blushing girl that he had never seen any one so
beautiful or heard a voice so divinely sweet.

Charles Dibdin tried to enshrine her in fitting verse, but abandoned the
effort in despair, vowing that she was indeed of that company described
by Milton:

"Who, as they sang, would take the prisoned soul
And lap it in Elysium."

The Bishop of Meath, in his unepiscopal enthusiasm, declared that she
was "the link between an angel and a woman"; while Dr Charles Burney,
supreme musician and father of the more famous Madame d'Arblay, wrote
more soberly of her:

"The tone of her voice and expression were as enchanting
as her countenance and conversation. With a
mellifluous-toned voice, a perfect shake and intonation,
she was possessed of the double power of delighting an
audience equally in pathetic strains and songs of
brilliant execution, which is allowed to very few
singers."

To her Horace Walpole also paid this curious tribute:

"Miss Linley's beauty is in the superlative degree. The
king admires and ogles her as much as he dares to do in
so holy a place as oratorio."

Such are a few of the tributes, of which contemporary records are full,
paid to the fair "Nightingale of Bath," whom Gainsborough and Reynolds
immortalised in two of their inspired canvases--the latter as
Cecilia--her face almost superhuman in its beauty and the divine rapture
of its expression--seated at a harpsichord and pouring out her soul in
song.

It was inevitable that a girl of such charms and gifts--"superior to all
the handsome things I have heard of her," John Wilkes wrote, "and withal
the most modest, pleasing and delicate flower I have seen"--should have
lovers by the score. Every gallant who came to Bath, sought to woo, if
not to win, her. But Elizabeth Linley was no coquette; nor was she a
foolish girl whose head could be turned by a handsome face or pretty
compliments, or whose eyes could be dazzled by the glitter of wealth and
rank. She was wedded to her music, and no lover, she vowed, should wean
her from her allegiance. It was thus a shock to the world of
pleasure-seekers at Bath to learn that the beauty, who had turned a cold
shoulder to so many high-placed gallants, had promised her hand to an
elderly, unattractive wooer called Long, a man almost old enough to be
her grandfather.

That her heart had not gone with her hand we may be sure. We know that
it was only under t