further. Without money, and without a profession, but with a full confidence in himself, and a hereditary connection with the theatre, it is no wonder that Sheridan determined to write for the stage. His father was an actor and a manager, and had written one play; and his mother had written several. With these antecedents and the reputation of ability which he had already achieved somehow, he was asked by Harris, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, to write a comedy.

II.

The time was most propitious for the appearance of a new comic author. The works of Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Congreve were falling, or had already fallen, out of the list of acting plays. Evelina blushed at the dialogue of Congreve's 'Love for Love,' and was ashamed at the plot. Only Sheridan himself could make Vanbrugh's Relapse' presentable. Farquhar and Wycherley fared but little better, though the Country Wife' of the latter, disinfected into something like decency by the skilful touch of Garrick, retained sufficient vitality to linger on the stage, under the name of the 'Country Girl.' There were many symptoms of a rapid improvement in virtue and of an evolution in morals; and this helped to make the way straight before the feet of a new dramatist who could keep his eye on the signs of the times. The comedies of Congreve and Wycherley, Farquhar and Vanbrugh, seem to have been written to show that the true road to happiness was to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife. Sydney Smith said that their morality "that every witty man may transgress the seventh commandment, which was never meant for

was

the protection of husbands who labour under the incapacity of making repartees." And Taine, with all his French tolerance for wit, is disgusted with the indecency of the comic writers of the Restoration, and says, "We hold our nose and read on." The times were ripe for a new writer.

Few of the dramatists of the day were formidable rivals. The one man who might have been a competitor to be feared, a fellow Irishman,-for, as Latin comedy was imitated from the Greek, and as French comedy was modelled upon the Italian, so English comedy has in great part been written by Irishmen, the author of the 'Good-natured Man,' Oliver Goldsmith, died in 1774 She Stoops to Conquer,' produced the year before, had scotched SentimentalComedy, an imported French fashion, which was slowly strangling the life out of the comic muse; and although Sheridan, in the Rivals,' might choose to do obeisance to this passing fancy by the introduction of those two most tedious persons, Faulkland and Julia, he was soon to repent him of his sins, and in the School for Scandal' deal it a final and fatal blow. Cumberland, the sole survivor of the school, had but little life left in him after the appearance of the 'Critic'; and no life is now left in his plays, which have hardly seen the light of the lamps these four-score years. Better luck has attended the more worthy work of George Colman the elder, the author of the 'Jealous Wife,' and of David Garrick, the author possibly of High Life Below Stairs,' who had also collaborated in the 'Clandestine Marriage'; these three plays keep the stage to this day. But in 1775 both Colman and Garrick had ceased to write for the theatre. The coarse, vigorous, hardy satires of Samuel Foote, and the namby-pamby tragedies

6

and wishy-washy comedies" not translations only, taken from the French of Arthur Murphy, were alike beginning to pall upon playgoers. Among all these dramatists, and greater than any of them, appeared the author of the 'Rivals."

Although written hastily at the request of Harris, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, the Rivals was not wholly a new composition; it is rather an elaboration of earlier sketches and inchoate memorandums jotted down by Sheridan at various times after he was seventeen years old, when the hope of gaining independence by writing for the stage first flitted before his eyes. And this reworking of ac

cumulated old material was characteristic of Sheridan throughout life, and in whatever department of literature he might venture himself. His poems, his plays, his jests, and his speeches abound in phrases and suggestions set down years before. Sheridan must needs have had aid from earlier work, since we find him telling his father-in-law, November 17, 1774, that he would have the comedy in rehearsal in a few days, and that he had not written a line of it two months before, "except a scene or two, which I believe you have seen in an odd act of a little farce." Haste of composition is shown in the inordinate bulk of the play, which was at least double the length of any acting comedy-so Sheridan tells us in the preface when he put it into Harris's hands. "I profited by his judgment and experience in the curtailing of it, till, I believe, his feeling for the vanity of a young author got the better of his desire for correctness, and he left many excrescences remaining because he had assisted in pruning so many more. Hence, though I was not uninformed that the acts were still too long, I flattered myself that, after the

first trial, I might with safer judgment proceed to remove what should appear to have been most dissatisfactory."

The Rivals' was first acted at Covent Garden Theatre on the evening of January 17, 1775, and it was damned out of hand. It was repeated the next night, and then withdrawn for repairs. A change of front in the face of the enemy is always a risky experiment, but Sheridan operated it successfully. Lightened of the feebler scenes by condensation, and strengthened by the substitution of Clinch as Sir Lucius O'Trigger for Lee, who had acted the part very badly, the Rivals' was again offered to the public, and was acted fourteen or fifteen times before the season closed on June 1. On the tenth night a new prologue was spoken by Mrs. Bulkley, in which Sheridan made adroit use of the figures of Comedy and Tragedy, which stood on each side of the stage, and defended his use of broader comic effects than the partisans of Sentimental-Comedy could tolerate. After the first few nights, however, the Rivals' picked up and held its own. Its brisk and bristling action, its highly ingenious equivoke, its broadly limned and sharply contrasted characters, its close sequence of highly comic situations — all these soon began to tell with the public, and the piece became one of the first favourites of the playgoer.

As Goldsmith had shown his gratitude to Quick, who acted Tony Lumpkin to his satisfaction, by signing the 'Grumbler,' an adaptation of the Grondeur' of Brueys, acted for Quick's benefit, so Sheridan, in gratitude to Clinch, who had bravely lent his aid to pluck the flower success from the nettle danger, wrote 'St. Patrick's Day; or the Scheming Lieutenant,' a farce in two acts, produced for

Clinch's benefit, May 2, 1775, and acted six times before the close of the season at the end of the month. St. Patrick's Day' is a lively enough little play, of no great consequence or merit, owing something in the conduct of its plot and the comicality of its situations to Molière, and containing only a few of the brilliant flashes of wit which we are wont to consider as Sheridan's especial property.

Sheridan devoted the summer to the writing of a comic opera, the music for which was selected and composed by his father-in-law, Mr. Linley. "We owe to Gay," said Dr. Johnson, "the ballad-operaa mode of comedy which at first was supposed to delight only by its novelty, but has now, by the experience of half a century, been so well accommodated to the disposition of a popular audience that it is likely to keep long possession of the stage. And of all ballad-operas, Gay's first was easily the foremost until this of Sheridan's; the 'Beggar's Opera' had no real rival until the production of the 'Duenna.' While, however, the 'Beggar's Opera' owed part of its extraordinary vogue to its personal and political satire, the 'Duenna' had no political purport; its only aim was to please, and in this it succeeded abundantly. Brought out originally at Covent Garden on November 21, 1775, it was performed seventy-five times during the ensuing season an extraordinary number in those days - twelve more than the 'Beggar's Opera' had achieved. In order to counteract this great success of the rival house, Garrick, then the manager of Drury Lane, as Moore tells us, "found it necessary to bring forward all the weight of his own best characters, and even had recourse to the expedient of playing off the mother against the son, by reviving Mrs. Frances