This concluded the performance, and the performer presently took his leave. After he had said good-bye, and left the room, he hastily came back, whimsically laughing, and said: ‘Here’s one of your maids downstairs that I love prodigiously to talk to, because she is so cross! She was washing, and rubbing, and scrubbing, and whitening and brightening your steps this morning, and would hardly let me pass. Egad, sir, she did not know the great Roscius! But I frightened her a little just now: “Child,” says I, “you don’t guess whom you have the happiness to see! Do you know that I am one of the first geniuses of the age? You would faint away upon the spot if you could only imagine who I am!”’ One familiar face was no longer seen at Burney’s house. Mr. Crisp had become subject to such frequent fits of gout that his visits to London were almost given up, and he rarely slept even a single night away from Chesington. But his interest in musical and literary news, and in all that concerned the Burney family, continued unabated. What he could no more take part in himself was duly communicated to him by letter. How early the correspondence between Frances and the family friend began we are not informed. But it must have commenced long before she was old enough to be admitted to parties such as she had now to describe to her ‘daddy.’ In a passage written at seventy-two, she has set down “a charge delivered to me by our dear vehement Mr. Crisp at the opening of my juvenile correspondence with him: ‘Harkee, you little monkey! dash away whatever comes uppermost; if you stop to consider either what you say, or what may be said of you, I would not give one fig for your letters.’” So rough a speech could not have been addressed, even by a professed cynic, to any young lady very far advanced in her teens. In the letters from which we are about to quote, Miss Fanny prattles to the old man with perfect ease and confidence, showing that she felt herself on terms of established familiarity, and was quite free from the shyness and embarrassment that would attend a timid girl’s first efforts to entertain him.