Mr. Burney at once obtained as many pupils of the most respectable description as he had time to attend, and was thus enabled to support his family, modestly indeed, and frugally, but in comfort and independence.  His professional merit obtained for him the degree of Doctor of Music from the University of Oxford;(4) and his works on subjects connected with art gained for him a place, respectable, though certainly not eminent, among men of letters.

The progress of the mind of Frances Burney, from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year, well deserves to be recorded, When her education had proceeded no further than the hornbook, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself.  Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate and sweet-tempered man can well be.  He loved his daughter dearly ; but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them.  It would indeed have been impossible for him to superintend their education himself.  His professional engagements occupied him all day.  At seven in the morning, he began to attend his pupils, and, when London was full, was sometimes employed in teaching

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till eleven at night.  He was often forced to carry in his pocket a tin box of sandwiches and a bottle of wine and water, on which he dined in a hackney coach while hurrying from one scholar to another.  Two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but he imagined that Frances would run some risk of being perverted from the Protestant faith if she were educated in a Catholic country, and he therefore kept her at home.  No governess, no teacher of any art or of any language was provided for her.  But one of her sisters showed her how to write ; and, before she was fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading.

it was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed.  Indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very small.  When at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the most celebrated works of Voltaire and Moli6re ; and, what seems still more extraordinary, had never heard or seen a line of Churchill, who, when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets.  It is particularly deserving of observation that she appears to have been by no means a novel reader.  Her father’s library was large, and he had admitted into it so many books which rigid moralists generally exclude that he felt uneasy, as he afterwards owned, when Johnson began to examine the shelves.  But in the whole collection there was only a single novel, Fielding’s “Amelia."(5)