the ‘Traveller,’ or ‘The Deserted Village,’ till a friend made her a present of them in 1790.[84] This being so, we cannot wonder that she had never heard of Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck’ when Colonel Digby produced a copy of that work. She appears to have been barely aware of Cumberland’s ‘Observer,’ a production in which she herself and most of her friends were referred to, until the Queen read some passages to her, and afterwards lent her the volumes. She had not seen Hawkins’s ‘Life of Johnson’ when the King first mentioned it to her, and ‘talked it over with great candour and openness.’ Nor did she take much interest in literary questions. The Scotch ballad of ‘The Gaberlunzie Man,’ then lately printed in Germany, she threw aside almost contemptuously, though it had been lent her by the Queen. About Shakspeare her views were those of a most loyal subject. She reads Hamlet to Mrs. Delany, and this is her comment: ‘How noble a play it is, considered in parts! how wild and how improbable, taken as a whole! But there are speeches, from time to time, of such exquisite beauty of language, sentiment, and pathos, that I could wade through the most thorny of roads to arrive at them.’ The Queen, as Thackeray has observed, could give shrewd opinions about books, and we suspect she presently learned to value her second Robe-Keeper for her brightness of intelligence, her powers of description, and her lively humour, rather than for the solidity or the variety of her attainments. ----- Footnote 76: Macaulay says that this promise of a gown was never performed; but he is mistaken. Miss Burney did get the gown after some delay. It was ‘a lilac tabby,’ whatever that may be, or may have been. (Diary, ii. 189.) Footnote 77: Thackeray. Footnote 78: Miss Goldsworthy, sub-governess of the Princesses. Footnote 79: ‘The last time I saw her (Mrs. Vesey) before I left London,’ writes Walpole, ‘Miss Burney passed the evening there, looking quite recovered and well; and so cheerful and agreeable that the Court seems only to have improved the ease of her manner, instead of stamping more reserve on it, as I feared. But what slight graces it can give will not compensate to us and the world for the loss of her company and her writings.’—Walpole to Hannah More, June 15, 1787. Footnote 80: What induced Macaulay to describe this gentleman as ‘half-witted,’ we are at a loss to conjecture. He possessed, as Miss Burney bears witness, remarkable cleverness, extraordinary attainments and great powers of conversation. Footnote 81: He had a wife to whom he was strongly attached. Footnote 82: