indeed brought before us not merely the minor notabilities of the day, but a great many persons whose station and talents assure them an historical celebrity-King George III., Queen Charlotte, and their family--Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua, and their society-Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Delany, and their circles-in short, the whole court and literary world; and all in their easiest and most familiar moods :their words—their looks-their manners and even their movements about the room -pencilled, as it would seem, with the most minute and scrupulous accuracy: but when we come a little closer, and see and hear what all these eminent and illustrious personages are saying and doing, we are not a little surprised and vexed to find them a wearisome congregation of monotonous and featureless prosers, brought together for one single object, in which they, one and all, seem occupied, as if it were the main business of human life-namely, the glorification of Miss Fanny Burney-her talents her taste-her sagacity-her wit-her manners-her temper-her delicacy-even her beauty and, above all, her modesty! We really have never met anything more curious, nor, if it were not repeated ad nauseam, more comical, than the elaborate ingenuity with which—as the ancients used to say that all roads led to Rome-every topic, from whatsoever quarter it may start, is ultimately brought home to Miss Burney. There can be, of course, no autobiography without egotism; and though the best works of this class are those in which self is the most successfully disguised, it must always be the main ingredient. We therefore expected, and, indeed, were very willing, that Miss Burney should tell us a great deal about herself; but what we did not expect, and what wearies, and, we must candidly add, disgusts us, is to find that she sees nothing beyond the tips of her own fingers, and considers all the rest of man and womankind as mere satellites of that great luminary of the age, the author of Evelina. In fact, the first sentence of her 'Diary,' though no doubt meant to pass for a modest irony, turns out to be a mere matter-of-fact expression of her true senti ments: 'Part I. 1778. This year was ushered in by a grand and most important event! At the latter end of January, the literary world was favoured with the first publication of the ingenious, learned, and most profound Fanny Burney! I doubt not but this memorable affair will, in future times, mark the period whence chronologers will date the zenith of the polite arts in this island. most elaborate performance, EVELINA; or, a Young Lady's Entrance into the World."" Vol. i., p. 37. This assumed pleasantry is her own real view of the case, and affords indeed the text, as it were, on which the rest of the work is a most illustrative commentary. * We insist thus early, and thus strongly, because it is the chief feature of the book, on this extravagant egotism, not merely but for the higher and more important purpose of doing justice to the eminent perish figure when thus dragged at the wheels sons who make a very mean and very foolof the triumphant car of Miss Burney,— for so we must call her, while the 'Diary' is written in that name. We know that ingenious and sensible people, from not adverting to her real and sole object-namely, herself-have been led to consider those the nonsense and twaddle which she has eminent personages as responsible for all chosen to put into their mouths. A weekly critic, for instance, who very shrewdly detected, and very adroitly exposed, the mock humility and inordinate vanity of the diarist,' is nevertheless so far inattentive to the consequences they produce as to assume her reports to be a true representation of the manners and conversation which she describes, and to flatter himself that society now-a-days would not tolerate the commonplace mediocrity and twaddle' of Johnson and Burke,' or 'the enormous pretensions and vulgarity of Mrs Montague, Miss Carter, and Hannah More!' We do not deny the existence of the mediocrity' and vulgarity' attributed to those eminent of countenance in every page: but we persons by Miss Burney; they stare us out very much wonder that any attentive reader, and above all one whose appreciation of the author is otherwise so just, should not see that the twaddle' and vulgarity' are Miss Burney's own; and that her natural propensity to those defects (of which there are innumerable other proofs) is mainly assisted by her affecting, in the true jog-trot of a novelwriter, to give, verbatim, all the details of long conversations-sometimes many days old-which the readiest pen and the quickest apprehension could not have done even on the instant. 6 In truth nothing can be so vapid as that mode of reporting conversation must inevitably be, even in the cleverest hands. Boswell, the best and most graphic of narra * Athenæum, 23d April, 1842. The description of Miss Burney's style and character in that article is very clever and just. writing; and how much the same thing it was to hear or to read him; but that nobody could tell that without coming to Streatham, for his language was generally imagined to be laboured and studied, instead of the mere common flow of his thoughts. 666 Very true," said Mrs. Thrale, "he writes and talks with the same ease, and in the same manner; but Sir, [to him,] if this rogue is like her book, how will she trim all of us by and by! Now she dainties us up with all the meekness in the world; but when we are away, I suppose she pays us off finely." 666 My paying off," cried I, "is like the Latin of Hudibras,-who never scanted His learning unto such as wanted;' for I can figure like anything when I am with those who can't figure at all." Mrs. T.-Oh, if you have any mag in you, we'll draw it out! tors, never attempts so hopeless a task for | remarking how very like Dr. Johnson is to his above two or three consecutive paragraphs, but more commonly contents himself with preserving the general spirit of the discourse -catching here and there the most striking expressions, and now and then venturing to mark an emphasis or an attitude. A clever artist may sketch a very lively likeness of a countenance which he has only seen en passant, but if he were to attempt-in the absence of the object-to fill up the outline with all the little details of form and colour, he would find that his efforts only diminished the spirit and impaired the resemblance. So it is of reporting public speeches-and so still more of reporting conversations. But even if Miss Burney had had more of Boswell's happy knack, it would not have much mended the matter, for her sole and exclusive object was-not to relate what Burke or Johnson, or anybody else should say on general subjects, but what flattering things they said about Fanny Burney. The result is, that we have little amusement and less faith in the details of those elaborate dialogues, which occupy, we believe, more than half her volumes-their very minuteness and elaboration sufficiently prove that they cannot be authentic; and they are, moreover, trivial and wearisome beyond all patience. How-we will not say, the author of Evelina' and 'Cecilia,' but-how any person of the most ordinary degree of taste and talents could have wasted time and paper in making such a much ado about nothing we cannot conceive; nor did wetill we had read this book-imagine that real life and proper names could by any maladresse of a narrator be made so insuf ferably flat, stale, and unprofitable. The severity of this judgment obliges us to justify it by some examples. We are well aware that they will appear tedious and fulsome, and that our readers may wish that we had spared them such wearisome extracts; but there is really no other way of giving them a tolerable idea of the book, and when we have the misfortune to think unfavourably of a work, we are anxious to allow it, as much as possible, to speak for itself. 'Dr. J.-A rogue! she told me that, if she was somebody instead of nobody, she would praise my book! 'F. B.-Why, Sir, I am sure you would scoff my praise. Dr. J.-If you think that, you think very ill of me; but you don't think it." Mrs. T.--We have told her what you said to Miss More, and I believe that makes her afraid. 'Dr. J.-Well, and if she was to serve me as Miss More did, I should say the same thing to her. But I think she will not. Hannah More has very good intellects, too; but she has by no means the elegance of Miss Burney. 666 Well," cried I," there are folks that are to well in the world as in the nursery: but what be spoilt, and folks that are not to be spoilt, as will become of me I know not." 'Mrs. T.-Well, if you are spoilt, we can only say, nothing in the world is so pleasant as being spoilt. Dr. J.--No, no; Burney will not be spoilt: she knows too well what praise she has a claim to, and what not, to be in any danger of spoiling. spoilt at Streatham, for it is the last place where I can feel of any consequence. 'F. B.-I do, indeed, believe I shall never be Mr. T.-Well, Sir, she is our Miss Burney, however; we were the first to catch her, and now we have got, we will keep her. And so she is all our own. 'Dr. J.-Yes, I hope she is; I should be very sorry to lose Miss Burney. F. B.--Oh dear! how can two such people sit and talk such Mrs. T. Such stuff, you think? but Dr Johnson's love 'Dr. J.--Love? no I don't entirely love her yet; I must see more of her first; I have much too high an opinion of her to flatter her. I have, indeed, seen nothing of her but what is fit to be loved, but I must know her more. I admire her, and greatly too. '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 discern ment, for her manner of expressing them, and write a comedy,—she has promised me she for all her writing talents.'-Vol. i., pp. 120-122. will! 'F. B.-Oh!-if you both run on in this man said, Such is the amabæan trash-the vitulâ tuner, I shalldignus et hic style-in which the author of 'I was going to say get under the chair, but Evelina' sings her own praises in the Mr. Sheridan, interrupting me with a laugh, names of the sage Johnson and the lively Thrale-anything less sage or less lively we can hardly conceive. Now let us see how she deals with the amiable Reynolds and the brilliant Sheridan: :- "Set about one? very well, that's right!" "Ay," cried Sir Joshua, "that's very right. And you (to Mr. Sheridan) would take anything of hers, would you not?-unsight, unseen?" 'What a point-blank question! who but Sir Joshua would have ventured it! into the bargain." 'Some time after, Sir Joshua, returning to his "Yes," answered Mr. Sheridan, with quickstanding-place, entered into confab (!) with Missness," and make her a bow and my best thanks Linley and your slave, upon various matters, during which Mr. Sheridan, joining us, said, "Sir Joshua, I have been telling Miss Burney that she must not suffer her pen to lie idle ought she?" 'F. B.-Why, twirling my fan, I think. 'Mr. Sheridan.-No, no; but what are you about at home? However, it is not a fair question, so I won't press it. "Yet he looked very inquisitive; but I was glad to get off without any downright answer. 'Sir Joshua.-Anything in the dialogue way, I think, she must succeed in; and I am sure invention will not be wanting. Mr. Sheridan.-No, indeed; I think, and say, she should write a comedy. Sir Joshua.-I am sure I think so; and hope she will. 'Now, my dear Susy, tell me, did you ever hear the fellow to such a speech as this?-it was all I could do to sit it. (!) "Mr. Sheridan," I exclaimed, "are you not mocking me?"—Vol i., p. 187–189. And so, from every conversation that happens in her presence, her industrious vanity extracts—we were going to say honey-but treacle, though it spoils the metaphor, is the more appropriate term. Even when a person says nothing, she construes his very silence into an expression of admiration so great as to amount to awe. Witness her first interview with Arthur Murphy : 'Now I must try to be rather more minute. On Thursday, while my dear father was here, who should be announced but Mr. Murphy; the longed to see? ... man of all other strangers to me whom I most When he had been welcomed by Mrs. Thrale, and had gone through the reception 'I could only answer by incredulous exclama-salutations of Dr. Johnson and my father, Mrs. tions. Consider,' continued Sir Joshua, “you have already had all the applause and fame you can have given you in the closet; but the acclamation of a theatre will be new to you." And then he put down his trumpet, and began a violent clapping of hands. I actually shook from head to foot! I felt myself already in Drury Lane, amidst the hubbub of a first night. "Oh, no!" cried I, "there may be a noise, but it will be just the reverse." And I returned his salute with a hissing. Mr. Sheridan joined Sir Joshua warmly. 6.66 very "Oh, Sir!" cried I, "you should not run on so,—you don't know what mischief you may do!" Mr. Sheridan.-I wish I may-I shall be very glad to be accessory. Thrale, advancing to me, said, Mr. Murphy; here is another F. B." 666 Indeed!" cried he, taking my hand, "is this a sister of Miss Brown's?" 666 No, no: this is Miss Burney." "What!" cried he, staring, "is this-is this this is not the lady that-that-" 6.66 Yes, but it is," answered she, laughing "No, you don't say so? You don't mean the lady that 666 you." Yes, yes, I do; no less a lady, I assure 'He then said he was very glad of the honour of seeing me; and I sneaked away.'-Vol. i. p., 195. 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 Sir Joshua.-She has, certainly, something lady of the day, Mrs. Cholmondeley, is inof a knack of characters; where she got it Itroduced as bearing a prominent part, but― don't know, and how she got it I can't imag ine; but she certainly has it. And to throw it like everybody else-all to the ultimate honaway is our of Fanny Burney. We select, asa further Mr. Sheridan.-Oh, she won't-she will specimen, two pages out of the nine :18 VOL. LXX. Mrs. Chol.-1 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, and who I shall see to-night [i. e. Fanny Burney], you would not dare to keep me muzzing here!" During all these pointed speeches her penetrating eyes were fixed upon me; and what could I do?-what, indeed, could anybody do but colour and simper?-all the company watching us, though all very delicately avoided joining the confab. Mrs. Chol.-My Lord Palmerston, I was told to-night that nobody could see your lordship for me, for that you supped at my house every night? "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 Fleetstreet, is a mighty silly fellow ;-perhaps you don't know who I mean ?-one T. Lowndes, [the printer ofEvelina"]-but maybe you don't know such a person?" F. B.-No indeed, I do not! that I can safely say. 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*—and afterwards to Mr. and Mrs. Lock of Norbury | Park, and 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. In men 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 diffidenceit 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. tioning a Dr. Shepherd, one of the canons of Windsor, she says, "In no farce did a man ever more floridly open upon his own perfections," (vol. iii., p. 436 ;) and we may safely say that in no farce did man or wofections as Miss Burney; and assuredly man ever so floridly open on their own perneither 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 has said of another celebrated Inovelist, 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.' 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 conuine modesty of a newly-elected Speakertrary, she humbles herself with all the genbut then, on the other hand, she thinks it 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) laid a wager the writer was a man :— said I was sure it was a woman: but now we are both out; for it is 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, 666 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 But her duty, as a mere historian and relater of See Quarterly Review, vol xlix. mate 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 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 out how the mind that could write that book provokes me. And, in fact, I can never make could be ignorant of its value." facts, to record, in the most conscientious | result from long experience, and deep and intidetail, all the panegyrics and complimentshowever extravagant, which anybody and everybody might address her. 'Dear Dr. 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 of recording, would have been equally anxious to obliterate from her own memory, and from that of others: "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 know so little of its worth, or of her own, as to part with such a work for twenty pounds, could 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 manoeuvring: suffice it here to repeat that it was at the outset represented that Evelina was the work of a girl of seventeen-very shy-re "I think, Sir," said my friend Sir Philip, markably backward-and hardly yet emerg "the young lady we have here is a very extra-ed from the school-room;-that it was writordinary proof of what you say." And now I cannot resist 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. "So extraordinary, Sir," 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?” 6.66 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 a 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," 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. Poetical abilities require not age to mature them; but Evelina' seems a work that should ten 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 selfadulation, 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 in directly 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 Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. |