believe that Madame d’Arblay’s English was ruined, not by associating with Colonel Digby, or even Colonel Manners, but by neglect of reading, by retirement from lettered society, by fading recollections of Johnson, by untoward family influences, and by a strong hereditary tendency to run into fustian. In October, 1796, Dr. Burney lost his second wife, who, after a prolonged period of ill-health, died at Chelsea Hospital. To prevent him from brooding over his bereavement, Madame d’Arblay induced her father to resume a poetical history of astronomy which he had begun some time before. This occupation amused him for some time, though in the end the poem, which ran to a great length, was destroyed unfinished. Out of the profits made by his wife’s publication, M. d’Arblay built a small house on land leased to him by Mr. Locke at West Humble, near Dorking, and called it Camilla Cottage. If a family, as well as a nation, is happy that has no history, we must conclude that the d’Arblays lived very much at ease for some years after their removal to their new abode. When the excitement of planning, building, and taking possession is exhausted, Madame’s pen finds little to record, beyond the details of occasional interviews with the Queen and Princesses at Buckingham House. She wisely declines a proposal of Mrs. Crewe to make her directress of a weekly paper, which was to have been started, under the name of _The Breakfast-Table_, to combat the progress of Jacobinical ideas. Later on she abandons unwillingly a venture of a different kind. Still thirsting for dramatic success, she had written a comedy called ‘Love and Fashion;’ and towards the close of 1799 was congratulating herself on having it accepted by the manager of Covent Garden Theatre.[121] The piece was put into rehearsal early in the following spring; but Dr. Burney was seized with such dread of another failure, that, to appease him, his daughter and her husband consented to its being withdrawn. The compliance cost some effort: Fanny complained that she was treated as if she ‘had been guilty of a crime, in doing what she had all her life been urged to, and all her life intended—writing a comedy.’ ‘The combinations,’ she added, ‘for another long work did not occur to me: incidents and effects for a drama did.’ This was only a transient disappointment. In the first days of 1800 came a lasting sorrow, in the loss of Mrs. Phillips, who, since the autumn of 1796, had been living with her husband in Ireland, and who died immediately after landing in England on her way to visit her father.[122] But, except by this grief, the peace of Camilla Cottage was never interrupted so long as the husband and wife remained together. In her old age, Madame d’Arblay looked back to the first eight years of her married life as to a period of unruffled happiness.