This was a new grief. Lord Orford had been not only an early patron,
but a familiar friend of the Doctor’s during the whole of his sojourn
in Norfolk.
This truly liberal, though, as has been acknowledged, not faultless
nobleman, attached himself to all that was literary or scientific
that came within reach of his kindness at Haughton Hall; yet without
suffering this intellectual hospitality to abridge any of the
magnificence of the calls of fair kindred aristocracy, which belonged
to his rank and fortune. His high appreciation of Mr. Bewley has been
already mentioned; and his value of the innate, though unvarnished
worth of Mr. Hayes, sprang from the same genuine sense of intrinsic
merit.
Nearly in the meridian of his life, Lord Orford had been afflicted
with a seizure of madness, occasioned by an unreflecting application
of some repelling plaster or lotion to an eruption on the forehead,
that had broken out just before one of the birthdays of the King,[23]
upon which, as his lordship was then first Lord of the Bedchamber in
waiting, his attendance at St. James’s had seemed indispensable.
This terrible malady, after repeated partial recoveries and
disappointing relapses, had appeared to be finally cured by the same
gifted medical man who blessedly had restored his Sovereign to the
nation, Dr. Willis. Lord Orford, from that happy lucid interval,
resided chiefly at Ereswell, his favourite villa. And here, once more,
Dr. Burney had had the cordial pleasure of passing a few days with
this noble friend; who delighted to resort to that retirement from the
grandeur and tumult of Haughton Hall.
It had been nineteen years since they had met; and the flow of
conversation, from endless reminiscences, kept them up nearly all the
first night of this visit. And Dr. Burney declared that he had then
found his lordship’s head as clear, his heart as kind, and his converse
as pleasing, as at any period of their early intercourse.
Lord Orford, since his revival, had acquired a knowledge, at once
profound and feeling, of the French Revolution—the only topic which
those who had either hearts or heads could, at that time, discuss.
And he animatedly asserted that never before had any country, or any
epoch, produced, in one and the same nation, contrasts so striking of
atrocious, unheard-of guilt, and consummate, intrepid virtue; warmly
adding, as he adverted to the emigrants then pouring into England, that
the detestation excited by the murderous and sacrilegious revolutionary
oppressors, ought universally to instigate respect as well as
commiseration for their guiltless fugitive victims.
The relapse, by which, not three weeks after this meeting, the Earl
again lost his senses, had two current reports for its cause: the
first of which gave it to a fall from his horse; the second to the
sudden death of Mrs. Turk, his erst lovely Patty; “to whom,” says the
Doctor, in a letter, after his Ereswell visit, that was addressed to
Mrs. Phillips, “he was more attached than ever, from her faithful
and affectionate attendance upon him during the long season of his
insanity; though, at this time, she was become a fat and rather coarse
old woman.”
Dr. Burney was of opinion that to both these circumstances, since one
of them quickly followed the other, this last fatal seizure might be
owing. Its prompt termination left the good, infirm, and far older Mr.
Hayes a sorrowing, but not a long survivor.
Dr. Burney mourned for both; for Lord Orford with true concern—for Mr.
Hayes with lasting regret.
Mr. Hayes bequeathed to Dr. Burney a finely chosen and beautifully
bound collection of books, among which were several works of great
price and rarity; to which was joined a valuable case of coins and
medals. And the Doctor’s eldest son, Captain Burney, who from a boy
had been known and loved by Mr. Hayes, was worthily named, by that
excellent friend, his general heir and residuary legatee.
In speaking of this last event in a letter to Mrs. Phillips, the Doctor
says: “I have been so melancholy as to be unwilling to communicate my
_lâcheté_ to you, who, I hope, are in better spirits. The death of
my worthy and affectionate friend, Hayes, though I gain a charming
collection of books by it, fills me with sorrow every time I look at
them. Thirty years ago, such a bequest would have made me mad with
joy; but now, alas! my literary curiosity and wants lie in a smaller
compass. I was already in possession of the best books he has left
me, though in worn editions and worse bindings; and as for the rest,
my gain is merely nominal: for our books have been so much in common
during more than thirty years, that his were mine and mine were his, as
much as our own. We had only to stretch out our hands a little further,
when we wanted what were distant. How much harder is such a friend to
find than such books, scarce, and really valuable as are many of them!”
* * * * *