In a few years after this, Miss Burney, through the favourable representations made concerning her by her venerable friend Mrs. Delany, was invited to accept a place 'in the household of queen Charlotte. A popular writer thus sketches the result, and the subsequent events of her chequered life:—
"The result was, that in 1786 our authoress was appointed second keeper of the robes to queen Charlotte, with a salary of £200 a-year, a footman, apartments in the palace, and a coach between her and her colleague. The situation was only a sort of splendid slavery. 'I was averse to the union,' said Miss Burney, 'and I endeavoured to escape it; but my friends interfered—they prevailed—and the knot is tied.' The queen appears to have been a kind and considerate mistress; but the stiff etiquette and formality of the court, and the unremitting attention which its irksome duties required, rendered the situation peculiarly disagreeable to one who had been so long flattered and courted by the brilliant society of her day. Her colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg, a coarse-minded, jealous, disagreeable German favorite, was also a perpetual source of annoyance to her; and poor Fanny at court was worse off than her heroine Cecilia was in choosing among her guardians. Her first official duty was to mix the queen's snuff, and keep her box always replenished, after which she was promoted to the great business of the toilet, helping her majesty off and on with her dresses, and being in strict attendance from six or seven in the morning till twelve at night! From this grinding and intolerable destiny Miss Burney was emancipated by her marriage, in 1793, with a French refugee officer, the Count D'Arblay. She then resumed her pen, and in 1795 produced a tragedy, entitled 'Edwin and Elgitha,' which was brought' out at Dmry Lane, and possessed at least one novelty—there were three bishops among the dramatis personæ. Mrs Siddons personated the heroine, but in the dying scene, where the lady is brought from behind a hedge to expire before the audience, and is afterwards carried once more to the back of the hedge, the house was convulsed with laughter! Her next effort was her novel of 'Camilla,' which she published by subscription, and realized by it no less than three thousand guineas. In 1802 Madame D'Arblay accompanied her husband to Paris. The count joined the army of Napoleon, and his wife was forced to remain in France till 1812, when she returned and purchased, from the proceeds of her novel, a small but handsome villa, named Camilla Cottage. Her success in prose fiction urged her to another trial, and in 1814 she produced 'The Wanderer,' a tedious tale in five volumes, which had no other merit than that of bringing the authoress the large sum of £1500. The only other literary labour of Madame D'Arblay was a memoir of her father. Dr. Burney, published in 1832. Her husband and her son, (the Rev. A. D'Arblay, of Camden Town chapel, near London,) both died before her—the former in 1818, and the latter in 1837. Three years after this last melancholy bereavement, Madame D'Arblay herself paid the debt of nature, dying at Bath, in January, 1840, at the great age of eighty-eight. Her 'Diary of Letters' edited by her niece, were published in 1842, in five volumes. If judiciously condensed, this work would have been both entertaining and valuable; but at least one half of it is filled up with small unimportant details of private gossip, and the self-admiring weakness of the
