the day before
his death she long remained in tears on the stairs leading to his
bedroom, in the hope that she might be called in to receive his
blessing. But he was then sinking fast, and, though he sent her an
affectionate message, was unable to see her. But this was not the worst.
There are separations far more cruel than those which are made by death.
Frances might weep with proud affection for Crisp and Johnson. She had
to blush as well as to weep for Mrs. Thrale.

Life, however, still smiled upon her. Domestic happiness, friendship,
independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers; and she
flung them all away.

* * * * *

Then the prison was opened, and Frances was free once more. Johnson, as
Burke observed, might have added a striking page to his poem on the
Vanity of Human Wishes, if he had lived to see his little Burney as she
went into the palace and as she came out of it.

The pleasures, so long untasted, of liberty, of friendship, of domestic
affection, were almost too acute for her shattered frame. But happy days
and tranquil nights soon restored the health which the Queen's toilette
and Madame Schwellenberg's card-table had impaired. Kind and anxious
faces surrounded the invalid. Conversation the most polished and
brilliant revived her spirits. Travelling was recommended to her; and
she rambled by easy journeys from cathedral to cathedral, and from
watering-place to watering-place. She crossed the New Forest, and
visited Stonehenge and Wilton, the cliffs of Lyme, and the beautiful
valley of Sidmouth. Thence she journeyed by Powderham Castle, and by the
ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, to Bath, and from Bath, when the winter was
approaching, returned well and cheerful to London. There she visited her
old dungeon, and found her successor already far on the way to the
grave, and kept to strict duty, from morning till midnight, with a
sprained ankle and a nervous fever.

At this time England swarmed with French exiles driven from their
country by the Revolution. A colony of these refugees settled at Juniper
Hall in Surrey, not far from Norbury Park, where Mr. Lock, an intimate
friend of the Burney family, resided. Frances visited Norbury, and was
introduced to the strangers. She had strong prejudices against them; for
her Toryism was far beyond, we do not say that of Mr. Pitt, but that of
Mr. Reeves; and the inmates of Juniper Hall were all attached to the
constitutio