No production had as yet transpired publicly from the pen of Dr.
Burney, his new connexion having induced him to consign every interval
of leisure to domestic and social circles, whether in London, or at the
dowry-house of Mrs. Burney, in Lynn Regis, to which the joint families
resorted in the summer.
But when, from peculiar circumstances, Mrs. Burney, and a part of the
younger set, remained for a season in Norfolk, the spirit of literary
composition resumed its sway; though not in the dignified form in
which, afterwards, it fixed its standard.
The long-predicted comet of the immortal Halley, was to make its
luminously-calculated appearance this year, 1769; and the Doctor was
ardently concurrent with the watchers and awaiters of this prediction.
In the course of this new pursuit, and the researches to which it
led, Dr. Burney, no doubt, dwelt even unusually upon the image and
the recollection of his Esther; who, with an avidity for knowledge
consonant to his own, had found time—made it, rather—in the midst of
her conjugal, her maternal, and her domestic devoirs, to translate from
the French, the celebrated Letter of Astronomical renown of Maupertuis;
not with any prospect of fame; her husband himself was not yet entered
upon its annals, nor emerged, save anonymously, from his timid
obscurity: it was simply from a love of improvement, and a delight in
its acquirement. To view with him the stars, and exchange with him her
rising associations of ideas, bounded all the ambition of her exertions.
The recurrence to this manuscript translation, at a moment when
astronomy was the nearly universal subject of discourse, was not likely
to turn the Doctor aside from this aerial direction of his thoughts;
and the little relic, of which even the hand-writing could not but
be affecting as well as dear to him, was now read and re-read, till
he considered it as too valuable to be lost; and determined, after
revising and copying it, to send it to the press.
Whether any tender notion of first, though unsuspectedly, appearing
before the public by the side of his Esther, stimulated the production
of the Essay that ensued from the revision of this letter; or whether
the stimulus of the subject itself led to the publication of the
letter, is uncertain; but that they hung upon each other is not without
interest, as they unlocked, in concert, the gates through which Doctor
Burney first passed to that literary career which, ere long, greeted
his more courageous entrance into a publicity that conducted him
to celebrity; for it was now that his first prose composition, an
Abridged History of Comets, was written; and was printed in a pamphlet
that included his Esther’s translation of the Letter of Maupertuis.
This opening enterprize cannot but seem extraordinary, the profession,
education, and indispensable business of the Doctor considered; and may
bear upon its face a character contradictory to what has been said of
his prudent resolve, to avoid any attempt that might warp, or wean him
from his own settled occupation; till it is made known that this essay
was neither then, nor ever after avowed; nor ever printed with his
works.
It was the offspring of the moment, springing from the subject of the
day; and owing its birth, there scarcely can be a doubt, to a fond,
though unacknowledged indulgence of tender recollections.
The title of the little treatise is, “An Essay towards a History of
Comets, previous to the re-appearance of the Comet whose return had
been predicted by Edmund Halley.”
In a memorandum upon this subject, by Dr. Burney, are these words:
“The Countess of Pembroke, being reported to have studied
astronomy, and to have accustomed herself to telescopical
observations, I dedicated, anonymously, this essay to her
ladyship, who was much celebrated for her love of the arts
and sciences, and many other accomplishments. I had not the
honour of being known to her; and I am not certain whether
she ever heard by whom the pamphlet was written.[37]”
This Essay once composed and printed, the Doctor consigned it to its
fate, and thought of it no more.
And the public, after the re-invisibility of the meteor, and the
declension of the topic, followed the same course.
But not equally passive either with the humility of the author, or with
the indifferency of the readers, were the consequences of this little
work; which, having been written wholly in moments stolen from repose,
though requiring researches and studies that frequently kept him to his
pen till four o’clock in the morning, without exempting him from rising
at his common hour of seven; terminated in an acute rheumatic fever,
that confined him to his bed, or his chamber, during twenty days.
This sharp infliction, however, though it ill recompensed his
ethereal flights, by no means checked his literary ambition; and the
ardour which was cooled for gazing at the stars, soon seemed doubly
re-animated for the music of the spheres.
A wish, and a design, energetic, though vague, of composing some
considerable work on his own art, had long roved in his thoughts, and
flattered his fancy: and he now began seriously to concentrate his
meditations, and arrange his schemes to that single point. And the
result of these cogitations, when no longer left wild to desultory
wanderings, produced his enlightened and scientific plan for a