MISS BURNEY’S “EVELINA.”
The story of Evelina being printed when the authoress was but seventeen years old is proved to have been sheer invention, to trumpet the work into notoriety; since it has no more truth in it than a paid-for newspaper puff. The year of Miss Burney’s birth was long involved in studied obscurity, and thus the deception lasted, until one fine day it was ascertained, by reference to the register of the authoress’ birth, that she was a woman of six or seven-and-twenty, instead of a “Miss in her teens,” when she wrote Evelina. The story of her father’s utter ignorance of the work being written by her, and recommending her to read it, as an exception to the novel class, has also been essentially modified. Miss Burney, (then Madame D’Arblay,) is said to have taken the characters in her novel of Camilla from the family of Mr. Lock, of Norbury Park, who built for Gen. D’Arblay the villa in which the work was written, and which to this day is called “Camilla Lacy.” By this novel, Madame D’Arblay is said to have realized 3000 guineas.
EPITAPH ON CHARLES LAMB.
Lamb lies buried in Edmonton churchyard, and the stone bears the following lines to his memory, written by his friend, the Rev. H. F. Cary, the erudite translator of Dante and Pindar:—
“Farewell, dear friend!—that smile, that harmless mirth,
No more shall gladden our domestic hearth;
That rising tear, with pain forbid to flow—
Better than words—no more assuage our woe.
That hand outstretch’d from small but well-earned store
Yield succour to the destitute no more.
Yet art thou not all lost: through many an age,
With sterling sense and humour, shall thy page
Win many an English bosom, pleased to see
That old and happier vein revived in thee.
This for our earth; and if with friends we share
Our joys in heaven, we hope to meet thee there.”
Lamb survived his earliest friend and school-fellow, Coleridge, only a few months. One morning he showed to a friend the mourning ring which the author of Christabelle had left him. “Poor fellow!” exclaimed Lamb, “I have never ceased to think of him from the day I first heard of his death.” Lamb died in five days after—December 27, 1834, in his fifty-ninth year.