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MEMOIR OF SHERIDAN.

RICHARD BRINSLEY BUTLER SHERIDAN (for so he was christened, after Brinsley Butler, second Earl of Lanesborough, though he dropped the latter name in his signature), was born in Dorset street, Dublin, in the month of September, 1751. He was the son of Thomas Sheridan, actor and elocutionist, and grandson of Dr. Sheridan, a celebrated schoolmaster, the friend of Swift. His mother was Frances Chamberlaine, authoress of "Nourjahad" and "Sidney Biddulph." He went to school, first in Dublin, and afterwards at Harrow; and was so careless at both places, and acquired so little, that his Irish schoolmaster pronounced him "an impenetrable dunce," and the masters at Harrow, though they discerned his capacity, conld do nothing with it, either by severity or indulgence. When he left Harrow, he could not spell; and he seems to have pronounced as badly, if we are to judge from his writing think for thing; but his aristocratic schoolfellows surpassed him in vulgarity of mind, for they taunted him with being the son of a player.

On leaving school he did not go to the University, probably because his father was poor. Early in life, Sheridan married Miss Linley, the singer, a beauty, then only sixteen, with whom all the world were in love. Sheridan ran away with her to a secret marriage in France. He then fought a duel on her account, and finally, on her return to England, by the extorted permission of her father, repeated the nuptial ceremony by licence, in the year 1773.

The approaches of want of money, or more likely the pressure of it, appears to have hastened the composition of our author's first drama, "The Rivals," which was brought out at Covent Garden in January, 1775. Though it failed on its first ight, judicious pruning made it the favorite which it has since remained. The gayety of success, and, some say, gratitude to

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MEMOIR OF SHERIDAN.

RICHARD BRINSLEY BUTLER SHERIDAN (for so he was christened, after Brinsley Butler, second Earl of Lanesborough, though he dropped the latter name in his signature), was born in Dorset street, Dublin, in the month of September, 1751. He was the son of Thomas Sheridan, actor and elocutionist, and grandson of Dr. Sheridan, a celebrated schoolmaster, the friend of Swift. His mother was Frances Chamberlaine, authoress of "Nourjahad" and "Sidney Biddulph." He went to school, first in Dublin, and afterwards at Harrow; and was so careless at both places, and acquired so little, that his Irish schoolmaster pronounced him "an impenetrable dunce," and the masters at Harrow, though they discerned his capacity, conld do nothing with it, either by severity or indulgence. When he left Harrow, he could not spell; and he seems to have pronounced as badly, if we are to judge from his writing think for thing; but his aristocratic schoolfellows surpassed him in vulgarity of mind, for they taunted him with being the son of a player.

On leaving school he did not go to the University, probably because his father was poor. Early in life, Sheridan married Miss Linley, the singer, a beauty, then only sixteen, with whom all the world were in love. Sheridan ran away with her to a secret marriage in France. He then fought a duel on her account, and finally, on her return to England, by the extorted permission of her father, repeated the nuptial ceremony by licence, in the year 1773.

The approaches of want of money, or more likely the pressure of it, appears to have hastened the composition of our author's first drama, "The Rivals," which was brought out at Covent Garden in January, 1775. Though it failed on its first right, judicious pruning made it the favorite which it has since remained. The gayety of success, and, some say, gratitude to

the good actor, who was substituted for the bad one in Sir Lucius O'Trigger, produced in the ensuing spring the farce of "St. Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant," which turns upon an amusing trick à la Molière, and met with the like prosperity. The "Duenna" followed.

Our author now became one of the proprietors of Drury Lane Theatre; how, nobody can tell, for nobody knew where the money came from. On the production of the "School for Scandal," which was in the year 1777, he reached the height of his brilliant career. It was preceded by the re-fashionment, not worth more than alluding to, of Vanburgh's "Relapse," under the title of "A Trip to Scarborough." He was at this period six-and-twenty, an age at which many prose comic writers have produced their best, though Shakspeare himself could hardly have given us "Lear" and "Hamlet." But this apparent precocity has excited more admiration than it deserves; for the truth is, that the "great world" of artificial society is a very little world to become intimate with, compared with Shakspeare's. Passions there, like modes, run very much in patterns, and lie on the surface; and folly, which is the object of satire, is by its nature a thing defective, and therefore sooner read through than the wisdom of the wise, or the universality of nature. A man, like Sheridan or Congreve, may very well know all that is to be known in the circles of conventional grace or absurdity, by the time he has spent more than half his life. Feeling, he needs but little; imagination, not at all. The stars might be put out, the ocean drunk up, almost every thing which makes the universe as it is might vanish, including the heart of man in its largest and deepest sense, and if a single ball-room survived, like some foolish fairy corner, he might still be what he is. A little fancy and a good deal of scorn, a terseness, a polish, and a sense of the incongruous, are all the requisites of his nature-admirable in the result, compared with what is superior to them-nothing (so to speak,) by the side of the mighty waters, and interminable shores, and everlasting truth and graces, of the masters of the dramatic art poetical.

The School for Scandal," with the exception of too great a length of dialogue without action in its earlier scenes, is a

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