theatre built in 1748, to dance, and to make love. There were spacious North and South Parades; luxurious upper and lower rooms were provided for assemblies and for the assiduous drinking of tea. Before Sheridan's day Richard Nash, known as "Beau," by organizing a band under his control, made himself master of ceremonies at concerts and dances. He established rules of behavior which he posted in the Pump Room and dictated the forms of social conduct and good taste. He not only banished high boots from the assemblies and fixed the hour of stopping the dances at eleven-"not a fiddle nor a chord after eleven," complains Fag; but he also arrested duelists and kept the prices of lodgings from becoming extortionate. Though a silent partner in gambling houses, he kept the social graces alive when open public gambling and dissipation of all sorts threatened to submerge them.

Though his active influence waned after 1745, the social forms which he originated persisted. But by 1770 the tone of Bath had deteriorated. Persons who wished to buy satisfaction for their social ambitions flocked to the place. Vulgar parvenus jostled the gentry in the pump-rooms and on the promenades. The crowd became motley and revealed ridiculous contrasts. Frivolity became forced and gaiety lost its amenity People assumed airs, but failed to attain graces. In other words, the social presumptions of the resort became excellent material for comedy.

This was the life which young Sheridan saw unrolled before him at Bath. The contact of this pageant with his halfsatiric observation and his native wit and humour produced, as it were almost automatically, his great comedies. The Rivals reflects the life of Bath observed in a spirit of sympathetic amusement. The School for Scandal, although the scene of its action is London, is the same world seen with a more satiric eye. Sheridan, however, did not merely observe this life from a quiet point of vantage, uninvolved in it. He became a man of fashion himself. He sharpened his wit in the social badinage of the assemblies. Most important of all for the spirit of his plays, he became the hero of a thrilling

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romance, into which was distilled the essence of the glittering excitement of the place.

Among the artists of every sort who flocked to Bath to entertain the throng of intellectually unemployed was the Linley family. The father had been a director of oratorios in the provinces and now in 1770 had assumed a similar office in Bath. All of his children possessed some degree of musical genius. The most famous of these was his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who had a beautiful voice. She seems also to have been a paragon of loveliness and purity. Sir Joshua Reynolds used her for a model many times, notably for St. Cecelia and for the Virgin in his painting of the Nativity. Moreover, she possessed to a remarkable degree the fashionable sensibility and sentimentality of the time. No wonder that she attracted suitors of every age.

When she was but sixteen years of age, her father had negotiated for her a match with a wealthy gentleman of sixty years. Just before the marriage ceremony the engagement was broken through the tearful appeals of Miss Linley to the generosity of her fatherly suitor. Truth to tell, the sentimental girl had formed a pure, but very tender, relationship with a married gentleman named Captain Mathews. All these circumstances were known to Bath society. Samuel Foote, an enterprising playwright, recognized good material in this situation and presented a faithful dramatic version of the romance to London audiences in a play called The Maid of Bath. Thus Elizabeth Linley was in the eyes of the entire scandalmongering world of society a notorious sentimental heroine.

Then Sheridan made his entrance. Both he and his older brother, the sententious, prudent Charles, some of whose lineaments can be traced in Joseph Surface, promptly fell in love with Miss Linley. Then the headlong Richard began to resent the importunities to which Captain Mathews continued to subject the lady. The rake knew that she was sentimentally devoted to him and he fashioned his technique of seduction accordingly. He alternately pleaded in melting mood and brandished pistols and made wild threats. Though she pos

sessed the virtue to resist him, she lacked the will and the inclination to break with him. She was accordingly in a state of delicious despair, contemplating, she believed, suicide as the only issue from her dilemma.

Sheridan suggested another way out, equally thrilling and final. She should run away to France with him—and a carefully provided chaperon. The Quixotic chivalry of this proposal won her trembling consent. They fled under circumstances sufficiently romantic. In the neighborhood of Calais they went through some form of marriage, which later they believed not to be legal, then Sheridan placed Miss Linley under the care of some nuns of St. Quentin at Dunkirk who had taught his sister.

Bath approved the conduct of the runaways and execrated that of Mathews. He promised to quit the place forever. He did no such thing. He stayed there and began to whisper disagreeable innuendoes about the lovers. They dare never show their faces in England again, he boasted. Gaining confidence through unopposed iteration of his scandal, he finally posted Sheridan in The Bath Chronicle of April 9th, 1772, as "a liar and a treacherous scoundrel." Besides he wrote letters to him, containing threats and abuse.

Sheridan was not the sort of man to endure such public insult. He posted to London, went to Mathews's house in the middle of the night, and battered on the door until he could make him receive his peremptory challenge to a duel. This was fought soon after with swords in a London tavern. Sheridan disarmed his opponent, broke his sword, and made him beg for his life. Then he forced him to write a retraction and apology to be published in The Bath Chronicle. The affair thus seemed heroically settled and Sheridan's conduct vindicated.

Mathews, however, smarting under the reputation for cowardice which this duel had gained him, followed his rival to Bath and deliberately provoked a second encounter. This proved a kind of rough-and-tumble fight instead of a proper duel. The swords of both were broken, and the two men

grappled and rolled on the ground. Sheridan was stabbed five or six times with the truncated weapon of his irate opponent. He was so painfully wounded that Miss Linley's miniature reposing on his heart was utterly shattered and found afterwards lying in a pool of his blood. It was while recovering from his wounds that he made a sketch for his first comedy, called The Rivals, of which a duel formed the supreme crisis.

Sheridan's romantic heroism had bound Miss Linley to him with the strongest bonds of affection. Fortunately for their romance, the parents of each objected to their union. They could therefore write to each other for a year in the rôles of adoring but hopeless lovers. In their correspondence she always addresses him as Horatio and he her as Eliza. "Oh! My Horatio," Miss Linley writes, "I did not know till now how much I loved you. Believe me, had you died, I should certainly have dressed myself as a man and challenged Mathews. He should have killed me, or I would have revenged you and myself." To this tone of romantic bravado was often added that of sentimental self-torture and pleasing anguish. Finally the opposition of the parents and the sentimental hesitations of the lovers were worn away and the two were married in April, 1773.

At that time Sheridan had become a student at the Inner Temple and was confident of being able to forge a career in law and politics. Though the young couple had little on which to live, Sheridan resolutely refused to allow his wife to add to their income by singing as a professional. At that time there was a great gulf fixed between the professional musician and the lady of society; and Sheridan clearly had his eye on the social ladder. This he soon began to climb with astonishing ease. His wit and his charm and his wife's beautiful voice were imperious magnets. Society began to flock to his London house. And it was not long before two of its most famous luminaries, the brilliant sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Bessborough, became his declared pa

tronesses and friends. Then the Sheridans' social position was assured.

To literature Sheridan turned for the money necessary to maintain this social success. He first wrote essays and reviews on both political and literary subjects. He also began to compose The Rivals, which he dashed off in what seems a miracle of genius during the autumn of 1774. But the comedy can now be regarded as a crystallization of the personal experience of a dashing youth with the fashions in conduct and in feeling which prevailed in the polite world. In The Rivals can be seen the reflection of his duels with Mathews, of almost all the phases of his romance with Elizabeth Linley, and of his personal knowledge of the color and the folly of the life in Bath.

The Rivals was first performed on the evening of January 17, 1775, at the Covent Garden Theatre. This première was not a success. Although the author was not named, he was generally known. The social success of the Sheridans had excited envy which expressed itself in a hostile reception of the play. A claque was organized against it and during the performance a crowd in the gallery displayed its animus so noisily that they had to be ejected from the theatre. The comedy in itself had serious faults. It was much too long; Shuter, who played Sir Anthony Absolute, did not know his lines and the part of Sir Lucius as written and as acted was resented as an attack on Irish gentlemen. Sheridan immediately withdrew the comedy from the stage, cut it drastically, and put on the revised version about ten days after the original performance. This was an immediate success and ran for fourteen or fifteen nights.

Another important event in Sheridan's theatrical history occurred in November of this same year, when his opera The Duenna was first presented. The music was composed by his father-in-law, Linley, and many of the lyrics were the love poems which Sheridan had written to his wife during his