On the following day, the ceremony was repeated at the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, according to the rites of the Romish Church. The marriage proved eminently happy. Dr. Burney, though he shrank from giving away the bride, was a respecter of accomplished facts, and soon became on excellent terms with his new son-in-law. The late impetuous lovers proceeded to translate their romance into the most sober prose. Love in a cottage had been the goal of their ambition. Mr. Locke had promised a site for the cottage; but as funds for building it were not immediately forthcoming, the pair went first into farm lodgings, afterwards into a hired house of two or three rooms at Bookham, within two miles of Mickleham and Norbury Park. D’Arblay, a man of real honour, would have left his wife, almost in their honeymoon, to fight for Louis XVII. at Toulon; but his offer of service was declined by the English Government, and thenceforth the General resigned himself to wait for better times. Like a sensible man, _il cultivait son jardin_. Like a man of sense, but not like a good husbandman. His wife, who, notwithstanding her happiness, seems to have lost her sense of humour very soon after matrimony, enjoyed one of her last hearty laughs at the expense of her lord: “This sort of work is so totally new to him, that he receives every now and then some of poor Merlin’s[113] ‘disagreeable compliments’; for when Mr. Locke’s or the Captain’s gardeners favour our grounds with a visit, they commonly make known that all has been done wrong. Seeds are sowing in some parts when plants ought to be reaping, and plants are running to seed while they are thought not yet at maturity. Our garden, therefore, is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the world; but M. d’A. assures me it is to be the staff of our table and existence. “A little, too, he has been unfortunate; for, after immense toil in planting and transplanting strawberries round our hedge here at Bookham, he has just been informed they will bear no fruit the first year, and the second we may be ‘over the hills and far away.’ “Another time, too, with great labour, he cleared a considerable compartment of weeds; and when it looked clean and well, and he showed his work to the gardener, the man said he had demolished an asparagus bed! M. d’A. protested, however, nothing could look more like _des mauvaises herbes_. “His greatest passion is for transplanting. Everything we possess he moves from one end of the garden to another to produce better effects. Roses take place of jessamines, jessamines of honeysuckles, and honeysuckles of lilacs, till they have all danced round as far as the space allows; but whether the effect may not be a general mortality, summer only can determine.