The name Burney,’ Hazlitt once said, ‘is a X pass-port to the Temple of Fame. Those who bear it, wits, scholars, novelists, musicians, artists, are by birthright free of Parnassus.’ And the Burneys were full as loveable as they were cultured. ‘I love all that breed,’ cried Dr. Johnson, ‘and I love them because they love each other.’

Now of books about the Burneys there have been of recent years no end. Most of them, of course, are concerned with Madame D’Arblay, from Austin Dobson’s splendid edition of her Diary to the entertaining gossip; of Hill and Seeley. And her father, Dr. Burney, and her brother Charles, the great Greek scholar, and her sisters, have not passed unnoticed. Yet, until this present time, one hundred and ten years after his death, no one had thought of writing the Life of her sailor-brother James. He has had, indeed, to wait long for his Biography, but perhaps happily, for now that it has come at last it is an ideal one, graphic in style and based on much hitherto unpublished matter, altogether worthy of a man whose career was a romance and who is the connecting link between the great Johnsonian Circle and that other very different coterie of which Charles Lamb was the shining light.