The Irishman's vanity, prodigality, and hasty assumption of an importance to which he had no right could scarcely be better exemplified-nor, perhaps, the reader will say, the privileged arrogance of the great critic. It is more easy to condone the careless extravagance of the one than the deliberate insolence of the other. The comment,

however, is just enough; and so, perhaps, was his description of the Irishman's attempt to improve the elocution of his contemporaries. "What influence can Mr. Sheridan have upon the language of this great country by his narrow exertions?" asks the great lexicographer. "Sir, it is burning a candle at Dover to show light at Calais." But when Johnson says, "Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull: but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in nature”—we acknowledge the wit, but doubt the fact. Thomas Sheridan very likely wanted humour, and was unable to perceive when he made himself ridiculous, as in the case of the medal; but we want a great deal more evidence to induce us to believe that the son of the jovial Dublin priest, and the father of Sheridan the great, could have been dull. He was very busy-" bustling," as Boswell calls him, his schemes going to his head, his vanity and enthusiasm combined making him feel himself an unappreciated reformer-a prophet thrown away upon an ungrateful age. But stupidity had nothing to do with his follies. He was "a wrong-headed, whimsical man," Dr. Parr tells us, but adds, "I respected him, and he really liked me and did me some important services." "I once or twice met his (Richard Sheridan's) mother: she was quite celestial." Such are the testimonies of their con

temporaries.

It was not long, however, that the pair were able to re

main in London. There is a whimsical indication of the state of distress into which Thomas Sheridan soon fell in the mention by Boswell of "the extraordinary attention in his own country" with which he had been "honoured,"

by having had " an exception made in his favour in an

Irish Act of Parliament concerning insolvent debtors." "Thus to be singled out," says Johnson, "by Legislature as an object of public consideration and kindness is a proof of no common merit." It was a melancholy kind of proof, however, and one which few would choose to be gratified by. The family went to France, leaving their boys at Harrow, scraping together apparently as much as would pay their expenses there-no small burden upon a struggling man. And at Blois, in 1766, Mrs. Sheridan died. "She appears," says Moore, "to have been one of those rare women who, united to men of more pretensions but less real intellect than themselves, meekly conceal this superiority even from their own hearts, and pass their lives without a remonstrance or murmur in gently endeavouring to repair those evils which the indiscretion or vanity of their partners have brought upon them." Except that she found him at seven an impenetrable dunce, there is no record of any tie of sympathy existing between Mrs. Sheridan and her brilliant boy.

"There was little in

He had not perhaps, indeed, ever appeared in this character during his mother's lifetime. At Harrow he made but an unsatisfactory appearance. his boyhood worth communication," says Dr. Parr, whose long letter on the subject all Sheridan's biographers quote; "he was inferior to many of his schoolfellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by Latin or English composition, either in prose or verse." This is

curious enough; but it is not impossible that the wayward boy, if he did adventure himself in verse, would think it best to keep his youthful compositions sacred from a master's eye. Verse writers, both in the dead languages and in the living, flourished at Harrow in those days of whom no one has heard since, "but Richard Sheridan aspired to no rivalry with either of them." Notwithstanding this absence of all the outward show of talent, Parr was not a man to remain unconscious of the glimmer of genius in the Irish boy's bright eyes. When he found that Dick would not construe as he ought, he laid plans to take him with craft, and "did not fail to probe and tease him":

"I stated his case with great good humour to the upper master, who was one of the best tempered men in the world: and it was agreed between us that Richard should be called oftener and worked more severely. The varlet was not suffered to stand up in his place, but was summoned to take his station near the master's table, where the voice of no prompter could reach him; and in this defenceless condition he was so harassed that he at last gathered up some grammatical rules and prepared himself for his lessons. While this tormenting process was inflicted upon him I now and then upbraided him. But you will take notice that he did not incur any corporal punishment for his idleness: his industry was just sufficient to keep him from disgrace. All the while Sumner and I saw in him vestiges of a superior intellect. His eye, his countenance, his general manner, were striking; his answers to any common question were prompt and acute. We knew the esteem and even admiration which somehow or other all his schoolfellows felt for him. He was mischievous enough, but his pranks were accompanied by a sort of vivacity and cheerfulness which delighted Sumner and myself. I had much talk with him about his apple loft, for the supply of which all the gardens in the neighbourhood were taxed, and some of the lower boys were employed to furnish it. I threatened, but without asperity, to trace the depredators through his associates up to the leader. He with perfect good humour set me at defiance, and I never could bring home the charge to him. All boys and all masters were pleased with him."

The amount of "good humour" in this sketch is enough to make the Harrow of last century look like a paradise; and the humorous torture to which young Sheridan was subjected shows a high sense of the appropriate either in "the best tempered man in the world," or in the learned doctor who loved to set forth his own doings and judgment in the best light, and had the advantage of telling his story after events had shown what the pupil was. Parr, however, modestly disowns the credit of having developed the intellectual powers of Sheridan, and neither were they stimulated into literary effort by Sumner, the head-master of Harrow, who was a friend of his father, and had, therefore, additional opportunities of knowing the boy's capabilities. "We both of us discovered great talents which neither of us were capable of calling into action while Sheridan was a schoolboy," Parr says. In short, it is evident that the boy, always popular and pleasant, amusing and attracting his schoolfellows, and on perfectly amicable terms with the masters, even when he was doubtful about his lesson, took no trouble whatever with his work, and cared nothing for the honours of school. He kept himself afloat, and that was all. His sins were not grievous in any way. He had it not in his power to be extravagant, for Thomas Sheridan in his bankrupt condition must have had hard enough ado to keep his boys at Harrow at all. But it is very clear that neither scholarship nor laborious mental exertion of any kind tempted him. He took the world lightly and gaily, and enjoyed his schoolboy years all the more that there was nothing of the struggle of young ambition in them. When his family came back from France, shortly after the mother's death, it is with a little gush of enthusiasm that his sister describes her first meeting after

long separation with the delightful brother whom she had half-forgotten, and who appears like a young hero in all the early bloom of seventeen, with his Irish charm and his Harrow breeding, to the eyes of the little girl, accustomed, no doubt, to shabby enough gentlemen in the cheap retreats of English poverty in France:

"He was handsome, not merely in the eyes of a partial sister, but generally allowed to be so. His cheeks had the glow of health, his eyes-the finest in the world-the brilliancy of genius, and were soft as a tender and affectionate heart could render them. The same playful fancy, the same sterling and innoxious wit that was shown afterwards in his writings, cheered and delighted the family circle. I admired-I almost adored him!"

No doubt the handsome, merry boy was a delightful novelty in the struggling family, where even the girls were taught to mouth verses, and the elder brother had begun to accompany his father on his half-vagabond career as a lecturer, to give examples of the system of elocution upon which he had concentrated all his faculties. After a short stay in London the family went to Bath, where for a time they settled, the place in its high days of fashion being propitious to all the arts. The father, seldom at home, lived a hard enough life, lecturing, teaching, sometimes playing, pursuing his favourite object as hotly as was practicable through all the struggles necessary to get a living, such as it was, now abundant, now meagre, for his family; while the girls and boys lived a sort of hap-hazard existence in the gay city, getting what amusement they could-motherless, and left to their own resources, yet finding society of a sufficiently exciting kind among the visitors with whom the town overflowed, and the artist-folk who entertained them. Here, while Charles worked with his father, Richard would seem to have done nothing at all, but doubtless