Thus glided away, in peace, domestic joys, improvement, and prosperity,
this first—and last! happy year of the new London residence. In the
course of the second, a cough, with alarming symptoms, menaced the
breast of the life and soul of the little circle; consisting now of six
children, clinging with equal affection around each parent chief.
She rapidly grew weaker and worse. Her tender husband hastened her
to Bristol Hotwells, whither he followed her upon his first possible
vacation; and where, in a short time, he had the extasy to believe that
he saw her recover, and to bring her back to her fond little family.
But though hope was brightened, expectation was deceived! stability
of strength was restored no more; and, in the ensuing autumn, she was
seized with an inflammatory disorder with which her delicate and shaken
frame had not force to combat. No means were left unessayed to stop the
progress of danger; but all were fruitless! and, after less than a week
of pain the most terrific, the deadly ease of mortification suddenly,
awfully succeeded to the most excruciating torture.
Twelve stated hours of morbid bodily repose became, from that
tremendous moment of baleful relief, the counted boundary of her
earthly existence.
The wretchedness of her idolizing husband at the development of
such a predestined termination to her sufferings, when pronounced
by the celebrated Dr. Hunter, was only not distraction. But she
herself, though completely aware that her hours now were told,
met the irrevocable doom with open, religious, and even cheerful
composure—sustained, no doubt, by the blessed aspirations of mediatory
salvation; and calmly declaring that she quitted the world with
perfect tranquillity, save for leaving her tender husband and helpless
children. And, in the arms of that nearly frantic husband, who, till
that fatal epoch, had literally believed her existence and his own, in
this mortal journey, to be indispensably one—she expired.
When the fatal scene was finally closed, the disconsolate survivor
immured himself almost from light and life, through inability to speak
or act, or yet to bear witnesses to his misery.
He was soon, however, direfully called from this concentrated anguish,
by the last awful summons to the last awful rites to human memory,
the funeral; which he attended in a frame of mind that nothing,
probably, could have rescued from unrestrained despair, save a pious
invocation to submission that had been ejaculated by his Esther, when
she perceived his rising agony, in an impressive “Oh, Charles!”—almost
at the very moment she was expiring: an appeal that could not but still
vibrate in his penetrated ears, and control his tragic passions.
The character, and its rare, resplendent worth, of this inestimable
person, is best committed to the pen of him to whom it best was
known; as will appear by the subsequent letter, copied from his
own hand-writing. It was found amongst his posthumous papers, so
ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself
obliged to re-write it for the post.
It may be proper to again mention, that though Esther was maternally of
French extraction, and though her revered mother was a Roman Catholic,
she herself was a confirmed Protestant. But that angelic mother had
brought her up with a love and a practice of genuine piety which
undeviatingly intermingled in every action, and, probably, in every
thought of her virtuous life, so religiously, so deeply, that neither
pain nor calamity could make her impatient of existence; nor yet could
felicity the most perfect make her reluctant to die.
To paint the despairing grief produced by this deadly blow must be
cast, like the portrait of its object, upon the sufferer; and the
inartificial pathos, the ingenuous humility, with which both are marked
in the affecting detail of her death, written in answer to a letter of
sympathizing condolence from the tenderest friend of the deceased, Miss
Dorothy Young, so strongly speak a language of virtue as well as of
sorrow, that, unconsciously, they exhibit his own fair unsophisticated
character in delineating that of his lost love. A more touching
description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its
dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be
found upon record.
“TO MISS DOROTHY YOUNG.
“I had not thought it possible that any thing could urge me
to write in the present deplorable disposition of my mind;
but my dear Miss Young’s letter haunts me! Neither did I
think it possible for any thing to add to my affliction,
borne down and broken-hearted as I am. But the current
of your woes and sympathetic sorrows meeting mine, has
overpowered all bounds which religion, philosophy, reason,
or even despair, may have been likely to set to my grief.
Oh Miss Young! you knew her worth—you were one of the few
people capable of seeing and feeling it. Good God! that
she should be snatched from me at a time when I thought
her health re-establishing, and fixing for a long old age!
when our plans began to succeed, and we flattered ourselves
with enjoying each other’s society ere long, in a peaceable
and quiet retirement from the bustling frivolousness of a
capital, to which our niggard stars had compelled us to fly
for the prospect of establishing our children.
“Amongst the numberless losses I sustain, there are none that
unman me so much as the total deprivation of domestic comfort
and converse—that converse from which I tore myself with
such difficulty in a morning, and to which I flew back with
such celerity at night! She was the source of all I could
ever project or perform that was praise-worthy—all that I
could do that was laudable had an eye to her approbation.
There was a rectitude in her mind and judgment, that rendered
her approbation so animating, so rational, so satisfactory!
I have lost the spur, the stimulus to all exertions, all
warrantable pursuits,—except those of another world. From an
ambitious, active, enterprising Being, I am become a torpid
drone, a listless, desponding wretch!—I know you will bear
with my weakness, nay, in part, participate in it; but this
is a kind of dotage unfit for common eyes, or even for common
friends, to be entrusted with.
“You kindly, and truly, my dear Miss Young, styled her one
of the greatest ornaments of society; but, apart from the
ornamental, in which she shone in a superior degree, think,
oh think, of her high merit as a daughter, mother, wife,
sister, friend! I always, from the first moment I saw her
to the last, had an ardent passion for her person, to which
time had added true friendship and rational regard. Perhaps
it is honouring myself too much to say, few people were more
suited to each other; but, at least, I always endeavoured
to render myself more worthy of her than nature, perhaps,
had formed me. But she could mould me to what she pleased! A
distant hint—a remote wish from her was enough to inspire me
with courage for any undertaking. But all is lost and gone in
losing her—the whole world is a desert to me! nor does its
whole circumference afford the least hope of succour—not a
single ray of that fortitude She so fully possessed!
“You, and all who knew her, respected and admired her
understanding while she was living. Judge, then, with what
awe and veneration I must be struck to hear her counsel when
dying!—to see her meet that tremendous spectre, death, with
that calmness, resignation, and true religious fortitude,
that no stoic philosopher, nor scarcely christian, could
surpass; for it was all in privacy and simplicity. Socrates
and Seneca called their friends around them to give them
that courage that perhaps solitude might have robbed them
of, and to spread abroad their fame to posterity; but she,
dear pattern of humility! had no such vain view; no parade,
no grimace! When she was aware that all was over—when she
had herself pronounced the dread sentence, that she felt she
should not outlive the coming night, she composedly gave
herself up to religion, and begged that she might not be
interrupted in her prayers and meditations.
“Afterwards she called me to her, and then tranquilly talked
about our family and affairs, in a manner quite oracular.
“Sometime later she desired to see Hetty,[21] who, till
that day, had spent the miserable week almost constantly at
her bed-side, or at the foot of the bed. Fanny, Susan, and
Charley, had been sent, some days before, to the kind care
of Mrs. Sheeles in Queen-Square, to be out of the way; and
little Charlotte was taken to the house of her nurse.
“To poor Hetty she then discoursed in so kind, so feeling,
so tender a manner, that I am sure her words will never be
forgotten. And, this over, she talked of her own death—her
funeral—her place of burial,—with as much composure as
if talking of a journey to Lynn! Think of this, my dear
Miss Young, and see the impossibility of supporting such a
loss—such an adieu, with calmness! I hovered over her till
she sighed, not groaned, her last—placidly sighed it—just
after midnight.
“Her disorder was an inflammation of the stomach, with which
she was seized on the 19th of September, after being on that
day, and for some days previously, remarkably in health
and spirits. She suffered the most excruciating torments
for eight days, with a patience, a resignation, nearly
quite silent. Her malady baffled all medical skill from the
beginning. I called in Dr. Hunter.
“On the 28th, the last day! she suffered, I suppose, less,
perhaps nothing! as mortification must have taken place,
which must have afforded that sort of ease, that those who
have escaped such previous agony shudder to think of! On that
ever memorable, that dreadful day, she talked more than she
had done throughout her whole illness. She forgot nothing,
nor threw one word away! always hoping we should meet and
know each other hereafter!—She told poor Hetty how sweet
it would be if she could see her constantly from whence she
was going, and begged she would invariably suppose that that
would be the case. What a lesson to leave to a daughter!—She
exhorted her to remember how much her example might influence
the poor younger ones; and bid her write little letters,
and fancies, to her in the other world, to say how they all
went on; adding, that she felt as if she should surely know
something of them.
“Afterwards, feeling probably her end fast approaching, she
serenely said, with one hand on the head of Hetty, and the
other grasped in mine: “Now this is dying pleasantly! in the
arms of one’s friends!” I burst into an unrestrained agony of
grief, when, with a superiority of wisdom, resignation, and
true religion,—though awaiting, consciously, from instant
to instant awaiting the shaft of death,—she mildly uttered,
in a faint, faint voice, but penetratingly tender, “Oh
Charles!—”
“I checked myself instantaneously, over-awed and stilled as
by a voice from one above. I felt she meant to beg me not to
agitate her last moments!—I entreated her forgiveness, and
told her it was but human nature. “And so it is!” said she,
gently; and presently added, “Nay, it is worse for the living
than the dying,—though a moment sets us even!—life is but a
paltry business—yet
“‘Who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey
This pleasing—anxious being e’er resign’d?
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?’”
“She had still muscular strength left to softly press both
our hands as she pronounced these affecting lines.
“Other fine passages, also, both from holy writ, and from
what is most religious in our best poets, she from time to
time recited, with fervent prayers; in which most devoutly we
joined.
“These, my dear Miss Young, are the outlines of her sublime
and edifying exit—— —— —What a situation was mine!
but for my poor helpless children, how gladly, how most
gladly should I have wished to accompany her hence on the
very instant, to that other world to which she so divinely
passed!—for what in this remains for me?”
Part of a letter, also, to Mrs. Stephen Allen, the friend to whom, next
to Miss Dorothy Young, the departed had been most attached, seems to
belong to this place. Its style, as it was written at a later period,
is more composed; but it evinces in the wretched mourner the same
devotion to his Esther’s excellences, and the same hopelessness of
earthly happiness.
“TO MRS. STEPHEN ALLEN.
* * * * *
“Even prosperity is insipid without participation with
those we love; for me, therefore, heaven knows, all is at
an end—all is accumulated wretchedness! I have lost a
soul congenial with my own;—a companion, who in outward
appurtenances and internal conceptions, condescended to
assimilate her ideas and manners with mine. Yet believe not
that all my feelings are for myself; my poor girls have
sustained a loss far more extensive than they, poor innocents!
are at present sensible of. Unprovided as I should have
left them with respect to fortune, had it been my fate to
resign her and life first, I should have been under no great
apprehension for the welfare of my children, in leaving them
to a mother who had such inexhaustible resources in her mind
and intellects. It would have grieved me, indeed, to have
quitted her oppressed by such a load of care; but I could
have had no doubt of her supporting it with fortitude and
abilities, as long as life and health had been allowed her.
Fortitude and abilities she possessed, indeed, to a degree
that, without hyperbole, no human being can conceive but
myself, who have seen her under such severe trials as alone
can manifest, unquestionably, true parts and greatness of
mind. I am thoroughly convinced she was fitted for any
situation, either exalted or humble, which this life can
furnish. And with all her nice discernment, quickness of
perception, and delicacy, she could submit, if occasion seemed
to require it, to such drudgery and toil as are suited to the
meanest domestic; and that, with a liveliness and alacrity
that, in general, are to be found in those only who have never
known a better state. Yet with a strength of reason the most
solid, and a capacity for literature the most intelligent,
she never for a moment relinquished the female and amiable
softness of her sex with which, above every other attribute,
men are most charmed and captivated.”
Such, in their early effervescence, was the vent which this man of
affliction found to his sorrows, in the sympathy of his affectionate
friends.
At other times, they were beguiled from their deadly heaviness by the
expansion of fond description in melancholy verse. To this he was less
led by poetical enthusiasm—for all of fire, fancy, and imagery, that
light up the poet’s flame, was now extinct, or smothered—than by a
gentle request of his Esther, uttered in her last days, that he would
address to her some poetry; a request intended, there can be no doubt,
as a stimulus to some endearing occupation that might tear him from
his first despondence, by an idea that he had still a wish of hers to
execute.
Not as poetry, in an era fastidious as the present in metrical
criticism, does the editor presume to offer the verses now about to be
selected and copied from a vast mass of elegiac laments found amongst
the posthumous papers of Dr. Burney: it is biographically alone, like
those that have preceded them, that they are brought forward. They are
testimonies of the purity of his love, as well as of the acuteness of
his bereavement; and, as such, they certainly belong to his memoirs.
The reader, therefore, is again entreated to remember that they were
not designed for the press, though they were committed, unshackled,
to the discretion of the editor. If that be in fault, the motive will
probably prove a palliative that will make the heart, not the head, of
the reader, the seat of his judgment.
“She’s gone!—the all-pervading soul is fled
T’ explore the unknown mansions of the dead,
Where, free from earthly clay, the immortal mind
Casts many a pitying glance on those behind;
Sees us deplore the wife—the mother—friend—
Sees fell despair our wretched bosoms rend!
Oh death!—thy dire inexorable dart
Of every blessing has bereft my heart!
Better to have died like her, in hope of rest,
Than live forlorn, and life and light detest.—
In hope of rest? ah no! her fervent pray’r
Was that her soul, when once dissolv’d in air
Might, conscious of its pre-existent state,
On those she lov’d alive, benignly wait,—
Our genius, and our guardian angel be
Till fate unite us in eternity!
But—the bless’d shade to me no hope bequeaths
Till death his faulchion in my bosom sheaths!
Sorrowing, I close my eyes in restless sleep;
Sorrowing, I wake the live-long day to weep.
No future comfort can this world bestow,
’Tis blank and cold, as overwhelm’d with snow.
* * * * *
When dying in my arms, she softly said:
“Write me some verses!”—and shall be obey’d.
The sacred mandate vibrates in my ears,
And fills my eyes with reverential tears.
For ever on her virtues let me dwell,
A Patriarch’s life too short her worth to tell.
Such manly sense to female softness join’d,
Her person grac’d, and dignified her mind,
That she in beauty, while she trod life’s stage,
A Venus seem’d—in intellect, a sage.
Before I her beheld, the untutor’d mind
Still vacant lay, to mental beauty blind:
But when her angel form my sight had bless’d
The flame of passion instant fill’d my breast;
Through every vein the fire electric stole,
And took dominion of my inmost soul.
By her ... possess’d of every pow’r to please,
Each toilsome task was exercis’d with ease.
* * * * *
For me, comprising every charm of life,
Friend—Mistress—Counsellor—Companion—Wife—
Wife!—wife!—oh honour’d name! for ever dear,
Alike enchanting to the eye and ear!
Let the corrupt, licentious, and profane
Rail, scoff, and murmur at the sacred chain:
It suits not them. Few but the wise and good
Its blessings e’er have priz’d or understood.
Matur’d in virtue first the heart must glow,
Ere happiness can vegetate and grow.
From her I learnt to feel the holy flame,
And found that she and virtue were the same.
From dissipation, though I might receive—
Ere yet I knew I had a heart to give—
An evanescent joy, untouch’d the mind
Still torpid lay, to mental beauty blind;
Till by example more than precept taught
From her, to act aright, the flame I caught.
How chang’d the face of nature now is grown!
* * * * *
Illusive hope no more her charms displays;
Her flattering schemes no more my spirits raise;
Each airy vision which her pencil drew
Inexorable death has banish’d from my view.
Each gentle solace is withheld by fate
Till death conduct me through his awful gate.
Come then, Oh Death! let kindred souls be join’d!
Oh thou, so often cruel—once be kind!”
A total chasm ensues of all account of events belonging to the period
of this irreparable earthly blast. Not a personal memorandum of the
unhappy survivor is left; not a single document in his hand-writing,
except of verses to her idea, or to her memory; or of imitations,
adapted to his loss, and to her excellences, from some selected sonnets
of Petrarch, whom he considered to have loved, entombed, and bewailed
another Esther in his Laura.
When this similitude, which soothed his spirit and flattered his
feelings, had been studied and paralleled in every possible line of
comparison, he had recourse to the works of Dante, which, ere long,
beguiled from him some attention; because, through the difficulty of
idiom, he had not, as of nearly all other favourite authors, lost all
zest of the beauties of Dante in solitude, from having tasted the
sweetness of his numbers with a pleasure exalted by participation:
for, during the last two years that his Esther was spared to him, her
increased maternal claims from a new baby;[22] and augmented domestic
cares from a new residence, had checked the daily mutuality of their
progress in the pursuit of improvement; and to Esther this great poet
was scarcely known.
To Dante, therefore, he first delivered over what he could yet summon
from his grief-worn faculties; and to initiate himself into the works,
and nearly obsolete style, of that hardest, but most sublime of Italian
poets, became the occupation to which, with the least repugnance, he
was capable of recurring.
A sedulous, yet energetic, though prose translation of the Inferno,
remains amongst his posthumous relics, to demonstrate the sincere
struggles with which, even amidst this overwhelming calamity, he strove
to combat that most dangerously consuming of all canker-worms upon life
and virtue, utter inertness.
Of his children, James,[23] his eldest son, had already, at ten years
of age, been sent to sea, a nominal midshipman, in the ship of Admiral
Montagu.
The second son, Charles,[24] who was placed, several years later, in
the Charterhouse, by Mr. Burney’s first and constant patron, the Earl
of Holdernesse, was then but a child.
The eldest daughter was still a little girl; and the last born of her
three sisters could scarcely walk alone. But all, save the seaman, who
was then aboard his ship, were now called back to the paternal roof of
the unhappy father.
None of them, however, were of an age to be companionable; his fondness
for them, therefore, full of care and trouble, procured no mitigation
to his grief by the pleasure of society: and the heavy march of time,
where no solace is accepted from abroad, or attainable at home, gave
a species of stagnation to his existence, that made him take, in the
words of Young,
“No note of time,
Save by its loss!”
His tenderness, however, as a father; his situation as a man; and his
duties as a Christian, drew, tore him, at length, from this retreat
of lonely woe; and, in the manuscript already quoted from, which was
written many years after the period of which it speaks, he says: “I was
forced, ere long, to plunge into business; and then found, that having
my time occupied by my affairs was a useful dissipation of my sorrows,
as it compelled me to a temporary inattention to myself, and to the
irreparable loss I had sustained.”
Still, however, all mitigation to his grief that was not imposed upon
him by necessity, he avoided even with aversion; and even the sight of
those who most had loved and esteemed the departed, was the sight most
painful to him in sharpening his regrets, “which, therefore, no meeting
whatsoever,” he says, “could blunt; since to love and admire her, had
been universally the consequence of seeing and knowing her.”
From this mournful monotony of life, he was especially, however,
called, by reflecting that his eldest daughter was fast advancing to
that age when education is most requisite to improvement; and that,
at such a period, the loss of her mother and instructress might be
permanently hurtful to her, if no measure should be taken to avert the
possible consequences of neglect.
Yet the idea of a governess, who, to him, unless his children were
wholly confined to the nursery, must indispensably be a species of
companion, was not, in his present desolate state of mind, even
tolerable. Nevertheless masters without superintendence, and lessons
without practice, he well knew to be nugatory. Projects how to remedy
this evil, as fruitless as they were numberless, crossed his mind; till
a plan occurred to him, that, by combining economy with novelty, and
change of scene for himself, with various modes of advantage to his
daughters, ripened into an exertion that brought him, about a month
after its formation, to the gates of Paris.
The design of Mr. Burney was to place two of his daughters in some
convent, or boarding-house, where their education might be forwarded by
his own directions.
Sundry reasons decided him to make his third daughter, Susanna, take
place, in this expedition, of his second, Frances; but, amongst them,
the principal and most serious motive, was a fearful tendency to a
consumptive habit in that most delicate of his young plants, that
seemed to require the balsamic qualities of a warmer and clearer
atmosphere.
Another reason, which he acknowledged, in after-times, to have had
great weight with him for this arrangement, was the tender veneration
with which Frances was impressed for her maternal grandmother; whose
angelic piety, and captivating softness, had won her young heart with
such reverential affection, that he apprehended there might be danger
of her being led to follow, even enthusiastically, the religion of so
pure a votary, if she should fall so early, within the influence of any
zealot in the work of conversion. He determined, therefore, as he could
part with two of them only at a time, that Fanny and Charlotte should
follow their sisters in succession, at a later period.