But the year that followed this still rising tide of pleasure and
prosperity to Dr. Burney, 1779, opened to him with the personal loss
of a friend whom the world might vainly, perhaps, be challenged to
replace, for agreeability, delight, and conviviality, Garrick!—the
inimitable David Garrick! who left behind him all previous eminence in
his profession beyond reach of comparison; save the Roscius of Rome,
to whose Ciceronian celebrity we owe the adoption of an appropriate
nomenclature, which at no period could have been found in our own
dominions:—Garrick, so long the darling and unrivalled favourite of
the public; who possessed resistlessly, where he chose to exert it, the
power of pleasing, winning, and exhilarating all around him:—Garrick,
who, in the words of Dr. Johnson, seemed “Formed to gladden life,” was
taken from his resplendent worldly fame, and admiring worldly friends,
by “that stroke of death,” says Dr. Johnson, “which eclipsed the gaiety
of nations, and impoverished the stock of harmless pleasure.”
He had already retired from the stage, and retired without waiting for
failing powers to urge, or precipitate his retreat; for still his
unequalled animal spirits, gaily baffling the assaults of age, had such
extraordinary exuberance as to supply and support both body and mind at
once; still clear, varying, and penetrating, was his voice; still full
of intelligence or satire, of disdain, of rage, or of delight, was the
fire, the radiance, the eloquence of his eye; still made up at will, of
energy or grace, of command or supplication, was his form, and were his
attitudes; his face alone—ah! “There was the rub!—” his face alone was
the martyr of time: or rather, his forehead and cheeks; for his eyes
and his countenance were still beaming with recent, though retiring
beauty.
But the wear and tear of his forehead and cheeks, which, as Dr. Johnson
had said, made sixty years in Garrick seem seventy, had rendered them
so wrinkled, from an unremitting play of expression, off as well as
on the stage, that, when he found neither paint nor candle-light,
nor dress nor decoration, could conceal those lines, or smooth those
furrows which were ploughing his complexion; he preferred to triumph,
even in foregoing his triumphs, by plunging, through voluntary impulse,
from the dazzling summit to which he had mounted, and heroically
pronouncing his Farewell!—amidst the universal cry, echoed and
re-echoing all around him, of “Stop, Garrick, stop!—yet a little
longer stop!”
A brief account of the last sight of this admired and much loved friend
is thus given in a manuscript memoir of Dr. Burney.
“I called at his door, with anxious inquiries, two days before
he expired, and was admitted to his chamber; but though I
saw him, he did not seem to see me,—or any earthly thing!
His countenance that had never remained a moment the same in
conversation, now appeared as fixed and as inanimate as a
block of marble; and he had already so far relinquished the
world, as I was afterwards told by Mr. Wallace, his executor,
that nothing that was said or done that used to interest him
the most keenly, had any effect upon his muscles; or could
extort either a word or a look from him for several days
previously to his becoming a corpse.”
Dr. Burney, in the same carriage with Whitehead, the poet laureate,
the erudite Mr. Beauclerk, and Mr. Wallace, the executor, attended the
last remains of this celebrated public character to their honourable
interment in Westminster Abbey.
Long, and almost universally felt was this loss: to Dr. Burney it was
a deprivation of lasting regret. In his doggrel chronology he has left
the following warm testimony of his admiration.
1779.
“This year joy and sorrow alike put on sable
For losses sustained by the stage and the table,
For Garrick, the master of passion, retired,
And Nature and Shakespeare together expired.
Thalia’s as well as Melpomene’s magic,
With him at once vanished both comic and tragic.
Long, long will it be, now by Death he is slain,
Before we shall see his true likeness again.
Such dignified beauties he threw in each part,
Such resources of humour, of passion, and art;—
Hilarity missed him, each Muse dropped a tear,
And Genius and Feeling attended his bier.”
* * * * *