Dr. Burney was daily more enchanted at the kindness with which his daughter was honoured by Dr. Johnson; but neither parental exaltation, nor the smiles of fortune; nor the enticing fragrance of those flowery paths which so often allure from vigorous labour to wasting repose, the votary of rising fame; could even for a day, or scarcely for an hour, draw the ardent and indefatigable musical historian to any voluntary relaxation from his self-appointed task; to which he constantly devoted every moment that he could snatch from the multitudinous calls upon his over-charged time.
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.