vault.  And it was for such a life that Frances Burney had given up liberty and peace, a happy fireside, attached friends, a -wide and splendid circle of acquaintance, intellectual pursuits, in which she was qualified to excel, and the sure hope of what to her would have been affluence.

There is nothing new under the sun.  The last great master of Attic eloquence and Attic wit has left us a forcible and touching description of the misery of a man of letters, who, lulled by hopes similar to those of Frances, had entered the service of one of the magnates of Rome.  “Unhappy that I am,” cries the victim of his own childish ambition:  “would nothing content me but that I must leave mine old pursuits and mine old companions, and the life which was without care, and the sleep which had no limit save mine own pleasure, and the walks which I was free to take where I listed, and fling myself into the lowest pit of a dungeon like this?  And, O God! for what?  Is this the bait which enticed me?  Was there no way by which I might have enjoyed in freedom comforts even greater than those which I now earn by servitude?  Like a lion which has been made so tame that men may lead him about by a thread, I am dragged up and down, with broken and humbled spirit, at the beels of those to whom, in my own domain, I should have been an object of awe and wonder.  And, worst of all, I feel that here I gain no credit, that here I give no pleasure.  The talents and accomplishments, which charmed a far different circle, are here out of place.  I am rude in the arts of palaces, and can ill bear comparison with those whose calling from their youth up has been to flatter and to sue.  Have I, then, two lives, that, after I have wasted one in the service of others, there may yet remain to me a second, which I may live unto myself?”

Now and then, indeed, events occurred which disturbed the ,wretched monotony of Francis Burney’s life.  The Court moved from Kew to Windsor, and from Windsor back to Kew.  One dull colonel went out of waiting, and another dull colonel came into waiting.  An impertinent servant made a blunder about tea, and caused a misunderstanding between the gentlemen and the ladies.  A half-witted French Protestant minister talked oddly about conjugal fidelity.  An unlucky member of the household mentioned a passage in the " Morning Herald " reflecting on the queen ; and forthwith Madame Schwellenberg, began to storm in bad English, and told him that he had made her “what you call perspire!”

A more important occurrence was the royal visit to Oxford.  Miss Burney went in the queen’s train to Nuneham, was utterly neglected there in the crowd, and could with difficulty find a ,servant to show the way to her bedroom or a hairdresser to arrange her curls.  She had the honour of entering Oxford in the last of a long string of carriages which formed the royal procession, of walking after the queen all day through refectories and chapels and of standing, half dead with fatigue and hunqer,