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labyrinth of dark and winding passages, almost a day's journey, until he reached his distant and elevated post. "Now, Mr. Holland," cried Sheridan, "are you there and ready?" "Yes," was the immediate answer. "Can you hear me?" "Perfectly, perfectly, Mr. Sheridan !" "Then I wish you a very good morning." So saying Sheridan disappeared, and was two or three miles off before Holland could descend. Another long interval occurred ere he was able to chase the fugitive to his lair again.

Towards the end of 1795, Sheridan contracted a second marriage with Miss Esther Jane Ogle, daughter of the Dean of Winchester. He was then at the ripe age of forty-four, and the lady young enough to be his daughter. She was fascinating and handsome, while constant intemperance had made sad inroads on his personal pretensions. His nose had become red, and his cheeks bloated; yet such were the charms of his manner, mind, and conversation, that he soon changed the original aversion of his selected bride into enthusiastic love. In spite of his pecuniary difficulties, he contrived to raise fifteen thousand pounds (by selling shares in Drury-lane Theatre), which sum the Dean required to be settled upon his daughter and her children, should she have any, in addition to five thousand which he contributed himself. These conditions comprised the sine qua non of his consent, and being complied with, an estate called Polesden, at Leatherhead in Surrey, was purchased with the money, and carefully invested in the name of Mrs. Sheridan and her future offspring. Here was a second lovematch, not quite so romantic as the first, but fully as ardent in mutual affection.

Sheridan, like many other clever people of expanded minds, was prone to superstition. He had implicit confidence in dreams, with a full reliance on lucky and unlucky days. Nothing could induce him to travel, or allow a new play to be brought out, on a Friday. On the 14th of December, 1797, a drama was produced, the unexpected run of which relieved for a while the embarrassments of the theatre, and replenished the exhausted treasury. This was The Castle Spectre, by Lewis, the author of "The Monk." The great success of this piece, which is in truth a jumble of absurdity, may be quoted as

a striking proof that popularity is a very uncertain criterion of merit. With the exception, perhaps, of Pizarro and Bluebeard, The Castle Spectre brought more cash than any piece that had been produced for twenty years. The ghost, which was expected to be the cause of failure, proved the great source of attraction. George Frederick Cooke, in his journal, says: "I hope it will not be hereafter believed that The Castle Spectre could draw crowded houses when the most sublime productions of the immortal Shakspeare were played to empty benches." Reader, pause and ponder over the unfathomable eccentricities of public taste. A story is told, that towards the end of the season Sheridan and Lewis had some dispute in the greenroom, when the latter offered, in confirmation of his arguments, to bet Mr. S. all the money which The Castle Spectre had brought that he was right. "No," replied the manager, "I cannot afford to bet so much, Mat.; but I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll bet you all it is worth!" This retort was as witty as it was ungrateful and illtimed, and proves that Sheridan, under any circumstances, could never resist the temptation of a joke.

The Castle Spectre produced but a temporary lull in the storm of pecuniary difficulty by which the management of Drury-lane Theatre was continually beset. Sheridan found himself compelled to resume the dramatic pen he had so long abandoned, and after an interval of twenty years employed his genius on an amalgamation of Kotzebue's two dramas of The Virgin of the Sun and The Death of Rolla ; out of which, through the medium of previous English translations, with much original matter, he compounded the far-famed romantic play of Pizarro, or The Spaniards in Peru. No play has been more abused, yet none was ever so successful. It has been called an unworthy prostitution of Sheridan's brilliant talents, a monstrous melodrama in five acts, an absurd, inflated, unnatural farrago, with many other vituperative epithets too numerous to detail. Yet what modern manager would not rejoice to stumble on such a mine of gold? We shrewdly suspect too that if now presented for the first time, the interest of the story, and the dramatic strength of the leading characters, would carry it over all objections. The first representation

took place on the 24th of May, 1799. It was so late in the season that there was no room for more than thirty-one repetitions, but for several following years the attraction continued with unabated interest. Many stories are told with respect to the difficulty of getting Sheridan to finish the play, on which the very existence of the theatre depended. Neither duns from without, nor disaffection within, could arouse him from his prevailing sin of procrastination. It has been said that the fifth act was not complete when the curtain went up for the first, and that the last scene was handed to the actors while the ink was wet, and the paper blotted with corrections. It has been also affirmed that Sheridan refused eight hundred pounds for the copyright, that he afterwards accepted one thousand, and also that he declined both offers, and finally published the play on his own account. If so, his profit must have been enormous, for before the expiration of 1811, twentynine editions, each of one thousand copies, had passed through the press. The greater part of his alterations are highly judicious; and many poetical passages are introduced which are pleasing and impressive, whether listened to from the stage or perused in the closet. The scenic effects are numerous and striking, and the leading personages afford great scope to great actors. John Kemble was magnificent in Rolla; and Mrs. Siddons, although at first she disliked Elvira, found that the part added much to her reputation. She was singularly unfortunate throughout her career in original cha racters. This was the best that fell to her lot, and by this scale the value of the others may be estimated.

No speech was ever better calculated to entrap applause than Rolla's address to the soldiers, which is entirely Sheridan's, and not in the original. It was evidently intended as an ad captandum reference to the war with the French Republic and a philippic against the principles of the Revolution; yet nothing is said which might not with perfect propriety be addressed to an army of Peruvians. Such was the popularity of this tragedy, that the King, George III., could not resist his desire to see it. He had not been at Drury-lane for some years. Many

causes have been assigned for his dislike to the theatre; some sufficiently absurd such as a personal dislike to Sheridan because he was a Whig, a partisan of Fox, and an intimate associate of the Prince of Wales; but the most probable one is, that he had commanded two pieces, which, on account of the complicated machinery, could not be acted on the same evening unless he chose to wait two or three hours between the play and the farce -a delay little suited to the legitimate impatience of royalty. The intimation of the difficulty was given in a manner not considered as consonant with court etiquette.

Mr. Pitt having also been induced to see Pizarro, was asked his opinion. "If you mean," said he, "what Sheridan wrote, there is nothing new in it, for I have heard it all long ago, in his speeches at Hastings's trial." One of the finest ideas seems to have been borrowed from Burke. Rolla says, "I am as a blighted plantain, standing alone amid the sandy desert-nothing seeks or lives beneath my shelter. Thou art a husband and a father." The reader that can lay his hand on Burke's celebrated letter to the Duke of Bedford, will find that the writer, then a widower, and deprived of his only son, makes a similar comparison in language still more noble and affecting. We do not recollect the precise words, but their tenor is the same. Sheridan with becoming though unusual gallantry, inscribed Pizarro to his wife, in the following words:"To her, whose approbation of this drama, and whose peculiar delight in the applause it has received from the public, has been to me the highest gratification its success has produced, I dedicate this play."

During the high tide of the Pizarro mania, a descriptive burlesque song appeared in the papers, and obtained notoriety enough to be perpetuated in the "Annual Register." Some said it was written by Colman, others attributed it to Porson. The learned professor, though a professed Grecian, was a humorous man withal, and indulged in jocularity (particularly in his cups), not always restrained "within the limits of becoming mirth." The deeply studious but eccentric mind which conceived the "Devil's Walk,"*

• "The Devil's Walk," so long attributed to Porson, is now claimed as the property of Coleridge.

and "Lingo drawn for the Militia," might as easily, in the relaxation of hora subseciva, descend to the following jeu d'esprit :

PIZARRO-AN EXCELLENT NEW SONG.

"As I walked through the Strand, so careless and

gay,

I met a young girl who was wheeling a barrow : Choice fruit, sir,' said she, and a bill of the play,' So my apples I bought, and set off for Pizarro.

"When I got to the door I was squeez'd, and cried dear me

I wonder they made the entrance so narrow ;' At last I got in, and found every one near me Was busily talking of Mr. Pizarro.

"Lo! the hero appears-what a strut and a strideHe might easily pass for Field-Marshal Suwarrow; And Elvira so tall, neither virgin nor bride,

But the loving companion of gallant Pizarro.

"This Elvira, alas! turn'd so dull and so prosy, That I long'd for a hornpipe by little Del Caro; Had I been 'mongst the gods, I had surely cried, Nosey,

Come play up a jig, and a fig for Pizarro!'

"On his wife and his child his affection to pay, Alonzo stood gazing as straight as an arrow; But of him I have only this little to say,

That his boots were much neater than those of Pizarro!

"Then the priestess and virgins, in robes white and flowing,

Walked solemnly on, like a sow and her farrow, And politely informed the whole house they were going

To entreat heaven's curses on miscreant Pizarro.

"Then at it they went-how they made us all stare: One growl'd like a bear, and one chirp'd like a sparrow;

I listened, but all I could learn, I declare,

Was, that vengeance would certainly fall on Pizarro.

"Rolla made a fine speech, with such logic and gran.mar,

As must sure rouse the envy of Counsellor GarrowIt would sell for five pounds, were it brought to the hammer

For it rais'd all Peru against valiant Pizarro.

"Four acts are tol, lol-but the fifth's my delight, Where history's traced with the pen of a Varro; And Elvira in black, and Alonzo in white,

Put an end to the piece by killing Pizarro.

"I have finished my song. If I had but a tuneNancy Dawson' won't do, nor The Sweet Braes of Yarrow '

I vow I could sing it from morning to noon,
So much am I charmed with the play of Pizarro!"

Pizarro, like the Castle Spectre, could only feed the endless wants of the theatrical exchequer for a limited period. The usual negligence and inattention to business soon brought back the ever-recurring difficulties. Many questions and claims required the interference of the Lord Chancellor, who always decided with as much delicacy and consideration for Sheridan as he could possibly exercise in consistency with his high office. The manager's means were increased

by his appointment to the post of Receiver-General of the Duchy of Cornwall for his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. During the short administration of Mr. Fox, in 1806, he was made Treasurer of the Navy. The office was inferior to what a person of his ability, with more regular habits, might have expected; but the salary was acceptable, and his enjoyment of it unfortunately brief. On the 24th of February, 1809, Sheridan experienced the heaviest calamity of his life Drury-lane being, on that evening, totally consumed by fire. As this was a Friday in Lent, there had been no performance. The same catastrophe had befallen Covent Garden only five months before, on the 19th of September, 1808; so that the two great metropolitan theatres were levelled to their foundations at the same time. The close recurrence of two such conflagrations excited much suspicion that the second was intentional; but on a strict examination it appeared to have resulted, like the first, from accident, or more properly, from shameful neglect. It was proved that the stove in the upper coffee-room was of slight construction: the workmen who had been employed during the day had made a much larger fire than it was customary to make there, the remains of which were left in it at four o'clock in the afternoon. It is reasonable to suppose that the fire had communicated with the surrounding woodwork, and had been gaining strength from that time until about eleven at night, when it burst forth. Before twelve the whole of the interior was one blaze; at three the flames had nearly subsided, and nothing remained but a vast congeries of ruins. From the date of this unfortunate event, Sheridan's fate appears to have been definitively sealed. The source of immediate supply was cut off; and when the new theatre opened in 1812, he ceased to have any connexion with the management. His conduct while at the head of this great national concern has been too severely condemned by Watkins, and too leniently extenuated by Moore. The balance of truth lies between the two statements. Sheridan laboured under many peculiar habits which unfitted him for the complicated duties of his office; but want of capital may be pronounced the overwhelming influence which, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up all

minor deficiencies. He began in debt, and had no sinking fund to hold out even a dream of liquidation. He behaved ill to King, his first deputy manager; worse to Kemble, the second, and treated authors with systematic neglect. The performers suffered greatly by his extravagance. Miss Pope, though an economist, was at one time compelled to sell stock to meet her current expenses, notwithstanding that a large sum was due to her for weekly salary. Others were subjected to similar inconvenience— and all were obliged to take twentyfive per cent. in substitution of arrears.

Sheridan was in the House of Commons when news arrived of the destruction of the theatre by fire. Every eye turned towards him, and a motion for adjournment was immediately made as a token of general respect; but, with Roman composure, he said,

that whatever might be the extent of his private calamity, he hoped it would not be suffered to interfere with the public business of the country." It appears quite certain that he remained at his post, which destroys all the anecdotes that have been told of his joking on his own misfortune. In 1812 he lost his seat in Parliament, having no longer money, nor offices with which to purchase the votes of independent electors. From that time forward his few remaining years present little to vary the roll of the muffled drum, and the gradual approach of the funeral bell. He had now no temporary resource in the nightly receipts of the theatre: his person was open to arrest, and he actually underwent the indignity of being taken to a sponging-house. His books, in splendid bindings, the gifts of holiday friends, were consigned to the shelves of the pawnbrokers; the cup, presented by the constituency of Stafford, went after them; and the portrait of his first wife disappeared from the walls which it had so long graced as a genius loci.

The stipulations which regarded the interest or claims of Sheridan on the new theatre, were cruelly framed, and still more harshly enforced, by Whitbread, who was a cold, systematic, calculating, organised embodiment of business-as different from the person he had to deal with as light and darkness. But the broken man was obliged to succumb to the flourishing capitalist.

Sheridan left behind him fragments of an unfinished opera, intended to be called The Foresters. He often alluded to this in conversation, particularly when any regret was expressed at his having ceased to assist Old Drury with his pen. "Wait," he would say, smiling, "until I bring out my Foresters." Moore says that the plot of this musical piece, as far as can be judged by the few meagre scenes that exist, seems to have been intended as an improvement upon that of an earlier drama, from which he has given extracts. the devils in the first being transformed into foresters in the last.

The similarity will not be easily apparent to the reader who compares the two; but Moore does not seem to have had the least suspicion that Sheridan borrowed many of the leading circumstances of his drama from The Goblins of Sir John Suckling. Moore has given the whole of a love scene between the Huntsman and Regenella. A comparison between this and the concluding scene of the third act of The Goblins, will show that the former is very nearly a literal transcript of the latter-Sheridan having merely converted into prose what Suckling had originally written in the metrical

form.

It was not likely that the ex-manager would feel much inclination to enter the walls on sufferance, within which he had so long ruled as arbitrary sovereign. The compliment of a private box had been offered to Mrs. Sheridan by the Drury-lane committee, but three years elapsed before he availed himself of the privilege. At the end of that time he was persuaded by the late Earl of Essex to dine with, and accompany him afterwards to see Edmund Kean, of whom he had formed a very high opinion, and whom he had only once heard in private read Othello. On this occasion he was tempted, after the play had terminated, to enter the green-room, where his presence was most cordially greeted, and where, surrounded by familiar faces, and the revival of old associations, he recalled the remembrance of the happy past, indulged in all his fascinating powers of conversation, and snatched an hour or two from the pressure of the brooding nightmare which haunted him without intermission, and was hurrying him rapidly to his grave.

Much has been said and written in abuse of the late King George IV. for

his alleged ingratitude to Sheridan, and total desertion of an attached friend and supporter, who had devoted his talents to his service. But here, as in many other cases, gross exaggeration has superseded truth, which is not to be found in the harmoniously flowing, but bitterly expressed, verses of Moore, wherein he says, with reference to a sum proffered by the King, then Prince Regent, when Sheridan was on his death-bed:

"The pittance which shame had wrung from thee at last,

And which found all his wants at an end, was returned!"

That in the lines alluded to, Moore conveyed the opinions of Sheridan's friends, is certain; but it is equally a fact, that when he lost his interest in the theatre and his seat in parliament, the Prince offered, at his own expense, to get him returned for a borough; and that he also came forward to interpose between him and the harassing threats of arrest and imprisonment. It was said in the Westminster and Quarterly Reviews, that he had actually presented Sheridan with four thousand pounds, to which statement Moore gives no credit; but the Edinburgh Review, in an elaborate notice of the sparkling poet's life of the deceased orator, thus speaks to the question: :

"With regard to the alleged gift of £4,000 by his Majesty, we have the most sincere pleasure in saying that we have every reason to believe that the illustrious person is fully entitled to the credit of that act of beneficence, though, according to our information, its unhappy object did not derive from it the benefit that was inintended. The sum, which we have heard was about £3,000, was, by his Royal Highness's order, placed in the hands of an attorney for Sheridan's benefit, but was then either attached by his creditors, or otherwise dissipated in such a manner that very little of it actually reached its destination. Nor is it to be forgotten, that however desirous his Royal Highness might have been to assist Sheridan, he was himself an embarrassed man; he had been careless of his own expenditure, and there was not in his treasury the means adequate to afford the relief he might have felt an inclination to give. Every portion of the Prince's revenue was appropriated long before it was received; and though there was a sum annually devoted to objects of charity and to

works of benevolence, there was little left for the casual instances which presented themselves. But is was not royal munificence that was required, it was the assistance of his own immediate family that was denied him. The whole of his debts did not amount to five thousand pounds, and Mrs. Sheridan's settlement had been fifteen thousand; and however kind her conduct was towards him from the first moment of his malady, she does not seem to have influenced her friends to step forward to his pecuniary relief. All that has been affirmed of his forlorn situation at the hour of his death is borne out by the testimony of those who saw the utter poverty to which he was reduced. A neglected house, the most deplorable want of the common necessaries of life, of decent control over the servants, whose carelessness even of the physi cian's prescriptions, was remarked-do not speak of a wife's domestic management, however pure may have been her affections." It is but fair that this statement should be considered on the one side, while such opposite ones are put forward on the other. A comparison of evidence is the only true mode by which to arrive at a just sentence.

On Sunday, the 7th of July, 1816, Sheridan died in his destitution, and in the sixty-fifth year of his age. A report of a very shocking nature was spread, to the effect that the inanimate corpse had been seized and carried off by his creditors. The laws of the country would not permit such an abuse, which never occurred; although it is certain that a sheriff's officer had arrested the expiring sufferer, and was preparing to take him to prison in his blankets. The rumour of the violation of the dead arose from the circumstance of the body having been removed from Saville-row to Great Georgestreet, Westminster, the residence of Mr. Peter Moore, an attached friend of the deceased, as being nearer to the abbey, and more convenient for a walking funeral. On the following Saturday, all that was mortal of the once fascinating companion, matchless orator, and unapproachable wit, was conveyed to the grave. Then the great and influential of the land, who had held aloof from the bedchamber of the dying man, came forward to render empty honour to his inanimate remains. The "long parade of woe was graced by the presence of royalty, while princes and nobles eagerly press

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