About this period, also, or somewhat later, Dr. Burney had to lament the loss of his constant and respectable friend, Mrs. Ord; which, though not of a sort to prey upon his feelings, like those privations that bereaved him of the objects of his taste, as well as connexion, caused yet a considerable breach in his habits of friendly intercourse, and of such enlivening parties and projects, as constitute the major, though not the higher portion of our rotatory comforts.
The whole tenor of the life of Mrs. Ord, and of her minutest as well as most important actions, was under the concentrated guidance of a laudable ambition to merit general esteem. And so sagely directed were her movements for the attainment of their object, that she was one of those few beings whom censure passed by as unimpeachable.
She was sincerely attached to Dr. Burney and his family, and was sincerely lamented by all to whom her worth and virtues were known.
Towards the close of this year, 1807, Dr. Burney had an infliction which nearly robbed him of his long-tried, and hitherto almost invulnerable force of mind, for bearing the rude assaults of misfortune: this was a paralytic stroke, which, in casting his left hand into a state of torpor, threw his heart, head, and nerves into one of ceaseless agitation, from an unremitting expectance of abrupt dissolution.
His absent daughter was spared from participating in the pain of this terrifying interval; and the despotic difficulty so often repined at of foreign correspondence, might here have seemed a benediction, had it been to political rigidity alone that she had been indebted for this exemption from availless anguish: but her generous father had made it his first care to prohibit, and peremptorily, all parts of his house from sending any communication, any hint whatsoever of his apprehensive state to Paris: and his exhortation, with the same earnestness, though not the same authority, was spread to every writing class of friend or acquaintance.
His own account of this trying event, written in the following year, in answer to his daughter’s alarm at his silence, will shew the full and surprising return of his spirits and health upon his recovery:
“The complaints made, in one of the two short notes which I have received, of letters never answered, Old Charles returns—as his account of family affairs he finds has never reached you. Indeed, for these last two or three years, I have had nothing _good_ to say of _own self_; and I peremptorily charged all the rest of the family to say nothing _bad_ on the subject of health: for I never understood the kindness of alarming distant friends with accounts of severe illness,—as we may be either recovered or dead before the information reaches them.