out brightness? Had he no originality of his own? Was he a wit, or had he none? To a question put thus bluntly the answer is easy. Sheridan was a wit; and he was but little else. As far as mere wit could carry him, Sheridan went, and but little farther. He had wit raised to the zenith, and he could bend it to his bidding. In his early youth poetry of the Pope period was in fashion; Sheridan set his wits to work and brought forth Papal verse, quite as infallible as any made in his time. A little later he saw that through the stage door lay the shortest way to fame and fortune; and he wrote plays brimful of a wit which even now, after the lapse of a century and more, is well nigh as fresh as when it was first penned. When in after years he went to Parliament and needs must be an orator, again his wit was equal to the task, and he delivered orations which the great speakers, in that time of great speakers, declared to be unsurpassed. Had any other call been made on his wits, they would have done their best, and their best would have been good indeed. Whatever he produced, poem, or play, or speech, was but the chameleon expression of his wit. If in intellectual quality any of his work was thin, in quantity it was full beyond all cavil. No one ever more truly - to use the phrase with no invidious intent - no one ever more truly lived on his wits than Sheridan, not even the arch wit, M. de Voltaire, or the Caron de Beaumarchais to whom the stolid British reviewer deemed him inferior. I. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the son of Thomas and Frances Sheridan, and the grandson of Dr. Sheridan, the friend and correspondent of Swift. Thomas Sheridan was a teacher of elocution, a player, a manager, a lexicographer, and altogether an odd character. He thought himself a greater actor than David Garrick, and the author of a better dictionary than Samuel Johnson's. He seems to have had no great love for Richard Brinsley, and to have given the boy little care. Frances Sheridan was a woman of singular gifts and singular charm. Garrick and Johnson liked her, although they did not like her husband; and they appreciated her remarkable literary merits. Garrick brought out and acted in the 'Discovery,' a comedy of hers; and Dr. Johnson praised her novel, the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph,' saying he knew not if she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much. It can scarcely be doubted that her influence upon her son's character would have been highly beneficial; but unfortunately he was not always with her, and she died in 1766, when he was only fifteen years old. The absence of parental care left a fatal impress on his character, and it is to his unregulated youth that we may ascribe most of the wanderings, the missteps, and the mishaps of his manhood. When the boy was seven years of age he was placed at school with Mr. Thomas Whyte, who was afterward the teacher of Sheridan's biographer, Moore. Here he was considered a dunce. The next year, in 1759, the family removed to England; and in 1762 Richard Brinsley was sent to Harrow, where he remained for about three years. He was popular with his school-fellows, and his teachers believed in his ability. He showed already the indolence which was always one of his most marked characteristics, and which he possessed in conjunction, curiously enough, with an extraordinary power of application whenever he was aroused by an adequate motive. He seems to have acquired some understanding of Latin and Greek. He formed many friendships at Harrow. The chief partner of his youthful sports and studies was Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, with whom he translated the seventh idyl of Theocritus and many of the minor poems credited to that "singer of the field and fold." In 1769 the elder Sheridan returned to London from France with his favourite son, Charles ; and calling Richard to his side, he began to instruct both boys in English grammar and in oratory. "They attended also the fencing and riding schools of Mr. Angelo," who has recorded the fretful dignity of Thomas Sheridan, and the geniality and good humour of his younger son. In the middle of 1770 the Sheridans moved to Bath, a hot-bed of fast and fashionable society, and about as unsuitable and unwholesome a place as could be imagined for a young man of eighteen with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's lack of training and want of prospects. He kept up a lively correspondence with Hal hed, who was then at Oxford. The friends were ambitious and hopeful; and they determined to attempt literature together, fondly dreaming that they might awake one morning and find themselves famous. They planned a play and a periodical paper; Halhed wrote most of the former, and Sheridan sketched out the only number of the latter which Moore could discover. Then they attempted a metrical version of the love-epistles credited to the Greek sophist, Aristænetus. It is to be noted that Le Sage also began his literary life by translating Aristænetus. In November, 1770, Halhed had made a rough draft; it was not until December that Sheridan, in his usual dilatory way, set about his task of revision. There is a French version (Poictiers, 1597), but Sheridan had not gone to France in 1764 with the family; he knew little French, and he came in time to hate the language. He took several months over his work, and though the completed manuscript was to have been given to the publisher in March, it was not received by him until May; and it was only in August, 1771, that there appeared for sale "The Love Epistles of Aristænetus, Translated from the Greek into English metre." "Love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges; hath his seat -MILTON, Paradise Lost, Book 8. "London: Printed for J. Wilkie, No. 71 St. Paul's Churchyard. MDCCLXXI." The quotation from Milton we may credit to Sheridan; it is impudently humorous in the eyes of those who know how light and lively are some of the lovepassages related by the Greek tale-teller. The translation was anonymous, and the preface was signed with the joint initials of the young poets, H. S. It is highly comic to read that one of the reviews fathered it on "Mr. Johnson, author of the English Dictionary," etc. Moore and Sheridan's other biographers agree in calling the translation a failure in that it met with no favour from the public. It may be that the authors made no money by it; but it succeeded at least in getting itself into a second edition, which does not look exactly like flat failure. It has since been reprinted with Propertius, Petronius Arbiter, and Johannes Secundus, in a volume of he was sent into the country, where he remained until the spring of the next year, 1773. During all this time his father and Miss Linley's were determined to keep them apart. Moore tells us, that Sheridan contrived many stratagems "for the purpose of exchanging a few words with her, and that he more than once disguised himself as a hackneycoachman, and drove her home from the theatre," where she had been singing. At last Mr. Linley yielded, and they were married by license, April 13, 1773, after a courtship as romantic in its vicissitudes as Miss Lydia Languish or Miss Blanche Amory could possibly wish. Mrs. Sheridan was perhaps the most gifted of a gifted family. Dr. Burney refers to the Linleys "as a nest of singing-birds "; and Michael Kelly records that Mozart spoke in high terms of the talents of Mrs. Sheridan's brother. Her services were in good demand as a singer of oratorios, and might have been rewarded sufficiently to support the young couple in ease, if not in affluence. But Sheridan was not a man to live at his wife's apron-strings, or to grow fat on the money she earned. With manly pride he refused all offers, and declined even to allow her to fulfil the engagements made for her by her father before the marriage. This was honourable and high-minded, but it deprived them of a certain income. Dr. Johnson's praise might please Sheridan's heart, if it was reported to him, but it could not fill his stomach. With abundant belief in himself, Sheridan meant to make his own way in the world and to owe his support to his own hand. He had nothing, not even a serious education. He had been entered a student of the Middle Temple just before his marriage, but he had not pursued the law |