Fanny Burney and Her Friends: Select Passages from Her Diary and Other Writings. Burney Fanny

the great actor, keenly alive to his own gift of bestowing pleasure, would devote himself to entertaining the little ones. The rapture with which his entrance was greeted by that small audience charmed him as much as the familiar applause of Drury Lane. The prince of comedians and mimics was content to lavish all the resources of his art on a handful of girls and boys. When he left them, they spent the rest of the day in recalling the sallies of his humour, and the irresistible gestures which had set them off. So Fanny tells us, the least noticed, probably, yet the most attentive and observant member of the whole group. On many a happy night, the elder ones, in charge of some suitable guardian, were permitted to occupy Mrs. Garrick’s private box at the theatre. There they beheld ‘the incomparable Roscius’ take the stage, and followed him with eyes of such eager admiration, that it seemed—so their amused father told his friend—

      ‘They did, as was their duty,

      Worship the shadow of his shoe-tie!’

      Burney relates of Fanny that ‘she used, after having seen a play in Mrs. Garrick’s box, to take the actors off, and compose speeches for their characters, for she could not read them.’ But, he continues, in company or before strangers, she was silent, backward, and timid, even to sheepishness; and, from her shyness, had such profound gravity and composure of features, that those of Dr. Burney’s friends who went often to his home, and entered into the different humours of the children, never called Fanny by any other name, from the time she had reached her eleventh year, than ‘the old lady.’

Yet the shyest children will now and then forget their shyness. This seems to be the moral of a story which the worthy doctor goes on to tell in his rather prolix and pompous style. “There lived next door to me, at that time, in Poland Street, and in a private house, a capital hair-merchant, who furnished perukes to the judges and gentlemen of the law. The hair-merchant’s female children and mine used to play together in the little garden behind the house; and, unfortunately, one day, the door of the wig-magazine being left open, they each of them put on one of those dignified ornaments of the head, and danced and jumped about in a thousand antics, laughing till they screamed at their own ridiculous figures. Unfortunately, in their vagaries, one of the flaxen wigs, said by the proprietor to be worth upwards of ten guineas—in those days an enormous price—fell into a tub of water, placed for shrubs in the little garden, and lost all its gorgon buckle,^[7] and was declared by the owner to be totally spoilt. He was extremely angry, and chid very severely his own children, when my little daughter, ‘the old lady,’ then ten years of age, advancing to him, as I was informed, with great gravity and composure, sedately said, ‘What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure: but ’tis of no use to speak of it any more, because what’s done can’t be undone.’ ”

      Meanwhile, little was done on any regular plan for Fanny’s education. She had not been suffered to remain at the school in which she was temporarily placed during her mother’s last illness, nor was she sent to any other. When, after the lapse of two or three years, Burney found himself in a position to put two of his girls to school at Paris, he selected the third, Susanna, rather than Fanny, to accompany the eldest sister, proposing to send Fanny and Charlotte together at a future time. Two reasons were assigned for this arrangement. One was the notion that Susanna, who inherited her father’s consumptive habit, required change of climate more than the second daughter. The other was a fear lest Fanny’s deep reverence for her Roman Catholic grandmother might incline her to adopt the same form of faith, and thus render her perversion easy, if, when so young, she fell within the influence of some enterprising French chaplain. We cannot help suspecting, however, that the true cause of Fanny being passed over on this occasion was an impression that Susanna was a girl of brighter parts, and better fitted to benefit by the teaching of a Paris pension.

      From whatever motive, Fanny was left behind, nor was any instructor provided for her at home. The widower disliked the idea of introducing a governess into his house, though he had no time to spare even for directing his daughter’s studies. She was thus entirely self-educated, and had no other spur to exertion than her unbounded affection for her father, who excused himself for his neglect of her training by the reflection that ‘she had a natural simplicity and probity about her which wanted no teaching.’ In her eleventh year she had learned to read, and began to scribble little poems and works of invention, though in a character that was illegible to everyone but herself. ‘Her love of reading,’ we are told, ‘did not display itself till two or three years later.’ Her father had a good library, over which she was allowed to range at will; and in course of time she became acquainted with a fair portion of its lighter contents. The solitary child kept a careful account of the authors she studied, making extracts from them, and adding remarks which, we are assured, showed that her mind was riper than her knowledge. Yet she never developed any strong or decided taste for literature. She never became even a devourer of books. Indeed, it may be doubted whether she did not always derive more pleasure from her own compositions than from those of the greatest writers. Plying her pen without an effort, the leisure which most intellectual persons give to reading, Fanny devoted in great part to producing manuscripts of her own. Childish epics, dramas, and romances, were not the only ventures of her youth: she began keeping a diary at the age of fifteen, and, in addition to her published novels and sundry plays which have perished, journals, memoirs, and letters, of which a small proportion only have seen the light, occupied most of the vacant hours in her active womanhood.

      During this period of self-education, the person from whom Fanny received most notice and attention appears to have been her father’s old friend, Samuel Crisp. This gentleman had gone abroad while the Burneys were in Norfolk, and had taken up his abode at Rome, where he passed several years, improving his taste in music, painting, and sculpture, and forgetting for a while the young English professor who had interested him under Greville’s roof. Having at length returned to England, he, some time after Mrs. Burney’s death, met Burney by accident at the house of a common acquaintance. The casual encounter immediately revived the old intimacy. Crisp at once found his way to the house in Poland Street, and, like Garrick, was attracted by the group of children there. As the two eldest of these and the lively Susanna were soon afterwards removed to a distance, the chief share in his regard naturally fell to the lot of Fanny. Hence, while all the children came to look upon him with a sort of filial feeling, he was in a special manner appropriated by Fanny as ‘her dearest daddy.’ And there were points in Crisp’s temperament which harmonized well with the girl’s shy yet aspiring character. Both, in their turn, set their hearts on the attainment of literary renown; both had the same tendency to shrink into themselves. Success changed Fanny from a silent domestic drudge into a social celebrity; failure helped to change Crisp from a shining man of fashion into a moody recluse.

The story of this strange man has been sketched by Macaulay, but it has so close a bearing on our heroine’s life, that we cannot avoid shortly retracing it here. A handsome person, dignified manners, excellent talents, and an accomplished taste procured for Crisp, in his prime, acceptance and favour, not only with Fulk Greville and his set, but also with a large number of other persons distinguished in the great world. Thus, he was admitted to the acquaintance of the highly descended and wealthy Margaret Cavendish Harley, then Duchess Dowager of Portland, whom we mention here because through her Crisp became known to Mrs. Delany, by whom Fanny was afterwards introduced to the Royal Family. Another of his friends was Mrs. Montagu, who then, as he used to say, was ‘peering at fame,’ and gradually rising to the rank of a lady patroness of letters. And among the most intimate of his associates was the Earl of Coventry, at the time when that ‘grave young lord,’ as Walpole calls him, after long dangling, married the most beautiful of the beautiful Gunnings. Now, about the date when our Fanny first saw the light, it was buzzed abroad in the coterie of Crisp’s admirers that their hero had finished a tragedy on the story of Virginia. A lively expectation was at once awakened. But Garrick, though a personal friend of the author, hesitated and delayed to gratify the public with the rich feast which was believed to be in store for it. The utmost efforts were employed to overcome his reluctance. The great Mr. Pitt was prevailed on to read the play, and to pronounce in its favour. Lord Coventry exerted all his influence with the coy manager. Yet not until Lady Coventry herself had joined her solicitations to those of her husband was ‘Virginia’ put in rehearsal