profit of his pocket. But, whatever his shortcomings, there seems to be no reason to doubt that he spoke well within the truth when he said to Addington, "My visits to you may possibly be misconstrued by my friends; but I hope you know, Mr. Addington, that I have an unpurchaseable mind." Almost all his political life a member of the Opposition, he would not sell his soul to gain a world of political advantage. When the rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre was entrusted to a committee headed by Whitbread, it was not surprising that they stipulated that Sheridan should have no further part in its management. Though he was allowed £28,000 for his share in the theatre, most of that sum was absorbed by outstanding claims against him. So low, too, had his fortunes ebbed that, at the general election in 1812, he could not raise the funds essential to return him again as member for Stafford. That defeat sounded the death-knell of a continuous political career in the House of Commons of more than thirty years.

Banished alike from the world of politics and of the theatre, Sheridan was a broken man. When, in 1810, owing to the mental incapacity of George III, the Prince of Wales was appointed Regent, it was too late for the realization of the fond hopes entertained by the Whigs more than a score of years previous. The Tories remained undisturbed in power, and the Whigs vented their disappointment upon Sheridan. Now, if ever, had come the time when his son Tom's words should be fulfilled: "What a situation would yours be could you now stand between the Prince and the people, possessing the confidence of both."2 Possessing the full confidence of neither, Sheridan stood helplessly between the contending factions. At the end of years of faithful devotion his eyes opened to the fact that he had put trust in a Prince whose word was as worthless as his bond. Thomas Sheridan the elder had

1 Fraser Rae, Sheridan, II, 244.

2 Ibid., II, 273.

experienced the ingratitude of Swift; Thomas Sheridan the younger had felt the alienation of Dr. Johnson; Richard Sheridan knew both the alienation and the ingratitude of the Prince whom he had served with life-long loyalty.

As creditors pressed upon Sheridan, and the hard-headed Whitbread gave him little relief from the funds due him from Drury Lane, he was forced to the wall. In August, 1813, he was arrested for debt, and confined for a time in a sponginghouse. Financial distress was, however, not the darkest cloud which overhung his declining years. Both his wife and elder son were struggling against incurable diseases. His own health was broken, partly, it must be confessed, by excesses into which he had fallen. In justice, however, the usual unpitying verdict against his later years should be tempered by the remembrance that he lived in an age when even Pitt drank to excess.

Death.

Ceaseless struggle against debt and disease brought Sheridan to his death-bed in 1816. An abscess in his throat confined him to the house.

debt was served upon him.

on July 7, 1816.

But even here a sheriff's writ for

Death released him mercifully,

Pitiful as is the real record of Sheridan's last days, the truth is far less pitiful than the fictions that have too frequently passed current. That a bailiff stopped the funeral procession and arrested the corpse for debt is a falsehood too flagrant to deceive many. Equally false though less extravagant accounts given by the Prince of Wales to his facile tool Croker,1 in the effort to excuse his rank ingratitude toward Sheridan, have, however, been accepted by most biographers at face value. They should have recalled the Prince's admission to Lady Spencer, "You know I don't speak the truth"2-a confession, indeed, superfluous even in his own day, save to blind loyalty

1 The Croker Papers, edited by Louis J. Jennings, I, 288-312. 2 Fraser Rae, Sheridan, II, 283, foot-note 3.

such as Sheridan's. Modern taste is fortunately too squeamish to relish the picture of filth and stench in Sheridan's deathroom, painted by a Prince who-to apply the phrase often attributed to Sheridan "relied on his imagination for his facts." It is true that in the columns of The Morning Post an appeal for help was made by one of Sheridan's friends, but Charles Sheridan, in a letter to his half-brother Tom, wrote: "You will be soothed by learning that our father's death was unaccompanied by suffering, that he almost slumbered into death, and that the reports which you may have seen in the newspapers of the privations and the want of comforts which he endured are unfounded; that he had every attention and comfort which could make a death-bed easy." 1

The truth is that, however hampered by debts during life, Sheridan at his death had liabilities but slightly exceeding five thousand pounds—a sum insignificant in comparison with the forty thousand pounds which William Pitt left as a debt to be paid by the nation.

A truly royal assemblage attended Sheridan's interment in Westminster Abbey. He was buried, not near Fox, as he would have preferred, but in the Poets' Corner. Especially appropriate this seems to-day, when Sheridan is remembered as a dramatist rather than as a statesman. Yet it is well to recall that on the morning after his death an article in The London Times spoke of him as one "whom it has been the fashion for many years to quote as a bold reprover of the selfish spirit of party; and throughout a period fruitful of able men and trying circumstances, as the most popular specimen in the British Senate of political consistency, intrepidity, and honour."

1 Ibid., II, 286.

SHERIDAN'S RELATION TO THE ENGLISH DRAMA

I. SHERIDAN AND THE ELIZABETHANS

In examining the manuscript of Vortigern and Rowena, before that supposedly Shakespearean treasure-trove was proved to be Ireland's forgery, Sheridan encountered a line which he pronounced "not strictly poetic." Thereupon he turned to Ireland's father with the words, "This is rather strange; for though you are acquainted with my opinion as to Shakspeare, yet, be it as it may, he certainly always wrote poetry."1 The remark shows that Sheridan was not in full sympathy with even the greatest of the Elizabethan dramatists. He held the mirror up to art, rather than to nature. Unable to penetrate with Shakespeare the depths of the Human Comedy, Sheridan followed the comic dramatists of the Restoration in the simpler path of the Comedy of Manners. His failure to appreciate Shakespeare was not due to ignorance. The text of The Critic quotes phrases in Hamlet and Othello as readily as it recalls Falstaff's Page or Juliet or Richard. Familiarity with Shakespeare was, indeed, essential for the manager of Drury Lane, but it was a familiarity which led rather to the manager's appreciation of the successful playwright than to the critic's appreciation of supreme genius. J Idle, then, must be the attempt to find in Sheridan evidence of more than casual indebtedness to Shakespeare. Even the cherished assertions that Mrs. Malaprop is but Dogberry with a change of sex, and that Bob Acres is a second Sir Andrew Aguecheek, seem as unfair to Shakespeare as to Sheridan. Sheridan was a wit; Shakespeare, a humorist. Sheridan passed lightly over the surface of life, while Shakespeare probed its depths. Sheridan's prospect was bounded by the actual horizon. Beyond his ken lay Prospero's isle and the seacoast of Bohemia.

1

1 Confessions of William-Henry Ireland (1805), p. 138.

If literary kinship must be proved between Sheridan and the Elizabethans, it is less with Shakespeare than with Ben Jonson. Jonson's Comedy of Manners painted the affectations and vices of London life, largely delineating such individual peculiarities or "humors" of character as are implied in the names, Fastidius Brisk, Sir Amorous La-Foole, and Sir Epicure Mammon. Equally suggestive in Sheridan are such names as Absolute, Malaprop, Languish, Careless, Snake, Candour, Backbite, and Sneerwell. Furthermore, Sheridan has two highly developed instances of artificial humors in "the oath referential" of Bob Acres, and Mrs. Malaprop's "nice derangement of epitaphs," while, in a broader sense, Faulkland's humor is unreasonable jealousy, as Sir Lucius O'Trigger's humor is love of fighting. Without asserting conscious and direct imitation of Jonson's comedies by Sheridan, the fact is yet apparent that The Rivals and The School for Scandal incline less toward the Shakespearean Comedy of Character than toward the Jonsonian Comedy of Manners.

Despite frequent exaggeration of certain casual resemblances between Shakespeare and Sheridan, there has been singular disregard of perhaps their most noteworthy similarity in dramatic art. In distinguishing Shakespeare's plays from those of other dramatic poets, Coleridge made a primary point of the use of "expectation in preference to surprise,” as a dramatic motive. Shakespeare takes his audience into the secret of Viola's disguise, of Hero's supposed death, of Iago's villainy. With him no "Disinherited Knight" becomes an Ivanhoe; no "Black Knight" eventually unmasks the features of a King of England. In utter contrast to the Shakespearean use of "expectation," two conspicuous Elizabethan dramas sufficiently illustrate the frequent substitution of "surprise" as the dramatic motive. Jonson's Epicone; or, The Silent Woman, hinges on the revelation in the last act that the