Fanny Burney and Her Friends: Select Passages from Her Diary and Other Writings. Burney Fanny
Scared and confounded, he hastily rolled up the last two curls, and prepared to make his retreat; but before he could escape, Garrick, lifting his own miserable scratch from his head, and holding it out on his finger and thumb, squeaked out in a whining voice, ‘Pray now, sir, do you think, sir, you could touch me up this here old bob a little bit, sir?’
The hairdresser dismissed, the actor, who could not help acting, proceeded to give further proofs of his versatility. ‘And so, Doctor,’ he began, ‘you, with your tag-rag and bobtail there——’ Here he pointed to some shelves of shabby books and tracts, which he started up to examine; the next moment, becoming an auctioneer, he offered for sale these valuable works, each worth a hundred pounds, and proclaimed that they were ‘going, going, going, at a penny apiece.’ Then, quietly reseating himself: ‘And so, Doctor,’ he continued, ‘you, and tag-rag and bobtail there, shut yourselves up in this snug little bookstall, with all your bright elves around you, to rest your understanding!’ There were loud cries of mock indignation from the young people at the idea of papa resting his understanding. Garrick apologized in his best stage manner, and after some further talk, inquired, ‘But when, Doctor, shall we have out the History of Histories? Do let me know in time, that I may prepare to blow the trumpet of fame.’ Of course, this was a prelude to his appearing in the character of a cheap-jack, advertising ‘the only true History.’ Invited to the parlour to breakfast, he excused himself on the plea of being engaged at home to Twiss[16] and Boswell, whom immediately he took off to the life. Encouraged by the laughter of his audience, this most reprehensible person, who set no bounds to his levity, proceeded to offer an imitation of Dr. Johnson himself. He sincerely honoured and loved Dr. Johnson, he said, but that great man had eccentricities which his most attached admirers were irresistibly impelled to mimic. Arranging, therefore, his dress so as to enlarge his person, in some strange way, several inches beyond its natural size, assuming the voice and authoritative port of the lexicographer, and giving a thundering stamp on the carpet, the devout worshipper of Dr. Johnson delivered, with sundry extraordinary attitudes and gestures, a short dialogue that had passed between them during the preceding week:
“David! Will you lend me your ‘Petrarca’?”
“Y—e—s, sir!”
“David, you sigh?”
“Sir, you shall have it, certainly.”
“Accordingly,” Garrick continued, “the book—stupendously bound—I sent to him that very evening. But scarcely had he taken the noble quarto in his hands, when, as Boswell tells me, he poured forth a Greek ejaculation, and a couplet or two from Horace; and then, in one of those fits of enthusiasm which always seem to require that he should spread his arms aloft in the air, his haste was so great to debarrass them for that purpose, that he suddenly pounces my poor ‘Petrarca’ over his head upon the floor—Russia leather, gold border, and all! And then, standing for several minutes erect, lost in abstraction, he forgot, probably, that he had ever seen it, and left my poor dislocated Beauty to the mercy of the housemaid’s morning mop!”
This concluded the performance, and the performer presently took his leave. After he had said good-bye, and left the room, he hastily came back, whimsically laughing, and said: ‘Here’s one of your maids downstairs that I love prodigiously to talk to, because she is so cross! She was washing, and rubbing, and scrubbing, and whitening and brightening your steps this morning, and would hardly let me pass. Egad, sir, she did not know the great Roscius! But I frightened her a little just now: “Child,” says I, “you don’t guess whom you have the happiness to see! Do you know that I am one of the first geniuses of the age? You would faint away upon the spot if you could only imagine who I am!” ’
One familiar face was no longer seen at Burney’s house. Mr. Crisp had become subject to such frequent fits of gout that his visits to London were almost given up, and he rarely slept even a single night away from Chesington. But his interest in musical and literary news, and in all that concerned the Burney family, continued unabated. What he could no more take part in himself was duly communicated to him by letter.
How early the correspondence between Frances and the family friend began we are not informed. But it must have commenced long before she was old enough to be admitted to parties such as she had now to describe to her ‘daddy.’ In a passage written at seventy-two, she has set down “a charge delivered to me by our dear vehement Mr. Crisp at the opening of my juvenile correspondence with him: ‘Harkee, you little monkey! dash away whatever comes uppermost; if you stop to consider either what you say, or what may be said of you, I would not give one fig for your letters.’ ” So rough a speech could not have been addressed, even by a professed cynic, to any young lady very far advanced in her teens. In the letters from which we are about to quote, Miss Fanny prattles to the old man with perfect ease and confidence, showing that she felt herself on terms of established familiarity, and was quite free from the shyness and embarrassment that would attend a timid girl’s first efforts to entertain him.
For many years Dr. Burney had given informal evening concerts at his house. These entertainments, to which he had been prompted by Crisp, began in Poland Street, were continued in Queen Square, and attained their highest distinction in St. Martin’s Street. There was no band, no hired singer, no programme, no admission by ticket. A word from the courteous host was the only invitation needed or expected. But the company, as well as the music, was attractive even to guests accustomed to fashionable society. Before his writings made him famous, Burney’s extensive acquaintance brought him visitors whom the curious were anxious to meet. Some came to see Sir Constantine Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, on his return from his Arctic voyage. Others came for a view of Omai, whom Captain Cook had imported from the South Seas. On one occasion the gentle savage obliged the musical audience with a Tahitian love-song, which proved to be a mere confused rumbling of uncouth sounds. Whatever the incident of the evening, Crisp looked for a full report of it from ‘his Fannikin.’
The sense of humour which we may still see brimming over in her portrait was greatly provoked by Bruce, the particular lion of that day. The explorer was reported to have brought home with him drawings of a Theban harp at least three thousand years old, and of an Abyssinian lyre in present use, about which Fanny was evidently more sceptical than her father, who was always ready to welcome materials for his ‘History.’ ‘The Abyssinians have lyres, have they?’ said George Selwyn; ‘well, they have one less since he left their country.’ Bruce was a personage of stupendous height and breadth, whose pompous manners were proportioned to his size and fame. ‘He is the tallest man you ever saw in your life—at least gratis,’ wrote the observer. Nevertheless ‘the man-mountain’ condescended to the Burneys. In the season of his greatest glory, he figured several times at the Doctor’s concerts, of which visits faithful accounts were duly despatched to Chesington. On one of these evenings Mr. Bruce even consented to stay supper, “which, you know,” says Fanny, “with us is nothing but a permission to sit over a table for chat, and roast potatoes or apples. But now,” she continues, “to perfect your acquaintance with this towering Ethiopian, where do you think he will take you during supper? To the source, or sources, you cry, of the Nile? to Thebes? to its temple? to an arietta on the Theban harp? or perhaps to banqueting on hot raw beef in Abyssinia? No such thing, my dear Mr. Crisp—no such thing. Travellers who mean to write their travels are fit for nothing but to represent the gap at your whist-table at Chesington, when you have only three players; for they are dummies. Mr. Bruce left all his exploits, his wanderings, his vanishings, his reappearances, his harps so celestial, and his bullocks so terrestrial, to plant all our entertainment within a hundred yards of our own coterie; namely, at the masquerades at the Haymarket.” Then follows a story of a practical jest not worth copying. “To have looked at Mr. Bruce in his glee at this buffoonery, you must really have been amused; though methinks I see, supposing you had been with us, the picturesque rising of your brow, and all the dignity of your Roman nose, while you would have stared at such familiar delight in an active joke as to transport into so merry an espiègle the seven-footed loftiness of the haughty and impetuous tourist from the sands of Ethiopia, and the waters of Abyssinia; whom, nevertheless, I have now the honour to portray in his robe de chambre, that is, in private society, to my dear Chesington daddy.”
But far greater