strong resemblance to many passages in Sheridan's speeches. All this helped its popularity. Grand addresses in favour of patriotism are always delightful to the galleries, and have at all times a charm for the general imagination; but in those days, when there was actual fighting going on, and France, who had constituted herself the pedagogue of the world, to teach the nations the alphabet of freedom, was supposed to threaten and endanger England with her fiery teaching, it may be supposed to what a height of enthusiasm these exhortations would raise the audience. "They follow an adventurer whom they fear, and obey a power which they hate; we revere a monarch whom we love, a God whom we adore. They boast they come but to improve our state, enlarge our thoughts, and free us from the yoke of error! Yes! they will give enlightened freedom to our minds, who are themselves the slaves of passion, avarice, and pride!" Whether it were under Robespierre or Bonaparte, the common people in England scorned and feared the heated neighbour-nation, which thought itself entitled to dictate to the world; and no doubt the popular mind made a rapid adaptation of these heroic phrases.

It had been hard to move the author to complete The Critic; and the reader will remember the trick of Linley and his coadjutors in those early days when the delays. and evasions of the gay young man were an excellent jest, and their certainty of being able to put all right when they could lock him in with his work had something triumphant in it. But all that was over now; old Linley was dead, and a new generation, who had no worship for Sheridan, and a very clear apprehension of the everlasting confusion produced by his disorderly ways, had taken the place of the light-hearted actors of old. But

notwithstanding the awe-inspiring presence of Mrs. Siddons, and the importance of her brother, the astounding fact that when the curtain fell upon the fourth act of Pizarro these theatrical potentates had not yet seen their parts for the fifth, which they had to study in the interval, is vouched for by various witnesses. It is hard to imagine the state of the actors' minds, the terrible anxiety of the manager, in such an extraordinary dilemma, and still more hard to realise the hopeless confusion in the mind of the man who knew all that was being risked by such a piece of folly, and yet could not nerve himself to the work till the last moment. He was drifting on the rapids by this time, and going headlong to ruin, heedless of everything, name and fame, credit and fortune, the good opinion of his friends, the support of the public, all except the indulgence of the whim of the moment, or of the habit which was leading him to destruction.

He took another step about the same time which might perhaps have redeemed him had it been more wisely set about. He had met one evening, so the story goes, among other more important, and let us hope more well-bred people, a foolish, pretty girl, who, either out of flippant dislike to his looks, or that very transparent agacerie by which foolish men are sometimes attracted in the lower ranks of life, regarded him with exclamations of "Fright! horrid creature!" and the like, something in the style, not of Evelina, but of Miss Burney's vulgar personages. He was by this time forty-four, but ready enough still to take up any such challenge, and either he was piqued into making so frank a critic change her opinions, or the prettiness and foolishness of the girl amused and pleased him. He set to work at once to make her aware that a man of middleage and unhandsome aspect may yet outdo the youngest

and most attractive, and no very great time clapsed before he was completely successful. The lady's father was little pleased with the match. He was a clergyman, the Dean of Winchester, and might well have been indisposed to give his daughter and her five thousand pounds to a man with such a reputation. He made his consent conditional on the settling of fifteen thousand pounds, in addition to her own little fortune, upon her. Sheridan had always been great in financial surprises, and, to the astonishment of the dean, the fifteen thousand was soon forthcoming. He got it this time by new shares of the theatre, thus diminishing his receipts always a little and a little more. A small estate, Polesden, in Surrey, was bought with the money, and for a time all was gaiety and pleasure. It was in order to tell him of this marriage that Sheridan sent for his son, from his tutor and his lessons, on the occasion already referred to, to meet him at Guildford, at an inn of which he had forgotten the name. Four or five days after the anxious tutor received a letter from Tom. "My father I have never seen," wrote the lad, "and all that I can hear of him is that instead of dining with me on Wednesday last, he passed through Guildford on his way to town, with four horses and lamps, about twelve." Like father like son, the youth had remained there, though with only a few shillings in his pockets; but at the end was so "bored and wearied out" that he would have been glad to return even to his books. Finally, he was sent for to London and informed of the mystery. His letter to Smyth disclosing this is so characteristic that it is worth quoting:

"It is not I that am to be married, nor you. Set your heart at rest it is my father himself; the lady a Miss Ogle, who lives at Winchester; and that is the history of the Guildford business.

About my own age-better me to marry her, you will say. I am not of that opinion. My father talked to me two hours last night, and made out to me that it was the most sensible thing he could do. Was not this very clever of him? Well, my dear Mr. S., you should have been tutor to him, you see. I am incomparably the most rational of the two."

Moore describes the immediate result of the new marriage as a renewal of Sheridan's youth. "It is said by those who were in habits of intimacy with him at this period that they had seldom seen his spirits in a state of more buoyant vivacity," and there was perhaps a possibility that the new event might have proved a turningpoint. It is unfair to blame the foolish girl, who had no idea what the dangers were which she had so rashly undertaken to deal with, that she did not reclaim or deliver Sheridan. To do this was beyond her power, as it was beyond his own.

CHAPTER VI.

DECADENCE.

SHERIDAN'S parliamentary career was long, and he took an important part in much of the business of the country; but he never again struck the same high note as that with which he electrified the House on the question of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. His speech in answer to Lord Mornington's denunciation of the Revolution in France, perhaps his next most important effort, was eloquent and striking, but it had not the glow and glitter of the great oration under which the Commons of England held their breath. The French Revolution by this time had ceased to be the popular and splendid outburst of freedom which it had at first appeared. Opinions were now violently divided. The recent atrocities in France had scared England; and all the moving subjects which had inspired Sheridan before, the pictures of innocence outraged and the defenceless slaughtered, were now in the hands of his political opponents. He selected skilfully, however, the points which he could most effectively turn against them, and seizing upon Lord Mornington's description of the sacrifices by which French patriotism was compelled to prove itself, the compulsory loans and services, the privations and poverty amid which the leaders of the Revolution were struggling, drew an effective picture of