She was at the palace, indeed, when one of the earlier attacks of that mental ailment which at last slew George III.--fell upon him. She sees the poor Queen growing wild with dread--disturbed and trembling under those flashes of disorderly talk which smite upon her ear. She watches the King as he goes out to his drive on a certain fatal day;--hears the hushed, muffled steps and the babel of uncertain sounds, as he comes back late at night,--waits hour on hour for her usual summons to the Queen's presence, which does not come. At last, midnight being long past (and she meantime having hint of some great calamity) goes to the Queen's chamber; two other lady attendants were with her, she says; and the Queen, ghostly pale and shuddering--puts her hand kindly upon that of the poor little trembling Miss Burney and says "I am like ice--so cold--so cold!" "I tried to speak," says Miss Burney in her Diary, "but burst into tears: then the Queen did." And there was cause: for from beyond the chamber--along the corridor,--came the idle {170} jabbering of King George; and the intellectual power (such as there was of it) "thro' words and things went sounding on its dim and perilous way." I tell this not to test the reader's capability for sympathy, but to fasten poor little Miss Burney, the author of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, in mind; and to connect her service in the palace of St. James, in the year 1788, with the first threat and the first real attack of the King's insanity. I am afraid we must set down, as one helping cause to the King's affliction, the American obstinacy in maintaining their Independence. Miss Burney shortly after, with a pension of £100, retired from the royal duties, which had tried her sadly; and some years later encountering and greatly admiring General d'Arblay, who had come over an exile from France, in company with other distinguished emigrants, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, she married him (1793), and gave him a home that grew up out of the moneys received from her _Camilla_--hence called by old Dr. Burney, "Camilla Cottage." She survived her husband and a son (a clergyman {171} of the Established Church), and lived to so great an age as to find all her conquests in fiction over-run at last by the brilliant successes of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, and the more splendid triumphs of Walter Scott. She died almost in our day (1840) and was buried in Bath; but her best monument you can see without going there; it is her book of _Evelina_ and her Diary. _Hannah More._ [Sidenote: Mistress More.] Over-fine literary people will, I suppose, hardly recognize Hannah More--or Mistress Hannah More,[9] as I prefer to call her, in virtue of a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which gave this title of dignity to matronly women--married or unmarried, of mature age, and of worthy lives.