Richard Burton, with their irreverent and appalling candor, to be gently consoled by Mrs. Burnett, and to know with certainty that she really was such a delightful and charming child.
For Sir Richard, following the fashion of the day, has left us a spirited record of his early years, and they furnish scant food for edification. There was a time when unfledged vices, like unfledged virtues, were ignored by the biographer, and forgotten even by the more conscientious writer, who compiled his own memoirs. Scott's account of his boyhood is graphic, but all too brief. Boswell, the diffuse, speeds over Johnson's tender youth with some not very commendatory remarks about his "dismal inertness of disposition." Gibbon, indeed, awakens our expectations with this solemn and stately sentence:—
"My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of nature which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honorable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune."
