Such was the cloud that obscured the spring horizon of Dr. Burney
in 1788; but which, severely as it damped and saddened him, was
but as a point in a general mass, save from his kind grief for his
heart-afflicted daughter, compared with the effect produced upon him
by the appalling hurricane that afterwards ensued; though there, he
himself was but as a point, and scarcely that, in the vast mass of
general woe and universal disorder, of which that fatal storm was the
precursor.
The war of all the elements, when their strife darts with lightnings,
and hurls with thunder, that seem threatening destruction all around,
is peace, is calm, is tameness and sameness, to that which was caused
by the first sudden breaking out of a malady nameless, but tremendous,
terrific, but unknown, in the King—that father of his people, that
friend of human kind.
To mourn here was but the nation’s lot; daily to rise in the most
anxious expectation; nightly to go to rest in the most fearful dismay,
was but the universal fate, from the highest peer to the lowest peasant
of Great Britain. With one heart the whole empire seemed to beat for
his sufferings; and to unite with one voice in supplication for his
recovery.
This malady, however, so baleful in itself, so affrighting in its
concomitants, so agitating in its effects, is now become not a page
but a volume of history. All recurrence to it here would, therefore,
be superfluous; especially as Dr. Burney, though amongst the most
poignantly interested in its progress, from the loyalty of his
character joined to the situation of his daughter, had no intelligence
upon the subject but such as was public: for the Memorialist received
the commands of her Majesty, immediately upon the breaking out of
alarm, not to touch upon this calamity in a single letter sent from the
Lodge, even to her father: an order which she strictly obeyed, till,
first, the evil had become publicly known, and, next, was worn away.
This event, then, is foreign to all domestic memoirs; and to such
as are political, Dr. Burney’s can have no pretensions. It will
rapidly, therefore, be passed over, in consonance with the intentions
of the Doctor, manifested by an entire omission of any intervening
memorandums, from his grief at the illness, to his joy at the recovery
of his Sovereign; a joy which, however diversified by the endless
shadings of multitudinous circumstances, was almost universally felt by
all ranks, all classes, all ages; and hailed by a chorus of sympathy,
that resounded in songs of thanksgiving and triumph throughout the
British empire.
The Heavens then,—as far as the Heavens with the transitory events
of living man may be assimilated—once again were clear, transparent,
and bright with lustre to every loyal heart in the King’s dominions.
The royal sufferer, renovated in health, mental and corporeal,
re-instated in his exalted functions, and restored to the benediction
of his family, the exercise of his virtues, and the enjoyment of his
beneficence; suddenly emerged from an enveloping darkness of mystery
and seclusion, to an unexampled eclât of popularity; reverberating
from every voice, beating in every heart; streaming from every eye, to
hail his sight, wherever even a glimpse of him could be caught, with a
joy that seemed to shed over his presence a radiance celestial.
Who, in the fair front of humble individual rejoicers, stood more
prominent in vivacity of exultation than Dr. Burney? whose whole soul
had been nearly monopolized by the alternating passions of fear, hope,
pity, or horror, successively awakened by the changeful rumours that
coloured, or discoloured, all intelligence during the illness.