I am rude in the arts of palaces, and can ill bear comparison
with those whose calling, from their youth up, has been to flatter and
to sue. Have I, then, two lives, that, after I have wasted one in the
service of others, there may yet remain to me a second, which I may live
unto myself?"

Now and then, indeed, events occurred which disturbed the wretched
monotony of Frances Burney's life. The Court moved from Kew to Windsor,
and from Windsor back to Kew. One dull colonel went out of waiting, and
another dull colonel came into waiting. An impertinent servant made a
blunder about tea, and caused a misunderstanding between the gentlemen
and the ladies. A half-witted French Protestant minister talked oddly
about conjugal fidelity. An unlucky member of the household mentioned a
passage in the Morning Herald reflecting on the Queen; and forthwith
Madame Schwellenberg began to storm in bad English, and told him that he
made her "what you call perspire!"

A more important occurrence was the King's visit to Oxford. Miss Burney
went in the royal train to Nuneham, was utterly neglected there in the
crowd, and could with difficulty find a servant to show the way to her
bedroom, or a hairdresser to arrange her curls. She had the honor of
entering Oxford in the last of a long string of carriages which formed
the royal procession, of walking after the Queen all day through
refectories and chapels, and of standing, half dead with fatigue and
hunger, while her august mistress was seated at an excellent cold
collation. At Magdalene College, Frances was left for a moment in a
parlor, where she sank down on a chair. A good-natured equerry saw that
she was exhausted, and shared with her some apricots and bread, which he
had wisely put into his pockets. At that moment the door opened; the
Queen entered; the wearied attendants sprang up; the bread and fruit
were hastily concealed. "I found," says poor Miss Burney, "that our
appetites were to be supposed annihilated, at the same moment that our
strength was to be invincible."

Yet Oxford, seen even under such disadvantages, "revived in her," to use
her own words, "a consciousness to pleasure which had long lain nearly
dormant." She forgot, during one moment, that she was a waiting maid,
and felt as a woman of true genius might be expected to feel amidst
venerable remains of antiquity, beautiful works of art, vast
repositories of knowledge, and memorials of the illustrious dead. Had
she st