It seems, therefore, a devoir due to the singleness of truth, to cut short any future vague assertion on this small subject, by an explicit narration of a simple, though rather singular tale; which, little as in itself it can be worthy of public attention, may not wholly, perhaps, be unamusing, from the celebrated characters that must necessarily be involved in its relation; at the head of which, at this present moment, she is tempted to disclose, in self-defence—a proud self-defence!—of this personal obtrusion, the LIVING[21] names of Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Rogers, who, in a visit with which they favoured her in the year 1826, repeated some of the fabrications to which this mystery of her early life still gave rise; and condescended to solicit a recital of the real history of Evelina’s _Entrance into the World_.
This she instantly communicated; though so incoherently, from the embarrassment of the subject, and its long absence from her thoughts, that, having since collected documents to refresh her memory, she ventures, in gratefully dedicating the little incident to these Illustrious Inquisitors, to insert its details in these memoirs—to which, parentally, it in fact belongs.[22]
FRANCES, the second daughter of Dr. Burney, was during her childhood the most backward of all his family in the faculty of receiving instruction. At eight years of age she was ignorant of the letters of the alphabet; though at ten, she began scribbling, almost incessantly, little works of invention; but always in private; and in scrawling characters, illegible, save to herself.
One of her most remote remembrances, previously to this writing mania, is that of hearing a neighbouring lady recommend to Mrs. Burney, her mother, to quicken the indolence, or stupidity, whichever it might be, of the little dunce, by the chastening ordinances of Solomon. The alarm, however, of that little dunce, at a suggestion so wide from the maternal measures that had been practised in her childhood, was instantly superseded by a joy of gratitude and surprise that still rests upon her recollection, when she heard gently murmured in reply, “No, no,—I am not uneasy about her!”
But, alas! the soft music of those encouraging accents had already ceased to vibrate on human ears, before these scrambling pot-hooks had begun their operation of converting into Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces,—nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems, every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice; for she grew up, probably through the vanity-annihilating circumstances of this conscious intellectual disgrace, with so affrighted a persuasion that what she scribbled, if seen, would but expose her to ridicule, that her pen, though her greatest, was only her clandestine delight.