But though this gently cheering, and highly honourable connexion,
by its kindly operation, offered the first mental solace to that
portentous journey to Bath, which with a blight had opened the spring
of 1783; that blight was still unhealed in the excoriation of its
infliction, when a new incision of anguish, more deeply cutting still,
and more permanently incurable, pierced the heart of Dr. Burney by
tidings from Chesington, that Mr. Crisp was taken dangerously ill.
The ravages of the gout, which had long laid waste the health,
strength, spirits, and life-enjoying nerves of this admirable man, now
extended their baleful devastations to the seats of existence, the head
and the breast; wavering occasionally in their work, with something of
less relentless rigour, but never abating in menace of fatality.
Susanna,—now Mrs. Phillips,—was at Chesington at the time of the
seizure; and to her gentle bosom, and most reluctant pen, fell the
sorrowing task of announcing this quick-approaching calamity to Dr.
Burney, and all his house: and in the same unison that had been their
love, was now their grief. Sorrow, save at the dissolution of conjugal
or filial ties, could go no deeper. The Doctor would have abandoned
every call of business or interest,—for pleasure at such a period,
had no call to make! in order to embrace and to attend upon his long
dearest friend, if his Susanna had not dissuaded him from so mournful
an exertion, by representations of the uncertainty of finding even a
moment in which it might be safe to risk any agitation to the sufferer;
whose pains were so torturing, that he fervently and perpetually prayed
to heaven for the relief of death:—while the prayers for the dying
were read to him daily by his pious sister, Mrs. Gast.
And only by the most urgent similar remonstrances, could the elder[62]
or the younger[63] of the Doctor’s daughters be kept away; so
completely as a fond father was Mr. Crisp loved by all.
But this Memorialist, to whom, for many preceding years, Mr. Crisp had
rendered Chesington a second, a tender, an always open, always inviting
home, was so wretched while withheld from seeking once more his sight
and his benediction, that Dr. Burney could not long oppose her wishes.
In some measure, indeed, he sent her as his own representative, by
entrusting to her a letter full of tender attachment and poignant
grief from himself; which he told her not to deliver, lest it should
be oppressive or too affecting; but to keep in hand, for reading more
or less of it to him herself, according to the strength, spirits, and
wishes of his dying friend.
With this fondly-sad commission, she hastened to Chesington; where
she found her Susanna, and all the house, immersed in affliction: and
where, in about a week, she endured the heartfelt sorrow of witnessing
the departure of the first, the most invaluable, the dearest Friend
of her mourning Father; and the inestimable object of her own chosen
confidence, her deepest respect, and, from her earliest youth, almost
filial affection.
She had the support, however, of the soul-soothing sympathy of
her Susanna; and the tender consolation of having read to him, by
intervals, nearly the whole of Dr. Barney’s touching Farewell! and of
having seen that her presence had been grateful to him, even in the
midst of his sufferings; and of inhaling the balmy kindness with which
his nearly final powers of utterance had called her “the dearest thing
to him on earth!”
This wound, in its acuteness to Dr. Burney, was only less lacerating
than that which had bled from the stroke that had torn away from
him the early and adored partner of his heart. But the submissive
resignation and patient philosophy with which he bore it, will best
be exemplified by the following extract from a letter, written, on
this occasion, to his second daughter; whose quick feelings had—as
yet!—only once been strongly called forth; and that nearly in
childhood, on her maternal deprivation; who knew not, therefore,
enough of their force to be guarded against their invasion: and who,
in the depth of her grief, had shut herself up in mournful seclusion;
for,—blind to sickly foresight!—neither the age nor the infirmities
of Mr. Crisp had worked upon her as preparatory to his exit.
His age, indeed, as it was unaccompanied by the smallest diminution of
his faculties, though he had reached his seventy-sixth year, offered no
mitigation to grief for his death; though a general one, undoubtedly,
to its shock. What we lament, is what we lose; what we lose, whether
young or old, is what we miss: it may justly, therefore, perhaps, be
affirmed, that youth and beauty, however more elegiacally they may be
sung, are only by the Lover and the Poet mourned over with stronger
regret than age and goodness.
The animadversions upon the excess of sorrow to which this extract
may give rise, must not induce the Memorialist of Dr. Burney to spare
herself from their infliction, by withholding what she considers it her
bounden duty to produce, a document that strikingly displays his tender
parental kindness, his patient wisdom, and his governed sensibility.
“TO MISS BURNEY.
“ * * I am much more afflicted than surprised at the violence
and duration of your sorrow for the terrible scenes and
events you have witnessed at Chesington; and not only pity
you, but participate in all your feelings. Not an hour in the
day has passed—as you will some time or other find—since the
fatal catastrophe, in which I have not felt a pang for the
irreparable loss I have sustained. However, as something is
due to the _living_—there is, perhaps, a boundary at which it
is right to _endeavour_ to stop in lamenting the _dead_. It
is very difficult,—as I have found!—to exceed that boundary
in our duty or attention, without its being at the expense of
others. I have experienced the loss of one so dear to me as to
throw me into the utmost affliction of despondency which can
be suffered without insanity. But I had claims on my life, my
reason, and my activity, which, joined to higher motives, drew
me from the pit of despair, and forced me, though with great
difficulty, to rouse and exert every nerve and faculty in
answering them.
“It has been very well said of mental wounds, that they must
digest, like those of the body, before they can be healed. The
poultice of necessity can alone, perhaps, in some cases, bring
on this digestion; but we should not impede it by caustics or
corrosions. Let the wound be open a due time—but not kept bare
with violence.—
“To quit all metaphor, we must, alas! try to diminish our
sorrow for one calamity to enable us to support another! A
general peace gives but time to refit for new war; a mental
blow, or wound, is no more. So far, however, am I from blaming
your sorrow on the present occasion, that, in fact, I both
love and honour you for it;—and, therefore, will add no more
on that melancholy subject. With respect to the other,—&c. &c.
“* * *.”
It would be needless, it is hoped, to say that this mild and admirable
exhortation effected fully its benevolent purpose. With grateful
tears, and immediate compliance to his will, she hastened to his arms,
received his tenderest welcome, and, quitting her chamber seclusion,
again joined the family—if not with immediate cheerfulness, at least
with composure: and again, upon his motion, and under his loved wing,
returned to the world; if not with inward gaiety, with outward, yet
true and unaffected gratitude for the kindness with which it received
her back again to its circles:—but Mr. Crisp was not less gone, nor
less internally lamented!
What the Doctor intimates of the proofs she would one day find of the
continual occupation of his thoughts by his departed friend, alludes to
an elegy to which he was then devoting every instant he could snatch
from his innumerable engagements; and which, as a memorial of his
friendship, was soothing to his affliction. It opens with the following
lines.
“ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND.
“The guide and tutor of my early youth,
Whose word was wisdom, and whose wisdom, truth,
Whose cordial kindness, and whose active zeal
Full forty years I never ceas’d to feel;
The Friend to whose abode I eager stole
To pour each inward secret of my soul;
The dear companion of my leisure hours,
Whose cheerful looks, and intellectual powers,
Drove care, anxiety, and doubt away,
And all the fiends that on reflection prey,
Is now no more!—The features of that face
Where glow’d intelligence and manly grace;
Those eyes which flash’d with intellectual fire
Kindled by all that genius could inspire—
Those, those—and all his pleasing powers are fled
To the cold, squalid mansions of the dead!
This highly polished gem, which shone so bright,
Impervious now, eclips’d in viewless night
From earthly eye, irradiates no more
This nether sphere!”—
What follows, though in the same strain of genuine grief and exalted
friendship, is but an amplification of these lines; and too diffuse
for any eyes but those to which the object of the panegyric had been
familiar; and which, from habitually seeing and studying that honoured
object, coveted, like Dr. Burney himself, to dwell, to linger upon its
excellencies with fond reminiscence.
Mrs. Gast, the sister of Mr. Crisp, and Mrs. Catherine Cooke, his
residuary legatee, put up a monument to his memory in the little church
of Chesington, for which Dr. Burney wrote the following epitaph.