'F. B. Well, this is a very new style to me! I have long enough had reason to think myself loved, but admiration is perfectly new to me.

Dr. J.—I admire her for her observation, for her good sense, for her humour, for her discernment, for her manner of expressing them, and for all her writing talents. '-vol. i. pp. 120-122.

No less than nine pages are expended in an account of her reception at one of Sir Joshua's evening parties, in which a lively lady of the day, Mrs. Cholmondeley, is introduced as bearing a prominent part, but-like everybody else—all to the ultimate honour of Fanny Burney. We select, as a further specimen, two pages out of the nine:

'Mrs. Chol.-I have been very ill; monstrous ill indeed! or else I should have been at your house long ago. Sir Joshua, pray how do you do? You know, I suppose, that I don't come to see you? 'Sir Joshua could only laugh; though this was her first address to him.

Mrs. Chol.-Pray, miss, what's your name? 'F. B. Frances, ma'am.

'Mrs. Chol.-Fanny? Well, all the Fannys are excellent! and yet, -my name is Mary! Pray, Miss Palmer, (Sir Joshua's niece) how are you?-though I hardly know if I shall speak to you to-night. I thought I should never have got here! I have been so out of humour with the people for keeping me. «If you but knew, cried I, «to whom I am going to-night (i. e. Fanny Burney), you would not dare keep me muzzing here!»

D

During all these pointed speeches her penetrating eyes were fixed upon me; and what could I do?-what, indeed, could anybody dɔ but colour and simper? all the company watching us, though all very delicately avoided joining the confab.

every night?

Mr. Chol. -My Lord Palmerston, I was told to-night that nobody could see your lordship for me, for that you supped at my house Dear, bless me, no!» cried I, «not every night!» and I looked as confused as I was able; but I am afraid I did not blush, though I tried hard for it!

Then, again, turning to me, (F. B.)

That Mr. What d'ye-call him, in Fleet-street, is a mighty silly fellow; perhaps you don't know who I mean?-one T. Lowndes, (the printer of Evelina - but maybe you don't know such a per

son?

'F. B.-No, indeed, I do not!-that, I can safely say.

Mrs. Chol.-I could get nothing from him: but I told him I hoped he gave a good price; and he answered me, that he always did things genteel. What trouble and tagging we had! Mr.

(I cannot recollect the name she mentioned) said man:-I said I was sure it was a woman: but now we are both out; for it's a GIRL!

In this comical, queer, flighty, whimsical manner she ran on, till we were summoned to supper; for we were not allowed to break up before; and then, when Sir Joshua and almost everybody was gone down stairs, she changed her tone, and, with a face and voice both grave, said,

"Well, Miss Burney, you must give me leave to say one thing to you; yet, perhaps you won't, neither, will you ?»

What is it, ma'am? »

Why it is, that I admire you more than any human being! and that I can't help!»

Then, suddenly rising, she hurried down stairs. ' — vol. i. pp.

174-176.

:

If all this egotism had been, as it professes, intended for "the confidential eye of a sister, it would have been in some degree excusable but it was not so; and the pretence of its being so intended is but another of the shifts in which her exuberant vanity disguises itself. The journal went the round of her own domestic circle, and was then regularly transmitted to Mr. Crisp and his coterie at Chessington (1)—and afterwards to Mr. and Mrs. Lock of Norbury Park, and to we know not whom else and it seems, beyond all doubt, to have been prepared and left by her for ultimate publication. Strange blindness to imagine that anything like fame was to be gathered from this deplorable exhibition of mock-modesty, endeavouring to conceal, but only the more flagrantly exposing, the boldest, the most horse-leech egotism that literature or Bedlam has yet exhibited.

-

If indeed-which would be a charitable but hardly credible explanation--she was herself under a delusion as to her feelings and motives-if she really mistook the itchings of vanity for the tremors of diffidence it would only remind us of what she herself said of poor mad Barry, the painter-that 'with an innocent belief that he was the most modest of men, he nourished the most insatiable avidity for applause.' In mentioning a Doctor Shepherd, one of the canons of Windsor, she says, « In no farce did a man ever more floridly open his own perfections, vol. iii. p. 436; and we may (') See Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. p. 101.

upon

safely say that in no furce did man or woman ever so floridly open on their own perfections as Miss Burney; and assuredly neither Barry, nor Shepherd, nor any other glutton of flummery that we have ever heard of, could manage to feed themselves with their own spoons with such appetite and activity as the author of Evelina.' Dr. Johnson said of another celebrated novelist, Sir, that fellow Richardson, was not content to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.' But Richardson never thought of the happy process by which Miss Burney conducted her system of self-adoration, and which we really think the cleverest trait in her whole history. It was no easy task to reconcile and carry on, pari passu, the pretension of modesty and the cravings of vanity; but her device, if not successful, is at least ingenious-she never, in her own proper person, very directly or outrageously praises Fanny Burney-she never absolutely says I am the cleverest writer-I am the most amiable woman in the world'—on the contrary, she humbles herself with all the genuine modesty of a newly-elected Speaker-but then, on the other hand, she thinks it her duty, as a mere historian and relater of facts, to record, in the most conscientious detail, all the panegyrics and compliments-however extravagant -which anybody and everybody might address to her. 'Dear Doctor Johnson pronounced that F. B. was the cleverest writer that ever lived, Sweet Mrs. Thrale exclaimed that F. B. was the most charming girl in the world; » and then, having sucked in all these sugared details with undisguisable relish, F. B. thinks it decent to blush-to stammer-to tremble-to fall into hysterics of wounded modesty, and to bewail to her confidants the intolerable torture-the eternal martyrdom of that universal admiration and worship to which she-poor victim-is thus reluctantly exposed. Even after what we have said, the following specimen of humility will, we think, startle our readers, and it is the more remarkable, because it forces into notice another feature of her vanity, which, we should have supposed, Miss Burney, instead

VOL. VI.

2

of recording, would have been equally anxious to obliterate from her own memory and from that of others

'And now I cannot help telling you of a dispute which Dr. Johnson had with Mrs. Thrale, the next morning, concerning me, which that sweet woman had the honesty and good sense (!) to tell me. Dr. Johnson was talking to her and Sir Philip Jennings of the amazing progress made of late years in literature by the women. He said he was himself astonished at it, and told them he well remembered when a woman who could spell a common letter was regarded as all-accomplished; but now they vied with the men in everything. "I think, Sir," said my friend Sir Philip, the young lady we have here is a very extraordinary proof of what you say.»

So extraordinary,» answered he, " that I know none like her, --nor do I believe there is, or there ever was a man who could write such a book so young. »、

They both stared-no wonder, I am sure!-and Sir Philip said, What do you think of Pope, Sir? could not Pope have written

such a one?"

Nay, nay, cried Mrs. Thrale, «there is no need to talk of Pope; a book may be a clever book, and an extraordinary book, and yet not want Pope for its author. I suppose he was no older than Miss Burney when he wrote Windsor Forest ;-(Pope is said to have written Windsor Forest' at 16,)—and I suppose Windsor Forest' is equal to Evelina!'»

Windsor Forest, a repeated Dr. Johnson, though so delightful a poem, by no means required the knowledge of life and manners, nor the accuracy of observation, nor the skill of penetration, necessary for composing such a work as Evelina:' he who could ever write Windsor Forest' might as well write it young as old. Poet ical abilities require not age to mature them; but Evelina seems a work that should result from long experience, and deep and intimate knowledge of the world; yet it has been written without either. Miss Burney is a real wonder. What she is, she is intuitively. Dr. Burney told me she had the fewest advantages of any of his daughters, from some peculiar circumstances. And such has been her timidity, that he himself had not any suspicion of her powers.»

« Her modesty," said Mrs. Thrale (as she told me), is really beyond bounds. (!!!) It quite provokes me. And, in fact, I can never make out how the mind that could write that book could be ignorant of its value. »

“That, madam, is another wonder,» answered my dear, dear Dr. Johnson, for modesty with her is neither pretence nor decorum; 'tis an ingredient of her nature: for she who could part with such a work for twenty pounds, could know so little of its worth, or of her own, as to leave no possible doubt of her humility.»'—vol. i. pp.

235-236.

The 'good sense' of that 'sweet woman' in repeating these hyperboles is nearly on a par with the modesty and humility' of the writer, who, let it never be forgotten, not only circulated them amongst her friends at the time, but bequeathed them to the wonder of posterity; though conscious, all the while, that the main point of Dr. Johnson's admiration-namely, the extreme youth of the author-was an elaborate deception on the part of herself and her friends. We beg leave to refer to our former article on Madame D'Arblay's Memoirs of her Father,' (') for the details of this manœuvring; suffice it here to repeat that it was at the outset represented that Evelina was the work of a girl of seventeen -very shy-remarkably backward-and hardly yet emerged from the school-room;-that it was written and printed by stealth, as a mere childish frolic-unknown to her father, and even unseen by herself, until, after, the lapse of six months, its immense success forced it upon their notice. All this was very surprising, but it was so confidently asserted, that no one, we believe, doubted its truth, till Madame D'Arblay began her career of self-adulation, in the Memoirs of her Father.' Here it was observed that, while repeating, with many heightening circumstances, the previous story of her extreme youth when Evelina' was published, she involved in studied obscurity not merely the time of her own birth, but every other date and circumstance which could directly or indirectly tend to ascertain it. This strange silence on the most remarkable peculiarity of her whole story excited, at first curiosity, and afterwards suspicion, and at length it was with some difficulty ascertained by the parish register of Lynn, in Norfolk, that Frances, the second daughter of Charles Burney, was born in the summer of 1752 (2); and that consequently she was at the time of the publication of Evelina' (1778)-not seventeen, but-between twenty-five

(') Quarterly Review, vol. xxlix p. 107.

(') See Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. p. 110, where it is stated from the parish register that she was baptized in July, 1752. In the introduction to the Memoirs her age is (for the first time by her or her friends) stated, and it appears that she was born on the 13th June, 1752.