opinions and feelings. She told me she had never, in her most juvenile years, loved dress and shew, nor received the smallest pleasure from any thing in her external appearance beyond neatness and comfort: yet did not disavow that the first week or fortnight of being a queen, when only in her seventeenth year, she thought splendour sufficiently becoming her station to believe she should thenceforth choose constantly to support it. But her eyes alone were dazzled, not her mind; and therefore the delusion speedily vanished, and her understanding was too strong to give it any chance of returning,