And equally alert with the same congratulatory courtesies, were his
long and rootedly attached friends, the Grevilles. Mr. Greville,
curious to behold the successor of her whom he had never named, but
as one of the prettiest women he had ever seen, hastened to make his
marriage visit on the first morning that he heard of the bride’s
arrival in town: while of Mrs. Greville, the bridal visit was arranged
in such form, and with such attention, as she thought would shew most
consideration to its object. She came on an appointed day, that Mr.
Burney might be certainly at home, to present her to his wife; and she
stayed to spend the whole evening in Poland-street.
Her nearly peerless daughter, then in the first radiance of her
matchless bloom, who had been lately married to Mr. Crewe, of Cheshire,
with the same zeal as her parents to manifest esteem and affection for
Mr. Burney, joined the party; which consisted but of themselves, and of
Mr. Burney’s new and original young families.
Mrs. Greville, as was peculiarly in her power, took the lead, and bore
the burthen of the conversation; which chiefly turned upon Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey, at that time the reigning reading in vogue: but
when the new Mrs. Burney recited, with animated encomiums, various
passages of Sterne’s seducing sensibility, Mrs. Greville, shrugging
her shoulders, exclaimed: “A feeling heart is certainly a right heart;
nobody will contest that: but when a man chooses to walk about the
world with a cambrick handkerchief always in his hand, that he may
always be ready to weep, either with man or beast,—he only turns me
sick.”