essional engagements
occupied him all day. At seven in the morning he began to attend his
pupils, and, when London was full, was sometimes employed in teaching
till eleven at night. He was often forced to carry in his pocket a tin
box of sandwiches, and a bottle of wine and water, on which he dined in
a hackney coach, while hurrying from one scholar to another. Two of his
daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but he imagined that Frances
would run some risk of being perverted from the Protestant faith if she
were educated in a Catholic country, and he therefore kept her at home.
No governess, no teacher of any art or of any language, was provided for
her. But one of her sisters showed her how to write; and, before she was
fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading.

It was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed. Indeed,
when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very
small. When at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the
most celebrated works of Voltaire and Moliere; and, what seems still
more extraordinary, had never heard or seen a line of Churchill, who,
when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets. It is
particularly deserving of observation that she appears to have been by
no means a novel-reader. Her father's library was large; and he had
admitted into it so many books which rigid moralists generally exclude
that he felt uneasy, as he afterwards owned, when Johnson began to
examine the shelves. But in the whole collection there was only a single
novel, Fielding's Amelia.

An education, however, which to most girls would have been useless, but
which suited Fanny's mind better than elaborate culture, was in constant
progress during her passage from childhood to womanhood. The great book
of human nature was turned over before her. Her father's social position
was very peculiar. He belonged in fortune and station to the middle
class. His daughters seemed to have been suffered to mix freely with
those whom butlers and waiting maids call vulgar. We are told that they
were in the habit of playing with the children of a wigmaker who lived
in the adjoining house. Yet few nobles could assemble in the most
stately mansions of Grosvenor Square or St. James's Square a society so
various and so brilliant as was sometimes to be found in Dr. Burney's
cabin. His mind, though not very powerful or capacious, was restlessly
active, and, in the intervals of his p