Mr. Burney now, greatly lightened, and somewhat brightened in spirits,
returned to his country and his home. His mind seemed no longer
left in desolating inertness to prey upon itself. Nutriment of an
invigorating nature was in view, though not yet of a consistence to
afford spontaneous refreshment. On the contrary, it required taste
for selection, labour for culture, and skill for appropriation. But
such nutriment, if attainable, was precisely that which best could
re-inforce the poor “tenement of clay,”[26] which the lassitude of
unbraced nerves had nearly “fretted to decay.”
Sketches, hints, notes, and scattered ideas of all sorts, began to
open the way to some original composition; though the timidity of his
Muse, not the dearth of his fancy, long kept back the force of mind for
meeting the public eye, that now, in these more easy, dauntless times,
urges almost every stripling to present his mental powers to the world,
nearly ere his physical ones have emerged from leading-strings in the
nursery.
The first, because the least responsible, method of facing the critic
eye, that occurred to him, was that of translation; and he began
with acutely studying d’Alembert’s _Elémens de Musique théorique et
pratique, selon les principes de Rameau_; in which he was assiduously
engaged, when the appearance of the celebrated musical _Dictionaire_ of
the still more celebrated Rousseau, from its far nearer congeniality
to his taste, surprised him into inconstancy.
Yet this also, from circumstances that intervened, was laid aside; and
his first actual essay was a trifle, though a pleasing one, from which
no real fame could either accrue, or be marred; it was translating, and
adapting to the stage, the little pastoral afterpiece of Rousseau, _Le
Devin du Village_.