No production had as yet transpired publicly from the pen of Dr. Burney, his new connexion
[Pg 215]
having induced him to consign every interval of leisure to domestic and social circles, whether in London, or at the dowry-house of Mrs. Burney, in Lynn Regis, to which the joint families resorted in the summer.
But when, from peculiar circumstances, Mrs. Burney, and a part of the younger set, remained for a season in Norfolk, the spirit of literary composition resumed its sway; though not in the dignified form in which, afterwards, it fixed its standard.
The long-predicted comet of the immortal Halley, was to make its luminously-calculated appearance this year, 1769; and the Doctor was ardently concurrent with the watchers and awaiters of this prediction.
In the course of this new pursuit, and the researches to which it led, Dr. Burney, no doubt, dwelt even unusually upon the image and the recollection of his Esther; who, with an avidity for knowledge consonant to his own, had found time—made it, rather—in the midst of her conjugal, her maternal, and her domestic devoirs, to translate from the French, the celebrated Letter of Astronomical renown of Maupertuis; not with any prospect of fame; her husband himself was not yet entered upon its annals, nor emerged, save anonymously,
[Pg 216]
from his timid obscurity: it was simply from a love of improvement, and a delight in its acquirement. To view with him the stars, and exchange with him her rising associations of ideas, bounded all the ambition of her exertions.
The recurrence to this manuscript translation, at a moment when astronomy was the nearly universal subject of discourse, was not likely to turn the Doctor aside from this aerial direction of his thoughts; and the little relic, of which even the hand-writing could not but be affecting as well as dear to him, was now read and re-read, till he considered it as too valuable to be lost; and determined, after revising and copying it, to send it to the press.
Whether any tender notion of first, though unsuspectedly, appearing before the public by the side of his Esther, stimulated the production of the Essay that ensued from the revision of this letter; or whether the stimulus of the subject itself led to the publication of the letter, is uncertain; but that they hung upon each other is not without interest, as they unlocked, in concert, the gates through which Doctor Burney first passed to that literary career which, ere long, greeted his more courageous entrance into a publicity that conducted him to celebrity;
[Pg 217]
for it was now that his first prose composition, an Abridged History of Comets, was written; and was printed in a pamphlet that included his Esther’s translation o............