The one marked exception to the rule of early development in the Burney family was noted in the case of the daughter who was destined to be its principal ornament. We are told that the most remarkable features of Frances Burney’s childhood were her extreme shyness and her backwardness at learning. At eight years of age, she did not even know her letters; and her elder brother, who had a sailor’s love of practical jokes, used to pretend to teach her to read, and give her the book upside down, which, he said, she never found out. An officious acquaintance of her mother suggested that the application of the little dunce might be quickened by the rod, but the wiser parent replied that ‘she had no fear about Fanny.’ Mrs. Burney, it is clear, favoured no forcing methods in education. She was laid aside by illness shortly after the family’s return to London, and, so long as her health lasted, seems to have given regular teaching to the eldest of her daughters only, whose taste for reading she very early began to form. “I perfectly recollect,” wrote Fanny to Esther many years later, “child as I was, and never of the party, this part of your education. At that very juvenile period, the difference even of months makes a marked distinction in bestowing and receiving instruction. I, also, was so peculiarly backward that even our Susan stood before me; she could read when I knew not my letters. But, though so sluggish to learn, I was always observant. Do you remember Mr. Seaton denominating me at fifteen, the _silent, observant Miss Fanny_? Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope’s works and Pitt’s ‘Æneid.’ I recollect, also, your spouting passages from Pope, that I learned from hearing you recite them, before—many years before—I read them myself.” Mrs. Burney died at the end of September, 1761. Towards the close of her illness, Fanny and Susan, with their brother Charles, had been sent to board with a Mrs. Sheeles, who kept a school in Queen Square, that they might be out of the way; and this experienced judge of children was greatly struck by the intensity of Fanny’s grief at a loss which girls of nine are apt to realize very imperfectly.