4 more than to hear that he had derived a moment's gratification from any praise of mine-humble as it must appear to 'my elders and my betters.' The distresses of Sheridan now increased every day, and through the short remainder of his life it is a melancholy task to follow him. The sum arising from the sale of his theatrical property was soon exhausted, and he was driven to part with all he most valued to meet the pressing demands of the day. One of the most humiliating trials of his pride was yet to come. In the spring of this year he was arrested and carried to a spunging-house, where he remained two or three days. This abode, from which the following painful letter to Whitbread, who had managed the re-building of Drury Lane, was written, formed a sad contrast to those princely halls, of which he had so lately been the most brilliant and favoured guest, and which were possibly, at that very moment, lighted up and crowded with gay company, unmindful of him within those prison walls: "Tooke's Court, Cursitor Street, Thursday, past two. "I have done everything in my power with the solicitors, White and Founes, to obtain my release, by substituting a better security for them than their detaining me-but in vain. "Whitbread, putting all false professions of friendship and feeling out of the question, you have no right to keep me here! -for it is in truth your act—if you had not forcibly withheld from me the twelve thousand pounds, in consequence of a threatening letter from a miserable swindler, whose claim YOU in particular knew to be a lie, I should at least have been out of the reach of this state of miserable insult-for that, and that only, lost me my seat in Parliament. And I assert that you cannot find a lawyer in the land, that is not either a naturalborn fool or a corrupted scoundrel, who will not declare that your conduct in this respect was neither warrantable nor legal→ but let that pass for the present. Independently of the £1000 ignorantly withheld from me on the day of considering my last claim, I require of you to answer the draft I send herewith on the part of the committee, pledging myself to prove to them on the first day I can personally meet them, that there are still thousands and thousands due to me, both legally and equitably, from the theatre. My word ought to be taken on this subject; and you may produce to them this document, if one among them could think that, under all the circumstances, your conduct required a justification. O God! with what mad confidence have I trusted your word-I ask justice from you, and no boon. I enclosed you yesterday three different securities, which, had you been disposed to have acted even as a private friend, would have made it certain that you might have done so without the smallest risk. These you discreetly offered to put into the fire, when you found the object of your humane visit satisfied by seeing me safe in prison. "I shall only add that I think. if I know myself, had our lots been reversed, and I had seen you in my situation, and had left Lady E. in that of my wife, I would have risked £600 rather than have left you so-although I had been in no way accessary in bringing you into that condition. "R. B. SHERIDAN. "S. Whitbread, Esq." Even in this situation the sanguineness of his disposition did not desert him, for he was found by Mr. Whitbread, on his visit to the spunging-house, confidently calculating on the representation for Westminster, in which the proceedings relative to Lord Cochrane at that moment promised a vacancy. On his return home, however, to Mrs. Sheridan (some arrangements having been made by Whitbread for his release), all his fortitude forsook him, and he burst into a long and passionate fit of weeping at the profanation, as he termed it, which his person had suffered. He had for some months had a feeling that his life was near is close. The following touching passage occurred in a letter from him to Mrs. Sheridan, after one of those differences which a remonstrance on his irregularities and want of care of himself occasioned :-"Never again let one harsh word pass between us during the period, which may not, perhaps, be long, that we are in this world together, and life, however clouded to me, is mutually spared to us.” The disorder with which he was now attacked, arose from a diseased state of the stomach, brought on partly by irregular living and partly by the harassing anxieties that had for so many years beset him. His powers of digestion grew every day worse, till he was at length unable to retain any suste nance. While death was thus gaining fast on Sheridan, the miseries of his life were thickening round him also; nor did the last corner, in which he now lay down to die, afford him any asylum from the clamours of his legal pursuers. Writs and executions came in rapid succession, and bailiffs at length gained possession of his house. A sheriff's officer arrested the dying man in his bed, and was about to carry him off, in his blankets, to a spunging-house, when Doctor Bain interfered, and, by threatening the officer with the responsibility he must incur, if, as was but too probable, his prisoner should expire on the way, averted this outrage. About the middle of June, the attention and sympathy of the public were, for the first time, awakened to the desolate situation of Sheridan, by an article that appeared in the Morning Post-written, as I understand, by a gentleman, who, though on no very cordial terms with him, forgot every other feeling in a generous pity for his fate, and in honest indignation against those who now deserted him. "Oh delay not," said the writer, without naming the person to whom he alluded—“ delay not to draw aside the curtain within which that proud spirit hides its sufferings." He then adds, with a striking anticipation of what afterwards happened :-" Prefer ministering in the chamber of sickness to mustering at "The splendid sorrows that adorn the hearse ;' I say, Life and Succour against Westminster Abbey and a Funeral !" This article produced a strong and general sensation, and was reprinted in the same paper the following day. Its effect, too, was soon visible in the calls made at Sheridan's door, and in the appearance of such names as the Duke of York, the Duke of Argyle, &c., among the visitors. But it was now too late ; the spirit, that these unavailing tributes might once have comforted, was now fast leaving the consciousness of everything earthly but pain. After a succession of shivering fits, he fell into a state of exhaustion, in which he continued, with but few more signs of suffering, till his death. A day or two before that event, the Bishop of London read prayers by his bed-side; and on Sunday, the seventh of July, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, he died. On the following Saturday the funeral took place;-his remains having been previously removed from Savile Row to the house of his friend, Mr. Peter Moore, in Great George Street, Westminster. From thence, at one o'clock, the procession moved on foot to the Abbey, where, in the only spot in Poet's Corner that remained unoccupied, the body was interred; and the following simple inscription marks its resting-place :"RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN, BORN 1751, DIED 7th JULY, 1816. THIS MARBLE IS THE TRIBUTE OF AN ATTACHED FRIEND, PETER MOORE." Seldom has there been such an array of rank as graced this funeral. The pall-bearers were the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Lauderdale, Earl Mulgrave, the Lord Bishop of London, Lord Holland, and Lord Spencer. Among the mourners were his Royal Highness the Duke of York, his Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Argyle, the Marquises of Anglesea and Tavistock,; the Earls of Thanet, Jersey, Harrington, Bessborough, Mexborough, Rosslyn, and Yar mouth; Lords George Cavendish and Robert Spencer; Viscounts Sidmouth, Granville, and Duncannon; Lords Rivers, Erskine, and Lynedoch; the Lord Mayor; Right Hon. G. Canning and W. W. Pole, &c., &c.* Where were they all, these royal and noble persons, who now crowded to "partake the gale" of Sheridan's glory; where were they all, while any life remained in him? Where were they all, but a few weeks before, when their interposition might have saved his heart from breaking-or when the zeal, now wasted on the grave, might have soothed and comforted the death-bed? This is a subject on which it is difficult to speak with patience. If the man was unworthy of the commonest offices of humanity while he lived, why all this parade of regret and homage over his tomb? There appeared some verses at the time, which, written by Tom Moore, came evidently warm from the heart of the writer : "Oh it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow, And friendships so false in the great and high-born ; To think what a long line of titles may follow The relics of him who died friendless and lorn! "How proud they can press to the funeral array Of him whom they shunn'd, in his sickness and sorrow- Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!" "Was this then the fate of that high-gifted man, The pride of the palace, the bower, and the hall- Through each mode of the lyre, and was master of all? "Whose mind was an essence compounded, with art, From the finest and best of all other men's powers ; * In the train of all this phalanx of dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, honourables and right honourables, princes of the bloo. royal, and first officers of the state, it was not a little interesting to see, walking humbly, side by side, the only two men whose friendship had not waited for the call of vanity to display itself - Dr. Bain and Mr. Rogers. |