The ensuing initiation into this mingled existence of inertness and effort, of luxury and of desolation,
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was made at Bath. But Bath, from its buildings and its position, had a charm around it for the subject of these memoirs, to soften off the monotony of this wayward taste, and these wilful sufferings; though the seat of dissipation alone he found to be changed; its basis—cards, dice, or betting—being always the same.
Nevertheless, that beautiful city, then little more than a splendid village in comparison with its actual metropolitan size and grandeur, had intrinsic claims to the most vivid admiration, and the strongest incitements to youthful curiosity, from the antiquity of its origin, real as well as fabulous; from its Bladud, its baths, its cathedral; and its countless surrounding glories of military remains; all magically followed up, to vary impression, and stimulate approbation, by its rising excellence in Grecian and Roman architecture.
Born with an enthusiastic passion for rural scenery, the picturesque view of this city offered to the ravished eye of young Burney some new loveliness, or striking effect, with an endless enchantment of variety, at almost every fresh opening of every fresh street into which he sauntered.
And here, not only did he find this perpetual,
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yet changeful, prospect of Nature in her most smiling attire, and of Art in her most chaste and elegant constructions; Bath had yet further attraction to its new visitor; another captivation stronger still to a character soaring to intellectual heights, caught him in its chains,—it was that of literary eminence; Bath, at this moment, being illumined by that sparkling but dangerous Meteor of philosophy, politics, history, and metaphysics, St. John, Lord Bolingbroke.
Happily, perhaps, for his safety, it was in vain that young Burney struggled, by every effort of ingenuity he could exert, to bask in the radiance of this Meteor’s wit and eloquence. Every attempt at that purpose failed; and merely a glimpse of this extraordinary personage, was all that the utmost vigilance of romantic research ever caught.
Young Burney could not, at that period, have studied the works of Lord Bolingbroke, who was then chiefly known by his political honours and disgraces; his exile and his pardon; and by that most perfect panegyric that ever, perhaps, poet penned, of Pope:
“Come then, my friend! my Genius!——
Oh, master of the poet and the song!”
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Fortunately, therefore, the ingenuous youth and inexperience of the subj............