bethan tragedy. Although Boswell obsequiously kissed the sacred pages of this hoax and declared he could now die happy, the skeptical audience detected the false ring of such base metal on the first night. Would Garrick have been so obtuse? Especially in youth and even down to the last of his life Sheridan seemed ignorant of the literary grace of spelling; he wrote Whether as wether, where as were, which as wich, and thing as think, and the double s and m were too frequently single. For him the gods had not emptied their chest marked "Scholarship."

But whom the gods love need not be learned. Of what avail is heavy-eyed scholarship against the insinuating, mordant subtleties of Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite? Even at the moment when he was bemoaning Sheridan's impatience with his studies, Dr. Parr glowed over the youth's attractive personality. And so, indeed, it was. "I admired-I almost adored him,' wrote his sister: "I would most willingly have sacrificed my life for him." A stripling of twenty-one, he captured the heart of Elizabeth Linly, "Maid of Bath," as the enthusiastic called her, when she was enjoying with the naïveté of a girl of seventeen the hot suits of Nathaniel Halhed, Charles Sheridan, Mr. Long, and Captain Matthews, villain of her youth, and the admiration of half of all England's young men. It was said that when this paragon of loveliness gave concerts at Oxford the students could scarcely breathe, such was the effect upon them of her charm of face and manner, and sweetness of voice. "I am petrified," said Halhed in describing her concert. Once she had refused Sheridan; once he had given her up and begged only that he might be forever her friend, as the others had not. Yet it was he, unknown in Bath save for a clever skit or two and as the son of a maundering, pedantic actor and elocution teacher, who skilfully uncovered the foul object of Captain Matthew's suit, whisked Miss Linly off to a French convent more secretly and expeditiously than he did anything else as long as he lived, challenged Captain Matthews in a London coffee-house (after the party had been scared away from Hyde Park), broke through the captain's guard and broke his sword; and fought him again in a desperate duel at Kingsdown where the impetuous youth nearly lost his life. "My husband, my husband!” cried "Lizzy" instinctively when the

startling news reached her ears as she was returning to Bath in a coach; and thus at the moment which a Scott or a Bulwer-Lytton would have chosen, she betrayed the secret of her marriage to him in France.

Not learning but youth succeeds in the writing of artificial comedy. Congreve wrote his best before he was twenty-five. Farquhar wrote The Constant Couple at twenty-two, and everything else before he was thirty. And Sheridan was no sooner settled down in London as the fortunate and nearly famous youth upon whom Miss Linly had smiled than he, too, succeeded with comedy. Necessity drove him to the task. Lucky for them that the doddering old Mr. Long, rejected by "Lizzy" some time previous, had endowed her with £3000, half of which she still retained; for Sheridan had no money of his own, and despite the protest of musical London he would not let her sing again in public. "He resolved wisely and nobly, to be sure," declared Dr. Johnson when Boswell plied him on that subject which was then the tittle-tattle of London. "He is a brave man. Would not a gentleman be disgraced by having his wife sing publicly for hire? No, Sir, there can be no doubt here. I know not if I should not prepare myself for a public singer, as readily as let my wife be one.' Their dwindling fortunes Sheridan reëstablished within a year by the production of The Rivals at Covent Garden, which soon set the town agog and was played by other companies in Bath and Liverpool. The celebrity which surrounded the marriage of sowell loved a singer as Miss Linly (celebrated by the irrepressible Foote in A Tripto Calais and The Maid of Bath) was now augmented by the fulgurant genius of her husband. They were invited to the great houses-even by so snobbish a woman as the Duchess of Richmond-and their life became one of unending gaiety. Great people came to their snug abode; the young people were rare entertainers; Charles Fox said some years later, "An evening at Sheridan's is worth a week's waiting for." Yet Sheridan did not fritter away his time; he got up at sunrise, or worked with light and a glass of port after the guests had departed towards midnight. Within the next four years he squeezed into this glamorous life the writing of a rough-and-ready farce, a comic opera which ran twelve nights longer than the formidable (and much

more substantial) Beggar's Opera, a stop-gap and fairly emasculate version of Vanbrugh's licentious Relapse, and crowned his career in the theatre with The School for Scandal, which filled the empty coffers of his Drury Lane Theatre. Once again two years later his wit was keen enough for The Critic, which had a long showing in the theatre, although a contemporary critic observed it was “a species of dramatic entertainment entirely critical, and very little relished or understood by the British public in general.” But all the jests and sardonic jibes of that merry farce he had forgotten when he essayed the phlegmatic and swollen Pizarro twenty years afterwards. An anonymous critique of this play printed at Manchester in 1799 described it as

Five ling'ring acts stuff'd full of stage devices,

Five acts of pantomime at playhouse prices!!!

His day in the theatre was resplendent with the wit which the gods had given him. It soon ran out. Lamb termed Pizarro a “procession of verbiage stalking on the stage." Lamb had seen The School for Scandal (on complimentary tickets) when Palmer was acting Joseph Surface.

III

Wit never ran so high in England as it did in Sheridan's society. Wit was highly esteemed and assiduously cultivated in the days of Addison, of Vanbrugh and the writers of the drama of sensibility, of Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Mrs. Aphra Behn; but at best it was categorical, and at worst obscene. In Sheridan it was spontaneous, nimble and irrepressible. It was, moreover, spotlessly pure; doubtful stories which were not so coarse as to offend the ears of women were sometimes disagreeable to him, and at his wife's request were not repeated in his presence. His bon mots fill an ample volume compiled by an enthusiastic defender and hack. His house was a whirl of gaiety and high spirits where the most brilliant English society came with high expectations that were well gratified in the give-and-take of jest and rebounding humor. Nor was Sheridan always eclectic in the quality of his humor; on occasion he descended to the obviousness of practical jokes or horseplay. Bacchus had a hand in his creation; the slap

stick buffoonery of Scarron and Rabelais was there. At one time, having covered the floor of a dark passage with plates and dishes packed close together, Sheridan provoked his friend Tickell into giving chase. Having left a path for his own escape he ran through easily, but Tickell crashed on the china and was cut in several places. Again, during a house party near Osterly (General Burgoyne was among the guests) Sheridan proposed that a certain divine who was visiting them should deliver the sermon next Sunday in the local parish. The clergyman's objection that he had no sermon Sheridan met by writing one himself on the Abuse of Riches. The clergyman delivered it in his best pulpit style; but several months later to his undying chagrin he discovered that it was throughout a personal attack upon a rich member of the parish, and a friend, who was just then unpopular for his treatment of the poor. Riding through the streets of London one day in a coach for which he could not pay the hire, Sheridan saw his argumentative friend Richardson on the street and invited him inside. Whereupon Sheridan lost no time in engaging him in conversation on a subject which easily piqued Richardson. At the proper moment Sheridan declared he could not think of staying in the coach with a person who could use such vile language, got down into the street and, while Richardson shouted heated last words through the glass, left him responsible for the heavy fare. In the heyday of his membership in Parliament Sheridan spent reckless and hilarious evenings at Brookes's famous club in St. James Street, at the "Bedford" in Covent Garden, and was a member of a sportive, informal club which met at the Salutation Tavern kept by Dame Butler in an alley off Covent Garden. There he revelled none too delicately with the Prince of Wales, Charles Howard, Earl of Surrey and later Duke of Norfolk, Selwyn, Hare and Charles Fox; and there the flowing bowl, upon which Sheridan ever depended as writer and speaker, bubbled merrily all the night through. Even when he was too old for such frisking he accompanied the Prince and the Earl incognito in the darkness of early morning on several mad quests through the pitch-black streets; and once engaged in a battle with thugs and ruffians in the Brown Bear Tavern, when all three were arrested by the watch.

IV

It suited Sheridan's whim, as it suited Hugo's vanity, to give out that his rarest works were tossed off rapidly from a surcharged brain. A touch of youthful bravado made his personality spritely. "How comes it to pass that you are ever in appearance indolent without being really so?" asked Ker. In actual fact he sweated at his tasks, perhaps less earnestly than Goldsmith and less hypercritically than Flaubert. He did not pitch his jibes into the air, as Gautier pitched his sentences, trusting that like cats they would come down on all four feet. With the actual writing of The School for Scandal he was characteristically indolent. The comedy went into rehearsal before he had finished writing it. He had, so the story runs, one rough draft of the last five scenes scribbled on detached pieces of paper. Of all the preceding scenes there were numerous transcriptions, interlined and revised. On the last sheet of all, which still exists as no doubt Sheridan despatched it to the copyists, are the words: "Finished at last, thank God! R. B. SHERIDAN;" to which a relieved prompter appended: "Amen! W. HOPKINS." One of his contemporaries asserted that when Sheridan was writing The Critic and the last scenes of the piece did not come, he was tricked into a room in the theatre one evening by King and Ford, and locked there with wine and sandwiches until he finished the farce. Another declares that the last act of Pizarro was written on the evening of the first performance while the first four were being given behind the footlights. No doubt that stretches the truth; one so brilliant as Sheridan lends credence to the most colorful stories. Sheridan was as a rule a far-seeing workman. Apparently he had The School for Scandal in mind many years before he wrote it. Four years or so earlier he had worked at a comedy entitled The Slanderers, in which Lady Sneerwell appears, as well as much of the dialogue to be found in The School for Scandal. Subsequently he sketched another comedy to revolve about Sir Peter and Lady Teazle. Where and how he joined the two preliminary comedies into The School for Scandal is quite apparent now in the change of tone between the second and third acts. He labored over his most glittering remarks and jests. The paradoxical statement of Lady Teazle to Joseph Surface: "So you would have me sin in my