their foolish heads together in this crisis of fate-the girl thoroughly frightened, the youth full of chivalrous determination to protect her, and doubtless not without a hotheaded young lover's hope to turn it to his own advantage. He proposed that she should fly to France, and there take refuge in a convent till the danger should be over. His own family had left France only a few years before, and the sister, who was Eliza's friend, would recommend her to the kind nuns at St. Quentin, where she had herself been brought up. "He would go with me to protect me, and after he had seen me settled he would return to England and place my conduct in such a light that the world would applaud and not condemn me."

Such was the wonderful expedient by which the difficulties of this terrible crisis were surmounted. Her mother was ill and the house in great disorder, and under cover of the accidental commotion young Sheridan handed the agitated girl into a chair-his sister, who was in the secret, and, no doubt, in high excitement too, coming secretly to help her to pack up her clothes; and that night they posted off to London. "Sheridan had engaged the wife of one of his servants to go with me as a maid without my knowledge. You may imagine how pleased I was with his delicate behaviour." This last particular reaches the very heights of chivalry, for, no doubt, it must have been quite a different matter to the impassioned boy to conduct the flight with a commonplace matron seated in his post-chaise between him and his beautiful Delia, instead of the tête-à-tête which he might so easily have secured. Next day they crossed the Channel to the little sandy port of Dunkirk and were safe.

And it would seem that the rash young lover was very

honest and really meant to carry out this mad project; for she did eventually reach her convent, whither he attended her with punctilious respect. But when they were fairly launched upon their adventurous career either common sense or discreet acquaintances soon made it apparent to the young man that a youth and a maiden, however virtuous, cannot rove about the world in this way without comment, and that there was but one thing to be done in the circumstances. Perhaps Miss Linley had begun to feel something more than the mere "preference for the youngest," which she had so calmly announced, or perhaps it was only the desperate nature of the circumstances that made her yield. But, however that may be, the two fugitives went through the ceremony of marriage at Calais, though they seem to have separated immediately afterwards, carrying out the high sentimental and Platonic romance to the end.

It is a curious commentary, however, upon the prodigality of the penniless class to which Sheridan belonged that he could manage to start off suddenly upon this journey out of Thomas Sheridan's shifty household, where money was never abundant, a boy of twenty, with nothing of his own-hurrying up to London with post-horses, and hiring magnificently "the wife of one of his servants" to attend upon his love. The words suggest a retinue of retainers, and the journey itself would have taxed the resources of a youth much better endowed than Sheridan. Did he borrow, or run chivalrously into debt? or how did he manage it? His sister "assisted them with money out of her little fund for household expenses," but that would not go far. Perhaps the friend in London (a "respectable brandy-merchant") to whom he introduced Miss Linley as an heiress who had eloped with him, may have helped

on such a warrant to furnish the funds. But there is nothing more remarkable than the ease with which these impecunious gallants procure post-chaises, servants, and luxuries in those dashing days. The young men think nothing of a headlong journey from Bath to London and back again, which, notwithstanding all our increased facilities of locomotion, penniless youths of to-day would hesitate about. To be sure, it is possible that credit was to be had at the livery-stables, whereas, fortunately, none is possible at the railway-station. Post-horses seem to have been an affair of every day to the heroes of the Crescent and the Parade.

Meanwhile everything was left in commotion at home. Charles Sheridan, the elder brother, had left Bath and gone to the country in such dejection, after Miss Linley's final refusal of his addresses, as became a sentimental lover. When Richard went off triumphant with the lady his sisters were left alone, in great excitement and agitation; and their landlord, thinking the girls required "protection," according to the language of the time, set out at break of day to bring back the rejected from his retirement. The feelings of Charles on finding that his younger brother, whom even the girls did not know to be a lover of Miss Linley, had carried off the prize, may be imagined. But the occasion of the elopement, the designing villain of the piece—the profligate whose pursuit had driven the lady to despair-was furious. Miss Linley had, no doubt, left some explanation of the extraordinary step she was taking with her parents, and Sheridan appears to have taken the same precaution and disclosed the reasons which prompted her flight. When Matthews heard of this he published the following advertisement in a Bath newspaper:

"Mr. Richard S******* having attempted, in a letter left behind him for that purpose, to account for his scandalous method of running away from this place by insinuations derogatory to my character and that of a young lady innocent so far as relates to me or my knowledge; since which he has neither taken any notice of letters, or even informed his own family of the place where he has hid himself: I can no longer think he deserves the treatment of a gentleman, and therefore shall trouble myself no further about him than, in this public method, to post him as a L *** and a treacherous S********

"And as I am convinced there have been many malevolent incendiaries concerned in the propagation of this infamous lie, if any of them, unprotected by age, infirmities, or profession, will dare to acknowledge the part they have acted, and affirm to what they have said of me, they may depend on receiving the proper reward of their villainy in the most public manner."

This fire-eating paragraph was signed with the writer's name, and it may be imagined what a delightful commotion it made in such a metropolis of scandal and leisure, and with what excitement all the frequenters of the Pumproom and the assemblies looked for the next incident. Some weeks elapsed before they were satisfied, but the following event was striking enough to content the most sensational imagination. It would seem to have been April before a clue was found to the fugitives, and Linley started at once from Bath to recover his daughter. He found her, to his great relief, doubtless, in the house of an English doctor in Lisle, who had brought her there from her convent, and placed her under his wife's care to be nursed when she was ill. Everything, it was evident, had been done in honour, and the musician seems to have been so thankful to find things no worse that he took the young people's explanations in good part. He would even seem to have made some sort of conditional promise that she should no longer be compelled to perform in public after

she had fulfilled existing engagements, and so brought her back peacefully to Bath. Richard, who in the mean time, in his letters home, had spoken of his bride as Miss L., announcing her settlement in her convent, without the slightest intimation of any claim on his part upon her, seems to have returned with them; but no one, not even Miss Linley's father, was informed of the Calais marriage, which seems, in all good faith, to have been a form gone through in case any scandal should be raised, but at present meaning nothing more. And Bath, with all its scandal-mongers, at a period when the general imagination was far from delicate, seems to have accepted the escapade with a confidence in both the young people, and entire belief in their honour, which makes us think better both of the age and the town. We doubt whether such faith would be shown in the hero and heroine of a similar freak in our own day. Young Sheridan, however, came home to no peaceable reception. He had to meet his indignant brother, in the first place, and to settle the question raised by the insulting advertisement of Matthews, which naturally set his youthful blood boiling. Before his return to Bath he had seen this villain in London, who had the audacity to disclaim the advertisement and attribute it to Charles Sheridan-a suggestion which naturally brought the young man home furious. The trembling sisters, delighted to welcome Richard, and cager to know all about his adventure, had their natural sentiments checked by the gloomy looks with which the brothers met, and went to bed reluctantly that first evening, hearing the young men's voices high and angry, and anticipating with horror a quarrel between them. Next morning neither of them appeared. They had gone off again with those so-easily-obtained post-horses to London.