While this revival of intercourse with the Garricks, and partial
return to public life and affairs, necessarily banished the outward
and obvious marks of the change of existence, and lost happiness of
Mr. Burney, they operated also, gently, but effectively, in gradually
diminishing his sufferings, by forcing him from their contemplation:
for in that dilapidated state of sorrow’s absorption, where the mind
is wholly abandoned to its secret sensations, all that innately recurs
to it can spring only from its own concentrated sources; and these,
though they may vary the evil by palliatives, offer nothing curative.
New scenes and objects alone can open to new ideas; and, happily, a
circumstance now occurred that brought on a revival of intercourse with
the only man who, at that time, could recall the mourner’s faculties to
genial feelings, and expand them to confidential sociality.
His earliest favourite, guide, philosopher, and friend, Mr. Crisp, he
now, after a separation of very many years, accidentally met at the
house of Mr. Vincent, a mutual acquaintance.
Their satisfaction at the sight of each other was truly reciprocal;
though that of Mr. Burney was tinctured with dejection, that he could
no longer present to his dearest friend the partner whom, by such
a judge, he had felt would have been instantly and reverentially
appreciated.
Mr. Crisp joined in this regret; but was not the less desirous to see
and to know all that remained of her; and he hastened the following
day to Poland-street; where, from his very first entrance amidst the
juvenile group, he became instinctively honoured as a counsellor for
his wisdom and judgment, and loved and liked as a companion for his
gaiety, his good-humour, and his delight in their rising affections;
which led him unremittingly, though never obtrusively, to mingle
instruction with their most sportive intercourse.
As Mr. Crisp was the earliest and dearest friend of the subject of
these memoirs, the reader will not, it is probable, be sorry to be
apprised of the circumstances which, since their separation, had turned
him from a brilliant man of the world to a decided recluse.
The life of Mr. Crisp had been exposed to much vicissitude. Part
of it had been spent in Italy, particularly at Rome, where he took
up his residence for some years; and where, from his passion for
music, painting, and sculpture, he amassed, for the rest of his
existence, recollections of never-dying pleasure. And not alone for
his solitary contemplations, but for the delight that the vivacity of
his delineations imparted to his friends, when he could be induced to
unfold his reminiscences; whether upon the sacred and soul-pervading
harmony of the music of the Pope’s chapel; or upon the tones,
mellifluously melting or elevating, of Sinesino, Custini, or Farinelli:
or by bringing to view through glowing images, the seraphic forms and
expressions of Raphael and Correggio; and the sculptural sublimity
of Michael Angelo. Or when, animated to the climax of his homage for
the fine arts, he flitted by all else to concentrate the whole force
of his energies, in describing that electrifying wonder, the Apollo
Belvedere.
On this he dwelt with a vivacity of language that made his hearers wish
to fasten upon every word that he uttered; so vividly he portrayed the
commanding port, the chaste symmetry, and the magic form—for which not
a tint was requisite, and colouring would have been superfluous—of
that unrivalled production, of which the peerless grace, looking
softer, though of marble, than the feathered snow; and brightly
radiant, though, like the sun, simply white, strike upon the mind
rather than the eye, as an ideal representative of ethereal beauty.[28]
And while such were his favourite topics for his gifted participators,
there was a charm for all around in his more general conversation, that
illumined with instruction, or gladdened with entertainment, even the
most current and desultory subjects of the passing hour.
Thus rarely at once endowed and cultivated, there can be little
surprise that Mr. Crisp should be distinguished, speedily and forcibly,
by what is denominated the Great World; where his striking talents,
embellished by his noble countenance and elegant manners, made him so
much the mode with the great, and the chosen with the difficult, that
time, not friends, was all he wanted for social enjoyment.
High, perhaps highest in this noble class, stood Margaret Cavendish
Harley, Duchess Dowager of Portland, _The Friend of Mrs. Delany_; by
whom that venerable and exemplary personage, who was styled by Mr.
Burke, “The pattern of a real fine lady of times that were past,” had
been herself made known to Mr. Crisp.
Mrs. Montagu, also, who then, Mr. Crisp was wont to say, was peering
at fame, and gradually rising to its temple, was of the same coterie.
But most familiarly he resided with Christopher Hamilton of Chesington
Hall, and with the Earl of Coventry.
With this last he was intimately connected, at the time of that Earl’s
marriage with the acknowledged nonpareil of female beauty, the youngest
Miss Gunning.
Mr. Crisp had already written his tragedy of Virginia; but Garrick,
though he was the author’s personal friend, thought it so little equal
to the expectations that might await it, that he postponed, season
after season, bringing it out; even though Lord Coventry, who admired
it with the warmth of partial regard, engaged the first Mr. Pitt[29]
to read it, and to pronounce in its favour. Roscius still was adverse,
and still delayed the trial; nor could he be prevailed upon to prepare
it for the stage, till Mr. Crisp had won that Venus of her day, the
exquisite Lady Coventry, through his influence with her lord, to
present a copy of the manuscript, with her own almost sculptured hand,
to the then conquered manager.
The play neither succeeded nor failed. A catastrophe of so yea and nay
a character was ill suited to the energies and hopes of its high-minded
author, who was bitterly disappointed; and thought the performers had
been negligent, Mr. Garrick unfriendly, and the public precipitate.
The zealous Lord Coventry, himself a man of letters, advised sundry
changes, and a new trial. Mr. Crisp shut himself up, and worked
indefatigably at these suggestions: but when his alterations were
finished, there was no longer a radiant Countess of Coventry to bewitch
Mr. Garrick, by “the soft serenity of her smile,” to make a further
attempt. Lady Coventry, whose brief, dazzling race, was rapidly
run, was now already fast fading in the grasping arms of withering
consumption: and Mr. Garrick, though, from unwillingness to disoblige,
he seemed wavering, was not the less inexorable.
Mr. Crisp then, disgusted with the stage, the manager, and the
theatrical public, gave up not alone that point, but every other by
which he might have emerged from private life to celebrity. He almost
wholly retired from London, and resided at Hampton; where he fitted
up a small house with paintings, prints, sculpture, and musical
instruments, arranged with the most classical elegance.
But the vicinity of the metropolis caused allurements such as these,
with such a chief to bring them into play, to accord but ill with the
small, though unincumbered fortune of their master; and the grace with
which, instinctively, he received his visitors, made his habitation so
pleasant, as soon to produce a call upon his income that shattered its
stability.
His alarm now was such as might be expected from his sense of honour,
and his love of independence. Yet the delicacy of his pride forbade any
complaint to his friends, that might seem to implicate their discretion
in his distress, or to invite their aid; though his desire to smooth,
without publishing, his difficulties, urged him to commune with those
of his connexions who were in actual power, and to confess his wishes
for some honourable place, or occupation, that might draw forth his
faculties to the amelioration of his fortune.
Kind words, and enlivening promises, now raised his hopes to a
favourable change in his affairs; and, brightly looking forward, he
continued to welcome his friends; who, enchanted by his society, poured
in upon him with a thoughtless frequency, which caused an increase of
expenditure that startled him, ere long, with a prospect, sudden and
frightful, of the road to ruin.
Shocked, wounded, dismayed, he perceived two ways only by which
he could be extricated from the labyrinth into which he had been
betrayed by premature expectation; either vigorously to urge his suit
for some appointment, and persecute, pester his friends to quicken
his advancement; or cut off approaching worldly destruction by an
immediate sacrifice of worldly luxury.
A severe fit of the gout, that now, for the first time—hastened,
probably, by chagrin—assailed him, decided his resolution. He sold his
house at Hampton, his books, prints, pictures, and instruments; with
a fixed determination of relinquishing the world, and retiring from
mankind.
Within a few miles of Hampton stood Chesington Hall, his chosen
retreat; and thither, with what little of his property he had rescued
from the auctioneer and the appraiser, he transplanted his person; and
there buried every temporal prospect.
Chesington Hall was placed upon a considerable, though not rapid
eminence, whence two tall, antique trees, growing upon an old rustic
structure called The Mount, were discernible at sixteen miles distance.
The Hall had been built upon a large, lone, and nearly desolate common;
and no regular road, or even track to the mansion from Epsom, the
nearest town, had, for many years, been spared from its encircling
ploughed fields, or fallow ground.
This old mansion had fallen into the hands of the Hamiltons from those
of the Hattons, by whom its erection had been begun in the same year
upon which Cardinal Wolsey had commenced raising, in its vicinity, the
magnificent palace of Hampton Court.
Every thing around Chesington Hall was now falling to decay; and its
hereditary owner, Christopher Hamilton, the last male of his immediate
branch of the Hamilton family, was, at this time, utterly ruined, and
sinking in person as well as property in the general desolation.
This was precisely a sojourn to meet the secluding desire of Mr.
Crisp; he adopted some pic-nic plan with Mr. Hamilton; and Chesington
Hall became his decided residence; it might almost be said, his
fugitive sanctuary. He acquainted no one with his intentions, and
communicated to no one his place of abode. Firm to resist the kindness,
he determined to escape the tediousness, of persuasion: and, however
often, in after-life, when renovated health gave him a consciousness
of renovated faculties, he might have regretted this intellectual
interment, he was immoveable never more to emerge from a tranquillity,
which now, to his sickened mind, made the pursuits of ambition seem as
oppressively troublesome in their manoeuvres, as they were morbidly
bitter in their disappointments.
His fondness, however, for the arts, was less subordinate to the
casualties of life than his love of the world. It was too much an
integral part of his composition to be annihilated in the same gulph in
which were sunk his mundane expectations. Regularly, therefore, every
spring, he came up to the metropolis, where, in keeping pace with the
times, he enjoyed every modern improvement in music and painting.
Rarely can a re-union of early associates have dispensed brighter
felicity with more solid advantages, than were produced by the
accidental re-meeting of these long separated friends. To Mr. Burney
it brought back a congeniality of feeling and intelligence, that
re-invigorated his social virtues; and to Mr. Crisp it gave not only a
friend, but a family.
It operated, however, no further. To Mr. Burney alone was confided the
clue for a safe route across the wild common to Chesington Hall; from
all others it was steadfastly withheld; and from Mr. Greville it was
studiously and peculiarly concealed.
That gentleman now was greatly altered, from the large and larger
strides which he had made, and was making, into the dangerous purlieus
of horse-racing and of play; into whose precincts, from the delusive
difference of their surface from their foundation, no incursions can be
hazarded without as perilous a shake to character and disposition, as
to fortune and conduct. And Mr. Greville, who, always honourable, was
almost necessarily a frequent loser, was evidently on the high road to
turn from a man of pleasure to a man of spleen; venting his wrath at
his failures upon the turf and at the clubs, by growing fastidious and
cavilling in general society. Mr. Crisp, therefore, bent to maintain
the dear bought quiet of his worldly sacrifices as unmingled with
the turbulent agitations of querulous debate, as with the restless
solicitudes of active life, shunned the now pertinacious disputant
almost with dread.
Yet Mr. Greville, about this period, was rescued, for a while, from
this hovering deterioration, through the exertions of his friends
in the government, by whom he was named minister plenipotentiary to
the court of Bavaria; in the hope that such an appointment, with its
probable consequences, might re-establish his affairs.
No change, however, of situation, caused any change in Mr. Greville to
his early _protegé_ and attached and attaching friend, Mr. Burney, to
whom he still shewed himself equally eager to communicate his opinions,
and reveal his proceedings. A letter from Munich, written when his
Excellency was first installed in his new dignity, will display the
pleasant openness of their correspondence; at the same time that it
depicts the humours and expenses of the official ceremonials then in
use, with a frankness that makes them both curious and entertaining.[30]
* * * * *
A letter to the Earl of Eglinton from the celebrated David Hume,
written also about this time, gave Mr. Burney very peculiar
satisfaction, from the sincere disposition to esteem and to serve him,
which it manifested in that dangerously renowned philosopher; whose
judgment of men was as skilfully inviting, as his sophistry in theology
was fearfully repelling.
Yet upon the circumstances of this letter hung a cutting
disappointment, which, in the midst of his rising prospects, severely
pierced the hopes of Mr. Burney; and, from the sharpness of its injury,
and its future aggravating repetitions, would permanently have
festered them, had their composition been of less elastic quality.
To be Master of the King’s Band, as the highest professional honour to
be obtained, had been the earliest aim of Mr. Burney; and, through the
medium of warm friends, joined to his now well approved and obvious
merit, the promise of the then Lord Chamberlain had been procured
for the first vacancy. This arrived in 1765; but when the consequent
claim was made, how great, how confounding to Mr. Burney was the
intelligence, that the place was disposed of already.
He hastened with a relation of this grievance, as unexpected as it was
undeserved, to the celebrated historian, to whom his rights had been
well known at Paris. And Mr. Hume, whose sense of justice—one fatal
warp excepted—was as luminous as it was profound, shocked by such
a breach of its simplest and most unchangeable statutes, instantly
undertook, with the courage imbibed by his great abilities and high
moral character, to make a representation on the subject to Lord
Hertford.
Failing, however, of meeting with an immediate opportunity, and
well aware of the importance of expedition in such applications, he
addressed himself to the Countess; and from her he learnt, and with
expressions of benevolent concern, that it was the Duke of York[31] who
had demanded the nomination to the place.
It now occurred to Mr. Hume that the present applicant might possibly
be himself the object for whom his Royal Highness had interfered, as
Mr. Burney had frequently been seen, and treated with marked kindness,
by the Royal Duke at private concerts; which were then often, at the
sudden request of that prince, formed by the Earl of Eglinton; and at
which Mr. Burney, when in London, was always a principal and favoured
assistant. With this in his recollection, and naturally concluding Lord
Eglinton, who always shewed an animated partiality for Mr. Burney, to
be chief in the application to the Lord Chamberlain, Mr. Hume wrote the
following letter.