the least
miserable way of passing an evening with Madame Schwellenberg was at the
card-table, and consented, with patient sadness, to give hours, which
might have called forth the laughter and the tears of many generations,
to the king of clubs and the knave of spades. Between eleven and twelve
the bell rang again. Miss Burney had to pass twenty minutes or half an
hour in undressing the Queen, and was then at liberty to retire and to
dream that she was chatting with her brother by the quiet hearth in St.
Martin's Street, that she was the centre of an admiring assemblage at
Mrs. Crewe's, that Burke was calling her the first woman of the age, or
that Dilly was giving her a cheque for two thousand guineas.

Men, we must suppose, are less patient than women; for we are utterly at
a loss to conceive how any human being could endure such a life, while
there remained a vacant garret in Grub Street, a crossing in want of a
sweeper, a parish workhouse, or a parish vault. And it was for such a
life that Frances Burney had given up liberty and peace, a happy
fireside, attached friends, a wide and splendid circle of acquaintance,
intellectual pursuits in which she was qualified to excel, and the sure
hope of what to her would have been affluence.

There is nothing new under the sun. The last great master of Attic
eloquence and Attic wit has left us a forcible and touching description
of the misery of a man of letters, who, lured by hopes similar to those
of Frances, had entered the service of one of the magnates of Rome.
"Unhappy that I am," cries the victim of his own childish ambition;
"would nothing content me but that I must leave mine old pursuits and
mine old companions, and the life which was without care, and the sleep
which had no limit save mine own pleasure, and the walks which I was
free to take where I listed, and fling myself into the lowest pit of a
dungeon like this? And, O God! for what? Was there no way by which I
might have enjoyed in freedom comforts even greater than those which I
now earn by servitude? Like a lion which has been made so tame that men
may lead him about by a thread, I am dragged up and down, with broken
and humbled spirit, at the heels of those to whom, in mine own domain, I
should have been an object of awe and wonder. And, worst of all, I feel
that here I gain no credit, that here I give no pleasure. The talents
and accomplishments which charmed a far different circle are here out of
place.