Much ink has been expended on that portion of Fanny Burney’s career which forms the subject of this chapter. Exceptionally clever and gifted she was, without doubt; but with all her abilities, it must be admitted that, neither by her antecedents nor her experiences, was she suited for the post she was called upon to fill. The merely mechanical part of it she might perhaps have acquired,—though it seems she never did. Etiquette and formality she heartily detested; she was unmethodical; she was negligent in her dress; she was not always (in the presentation of petitions and the like) entirely judicious and tactful. Nevertheless, there is nothing to show that, save for the death of Mrs. Delany, the terrible tension of the King’s illness, the defection of Colonel Digby, and, above all, the unrelieved infliction of Mrs. Schwellenberg’s company and caprices,—the “one flaw” in her lot, she calls it,—she might not gradually have grown reconciled to her court life. If she were not (and it was no shame to her!) as good a Queen’s Dresser as Mrs. Haggerdorn, she was certainly—although, perhaps from her weak voice and short sight, she practically failed as a reader—an infinitely better “Confidential Companion.” The “Oyster” would have been utterly incompetent to report the Hastings trial, or to scribble a royal copy of verses to the Master of the Horse, or to delight the Queen by a circumstantial and picturesque account of the interview with the King in the gardens at Kew. And whatever Miss Burney’s dislike may have been to one or two of her colleagues, her own personal good qualities and intellectual capacity were always cordially recognised by all the Royal Family.[68] As to the enforced suspension of her literary labours, not only is that a grievance which she herself never felt or advanced; but when she came to Windsor in 1786, she had absolutely written nothing for four years. Nor were there any indications that she was likely to write anything. Her most stimulating friend and critic, “Daddy” Crisp, was dead; and she professed, or affected to profess (like a greater writer after _The Newcomes_),[69] that her vein had run dry with her latest book. Moreover, we now know what her first critics did not know, namely, that so far from receiving two thousand pounds for _Cecilia_, she had only—after more than a year’s hard work—received two hundred and fifty pounds. The deserts of genius are not easily assessed; but looking to all the circumstances, those who, in this particular instance, regarded two hundred a year for life, with accommodation and other advantages, as an offer worth considering by a diffident and delicate woman of four and thirty, whose entire gains by two popular novels, making eight volumes, had not exceeded two hundred and eighty pounds—can scarcely be said to have been wholly unwise in their generation. That there would be compensating drawbacks of tedium and restraint, they no doubt expected; but that the accidents of the employment would make the post untenable, was a result they could not possibly foresee.