One cannot help wondering if the question whether some more worthy position at Court might not be found for Miss Burney occurred to the Queen, or to herself, at this interview. If such a thought did present itself, it does not seem to have been mentioned by either. Fanny had early conceived the notion that the Queen intended to employ her as an English reader. She was not altogether wrong. She had been occasionally called on to read, but the result did not prove very satisfactory. At the first trial her voice was quite unmanageable; when she had concluded, the Queen talked of the _Spectator_ she had read, but forebore saying anything of any sort about the reader. Of a subsequent attempt we have this record: ‘Again I read a little to the Queen—two _Tatlers_; both happened to be very stupid; neither of them Addison’s, and therefore reader and reading were much on a par: for I cannot arrive at ease in this exhibition to her Majesty; and where there is fear or constraint, how deficient, if not faulty, is every performance!’ For the office of preceptress to the Princesses she was even less fitted than for that of reader to their mother. Probably Mrs. Goldsworthy and Miss Planta were much better qualified to instruct their young charges than Miss Burney would have been. This may be confessed without the slightest reflection on her extraordinary talents. She could afford to have it known that her education had been neglected. It was nothing that she had withdrawn rather ungraciously from Johnson’s Latin lessons. It was little that she did not understand a word of the German which the Royal Family commonly spoke among themselves. Hardly any Englishwomen in those days read Latin, or were acquainted with the language of Goethe and Wieland. But Miss Burney had not even a strong taste for reading. At the height of her fame, her knowledge of ordinary English authors was surprisingly limited. Queen Charlotte, who read a good deal in French and English, as well as in German, was disappointed by the scanty furniture of her attendant’s book-shelves. And whenever her Majesty or anyone else at Court mentioned any standard or current work in her presence, it almost invariably happened that she had not read it. One evening, Cowper’s ‘Task’ was referred to, and she was asked if she knew the poem; ‘Only by character,’ was her answer. She had not even that amount of acquaintance with Churchill’s Satires, the very existence of which seems to have been unknown to her. Akenside’s works she knew of only by some quotations which she had heard from Mr. Locke. It may, perhaps, be urged that Cowper was then quite a new writer, and that the fame of Mark Akenside and Charles Churchill, though bright when she was a child, had become dim before she grew up. Well, then, take Goldsmith. No poems were more popular than Oliver’s when Fanny began to see the world in Martin’s Street; yet we have her confession that she never read