His play “Virginia,” which has been represented as the main thing in his life, was not acted until he was forty-eight, although begun some years earlier. Whether any less shadowy affection than his love for it warmed those years of which we know nothing, must be left to conjecture. He tells Fanny in 1778, that “Molly Chute (an intimate and most infinitely agreable old friend of mine, long since dead), when I us’d to desire her to love me a great deal, would say, ‘Look ye Sam, I have this much stock of lave by me,’ putting out her little finger, ‘and I can afford you so much,’ measuring off perhaps half the length of her nail, ‘and I think that’s pretty fair.’ I thought so too, and was well content, — but what shall I do with you who have so many to content?.... Well, I must do as I may, and that is the very nuthook humour of it.”
Now, to be “well content” with the little love Molly could spare him, shows that it was her friendship that he desired. In one of Susan Burney’s amusing letters we find Mr. Crisp, when above seventy, delaying his party on their walk in order to admire the beauty of a Gypsy girl, on whom he gazed as upon a picture.
Only one of his five sisters married (Anne, the eldest, being of set purpose a spinster), and Mr. Crisp may have had no love-story at all to tell, even as he had none to tell of being “wronged or cruelly cheated.”
As we are expressly told that Mr. Crisp never saw the lovely Esther Sleepe, whom Charles Burney married about 1748, it is most likely that he did not meet her husband for about thirteen years, nine or ten of which Burney spent at Lynn, while Mr. Crisp passed some of them in Rome. In 1749 Burney was appointed organist of St. Dionis Back-church, Fenchurch Street. He had pupils; he composed music, to which, except in one instance, he did not put his name; and he “took the organ part at the new concert established at the King’s Arms,” on the west side of Cornhill.
We have not seen the register of the birth of his eldest child, Esther (Hetty), but James, and a Charles (who probably died an infant), were baptised at St. Dionis. Burney soon became seriously ill from work, study, and city air, and happening to be offered the post of organist at Lynn Regis, accepted it at the end of 1750, or beginning of 1751, being advised to live in the country by Dr. Armstrong, the poet, who was his physician. Mrs. Burney was left in London for nursery reasons, and did not join him until some months before the birth of her daughter Frances, on the 13th of June, 1752.
Frances received the Christian name of her godmother, Mrs. Greville, from the Reverend Thomas Pyle, perpetual curate of St. Nicholas, in Ann Street, Lynn, a chapel of ease to St. Margaret’s Church, of which church in the end he became the something short of orthodox “minister.” Between 1706 and 1718 he had preached six pamphlets in support of the succession of the House of Hanover, which he published under the name of sermons. He had “engaged” in the Bangorian controversy in aid of his friend Hoadley, who made him a residentiary prebendary of Salisbury. Owing to his merits and efforts, his three sons had an almost fabulous amount of church preferment. Thus that Fanny was to spend her life among people of more or less note, was foreshown even at her baptism.
The port of Bishop’s Lynn (the name was changed to King’s Lynn when Henry VIII wrested it from the see of Norwich) has lost consequence since the growth of Grimsby and Kingston-upon-Hull. It was a town of merchants who imported wine, and of brewers who exported beer, chiefly to the Baltic; a town where the venturous settled, to rise if they could into the powerful corporation; a town of high living rather than high thinking. Although made much of, Charles Burney was ill at ease when playing upon an “execrably bad organ” to “foggy aldermen” totally ignorant of music, with a patron and local “oracle of Apollo” (Sir John Turner, M.P.) who was “extremely shallow but he tells us in a note to the second volume of his “History of Music” (1782), that before he left Lynn the corporation granted him a new organ, made by his advice by Snetzler, “in place of one with worm-eaten wooden pipes and he halts in his first foreign tour to record Snetzler’s sarcasms upon his first organ at Lynn. In like manner, in his German tour, he pauses on the way between Berlin and Potsdam to say that “the road... is through a deep running sand, like the worst parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, where there are no turnpikes.” On such roads his mare Peggy picked her way, while her master studied Italian poetry on her back, with a dictionary of his own compiling in one pocket of his great coat, and his commonplace-book in another. If “looking around him in Lynn, he seemed to see a void,” visits to Houghton, Holkham, Rainham, and Felbrig, with occasional letters from Mr and Mrs. Greville and Mr. Crisp, new friendships with Mr. Hayes and Mr. Bewley, and an approach by letters to Dr. Johnson, much reading and many pupils, a happy home and returning health, made up for the loss of London. His children, Susan and Charles, were born in Lynn, which he did not leave before 1760.
Meanwhile, Mr. Crisp’s tragedy of “Virginia” had been played at Drury Lane Theatre on the 25 th of February, 1754.
It was with tenderness towards that play which had been so dear to Mr. Crisp, that the Editor untied his manuscript of “Virginia with regret that she found all that she could admire was the conspicuous beauty of the penmanship, — the delicacy of the text written in the Italian hand, the exquisite neatness of the writing of the foot-notes from Livy (printed with the pen) with which Mr. Crisp had fortified the text. It put her in mind of Rousseau’s care for the beauty of the manuscript of his “Nouvelle Heloise,” and of how he tied it with blue ribands. Lying on the dainty writing was a single small quarto leaf of another tragedy upon “Virginia,” which had been printed exactly one hundred years before that of Mr. Crisp. Had he kept it before him as a warning, or as an example? If it had been the key which had given him the note, no voice of his century could sustain it. In three lines on that black old leaf was more force than in Mr. Crisp’s five acts, for it was from the “Appius and Virginia” of the great poet of “Vittoria Corombona” and “The Duchess of Malfy.”
From a single scene of Mr. Crisp’s “Virginia” as given in “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” Macaulay had divined that “the whole piece was one blemish.” Not even Macaulay could exaggerate the flatness of the plot, the feeble conception of character, the weakness of diction. We feel almost as if criticising our own father; but truth is mighty and must prevail; yet we were bent upon admiring our “Daddy’s.”
“Virginia,” if it were possible. The pathos of the play, “the pity of it,” lay in Mr. Crisp’s having felt so warmly and strongly without having naturally, or by acquisition, a power to make others feel, adequate in any wise to his aim and end. His heart had burned within him when he read and wrote of the piteous story of Virginia, as it burned within him in his oldest days, when the combined fleets of France and Spain made a show of menace in the Channel, and he wished he were “under ground... rather than see the insolent Bourbon trampling under foot this once happy island.” To him his tragedy may have seemed as pathetic as that of Webster, without the overflow of force or archaic jocosities of the previous century; not as what it resembles, the dry framework of “a theme,” filled by a schoolboy.
It was not below many eighteenth century tragedies; not duller, for instance, than the “Zobeide” of Mr. Cradock “of Leicestershire,” or the “Orphan of China” of Arthur Murphy. Nor is it correct to say with Madame D’Arblay, that it had a “catastrophe of a yea and nay character,” that it neither succeeded nor failed; or with Macaulay, that there was “a feeling that the attempt had failed.” Nine nights then brought three authors’ benefits, and not many plays ran much longer. In his Epilogue, Garrick asked for little more —
Our author hopes, this fickle goddess, Mode,
With us, will make, at least, nine days abode;
To present pleasure he contracts his view,
And leaves his future fame to time and you.
Nine were as many as were secured for Johnson’s “Irene.” Mr. Crisp’s play “ran” at least eleven nights at Drury Lane; was reproduced at Covent Garden, as well as at Drury Lane, in his lifetime; was reprinte
d (in 1778 and in 1784), in collections of standard English plays, from his own edition of “Virginia” in 1754. This, for that time, was success. If Mr. Crisp complained, what he must have missed was that admiration from the admired, which would have been sweeter than the applause of the pit of Garrick’s bearing as “Virginius,” of the working of his countenance while silent, and of his manner of saying “Thou traitor” Yet in all his letters which we have seen, there is only a single sentence (that seized by Macaulay) which touches “Virginia,” and even that is indirect. It merely supports a counsel to Fanny by his own experience. We could never have inferred from his letters, or the letters of others about him, that he had, or had had, any great trouble but the gout (which we believe to have been his main misery), if it were not for Fanny’s narrative, upon which Macaulay founded his. To her, who had heard Mr. Crisp speak of “Virginia,” we must defer, but with a conviction that she herself would have “toned down” her picture had she known how much Macaulay would strengthen her outline and heighten her colouring. His inferences from her words are not unfair; but a close examination (which the “Memoirs of Dr. Burney” require as to dates and the order of events) would have shown, that in her sketch of Mr. Crisp facts are so run together, that his withdrawal to Chesington appears as a result of the cold reception of a play acted in 1754, whereas it was due to considerations of income and health ten years or more later. One single fragment of a letter from Mr. Crisp to her father is all of their correspondence that Fanny has published. It was written shortly before Mr. Crisp left England, to press Burney to return to London. This he was not able to do for some years afterwards.
Mrs. Burney [Esther Sleepe] being the grand-daughter of a Huguenot, French was almost as much her language as English. She shared with her husband the pleasure and profit to be gained from books. She made a translation from Maupertuis, which her husband published, after her death, with his own “Essay towards a History of Comets.”
Among the three ladies in Lynn who read, she was the chief. The other two were Dolly Young, whom Esther Burney wished Dr. Burney to marry after her own death, and Mrs. Stephen Allen, whom he did marry in the end.
While Mrs. Burney was “reading the best authors” with Hetty, Fanny was learning by ear. She was so slow in learning to read, that her sister Susan, who was between two and three years the younger, could read before Fanny knew her letters; but in her own words to Hetty (1821), “Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope’s works and Pitt’s ‘AEneid.’ I recollect you also spouting passages from Pope, that I learned from hearing you recite them before — many years before, I knew them myself.” Her dulness seems to have been as superficial as the quickness of many children. Her mother, who was never deceived by it, said she had no fear of Fanny, when friends called the child “the little dunce.” Nor does it appear that, after the dreary days of the alphabet and the copybook, anyone near to her thought Fanny dull. She was looked upon as considerate, reflective, and wise above nature; as a Mentor rather than a dunce. Her diffidence had much share in her apparent dulness. Diffidence ran in the family. Dr. Burney’s polished manners concealed it; Fanny suffered from it through life; it has made her cousin Edward less known as a painter than he well deserved to be; and the two apparent exceptions, Fanny’s sister Charlotte and her cousin Richard, may have been, — one somewhat flippant, the other a coxcomb by design, — out of a well-known turn taken by excessive diffidence.
In 1760 the Burney family left Lynn for London, where the head of it soon became the music-master most in request; but his wife sickened in Poland Street, apparently after the birth of her fourth daughter, Charlotte. As was the custom in cases of consumption, she was sent to “Bristol Hot Wells,” (now called Clifton,) where she rallied. This change for the better did not last long. She died, after a short, severe illness, on the 28th of September, 1761. We are told that during their mother’s last days, Fanny and Susan were sent to Mrs. Shields, a friend of their family, who lived in Queen Square, to be out of the way; and it is added that, when told of the loss of her mother, “the agony of Frances’s grief was so great, though she was not more than nine years old, that Mrs. Shields declared that she had never met with a child of such intense and acute feelings.”
Dr. Burney’s loss was great; so was his grief. Nothing is known of his next few years. His friends did their utmost to cheer him; the Garricks being conspicuously kind. Dr. Burney struggled with his grief. He sought some task difficult enough to compel his attention, and made, at this time, a prose translation of Dante’s greatest poem, choosing it because it was not among the Italian poems which he had read with his Esther.
Among Fanny’s papers, the following, from Dr. Burney, is the first:
[Woodhay, Berkshire, No I, 1763.]
FOR FANNY.
My Fanny shall find
That I have in mind
Her humble request and petition,
Which said, if I’d write her
A line ’twould delight her
And quite happy make her condition.
I’m not such a churl
To deny my dear girl
So small and so trifling a favour;
For I always shall try
With her wish to comply,
Though of nonsense it happen to savour.
‘Tho’ little I say,
I beg and I pray
That careful you’ll put these lines rare by;
For well they’ll succeed,
If my love they should plead —
So now you’ve a letter to swear by.
C. B.
“La rime n’est pas riche,” but it gave the pleasure it was meant to give. Fanny has numbered it, headed it, and endorsed it in childish round hand; then added, in old age, “from my dear father, when I was ten years old.” Fanny’s next two numbered papers are letters from her father when in Paris, for the first time, on the occasion of taking her sisters Esther and Susan to school. One begins thus: “I write to my dear Fanny to tell her grandmamas, to tell her aunts, to tell her uncles, to tell her cousins, to tell all friends, that we are now at Paris. Tis now Wednesday night the 13th of June. I am just come from the Comick Opera, which is here called the Comédie Italienne, where I have been extremely well entertained, but am so tired with standing the whole time, which every one in the pit does, that I can hardly put a foot to the ground, or a hand to the pen.” His journey had been slow on account of one of those severe feverish colds to which Susan was subject. She was, to all seeming, quite well when they left Calais about ten o’clock at noon on the previous Thursday, but so tired when they reached Boulogne at five, that they “did not get into the chaise till near twelve o’clock, and lay at Abbeville, fifty-four miles from Boulogne.” Poor Susan was again indulged by rest in bed until near eleven, before posting to Amiens, thirty miles farther, to dine. They slept at Breteuil; next day, they dined at Clermont, and slept at that “very delightful place, Chantilly.” On Monday night they reached the Hotel de Hollande, in Paris. When Dr. Burney wrote, Susan was a little better, but he had been “excessively wretched about her,” as she had had paroxysms of coughing, and of bleeding of the nose. Indeed one reason for taking her to school in France was the hope that the air might strengthen her. Dr. Burney next says, that Lady de Clifford, who lived below him in the hotel, “hearing we were English, very kindly sent to desire to see us.” To-morrow, or next day, he will “have some cloathes to appear among French people in.” He has found out his friend, Mr. Strange, [the great engraver,] and has been with Sir James Macdonald, “not minding dress with my countrymen.”
In the second letter, (which was written on the 17th and 18th of June,) Dr. Burney informs Fanny that her sister Susan is a great deal better, but that he has made no progress towards finding a proper school for her and Hetty. “It turns out far more difficult to find out a proper house for them than I had expected.” The next day he has “hopes of placing them much to his satisfaction”; “it will cost a good deal more money” than
he expected, but he is “now too far advanced to retreat.” Then comes a glimpse of Paris under Louis XV. The morrow is “a great festival, when all the Streets and Churches will be hung with Tapestry, and the finest Pictures in the King’s Collections will be exposed. There will be likewise Processions of the Clergy in all parts of the City. Hetty and Susey have been out but very little yet, not having had proper Cloathes: and indeed if they had been ever so much dressed Sukey was unable to stir at Home or Abroad. I was on Sunday at the English Ambassador’s Chapel, (Lord Hertford,) and saw there a great many English People, among whom was Mr Coleman, author of ‘the Deuce is in him,’ etc., Mr Vaillant the Bookseller, — Mr Wilks, etc, — Ld Beauchamp son to the Ambassador has been very civil and has showed me the House wch his Father Lord Hertford lives in, and for wch his Lordship gives £800 a year. It is called l’Hotel de Brancas, the name of a French Duke now living, and is the finest and best furnished and fitted up I ever saw. Mr Hume, Secretary to the Embassy, is likewise very civil and Friendly to me, as is Lady Clifford who lives in the same House and is own sister to the Duchess of Norfolk, indeed she is uncommonly kind to your sisters, who wd not know what to do about dress but for her Ladyship.”
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 446