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own defence, and part with my own virtue to preserve my reputation," exists in several of Sheridan's papers as if he had been whipping it into form for use at the right moment. He watched his moments; he would wait through most of a social evening to drop a brilliant joke at the most effective instant. In preparing his speeches, often in bed when it was supposed that he was sleeping, he made note of the places for appropriate gestures, had the whole speech in mind before he began it, and worked up the decorative passages to a fine polish. On the famous Begum speech, which Burke characterized as "the most astonishing piece of eloquence, argument and wit united of which there is any record or tradition," Sheridan, his wife, and most of his family labored feverishly for several days.

V

But that cruel perversion of divine prerogatives by which he was deprived of a balance wheel became at length his undoing. Sheridan touched life in many places; simultaneously he wrote plays, managed a theatre, debated in Parliament, trafficked with statesmen and agreeable fellows most of the night, enlivened the ballroom. But over the mundane affairs of life he had no vistage of control. William Smyth, tutor to Sheridan's son and later a poet of some distinction, has reported Sheridan's total absence of self-control "a torment" to those around him. While "Lizzy" was still alive, conscious alike of his genius and its limitations. and matching his ardent affection for her with an unvarying affection for him, he was kept in some sort of order. If he had not already planted deep the seeds of his final ruin, one might count her untimely death as the cause. His second marriage was not stimulating; at times it irritated them both. It is said that for thirty years Sheridan earned an average of £15,000, and spent £10,000 of it on interest, law suits costs and judgments. To him, and to chaps like him, a debt delayed was a debt half-paid. To this fellow wrestling reluctantly with the mechanics of living belongs the distinction of offering a promissory note to a highwayman. “Thank God, that's settled!" he once exclaimed, handing over an I. O. U. for £200 to a friend from whom he had just borrowed that sum. He was perennially "money-bound." And when his pockets

were filled they soon became flat again. So little order did he have in his debts and credits that a committee of friends, whom he once persuaded to run through his affairs to discover just how much he owed, soon gave up the task in despair; and when he died he fancied he owed four times as much as he did. He found it more convenient to pay a debt twice rather than produce proof that he had already paid it. While traveling on the highways in a coach he frequently found himself penniless, and obliged to summon a usurer to pay his tavern fees. His servants were irregularly paid, and often had no money at their disposal for household expenses. He gave generously to friends and relatives when they could find him. Being in a thousand places during the course of the day, he could never be found by those who wanted him. He took his breakfast in bed while he composed his speeches, dressed hastily, and then with a mad rush shot from his room and the house at noon-time; he was not to be found again until midnight. Those who required his attention lined up at the door; if they did not catch him as he left he was free for the day-and by so much the richer. He maintained three expensive establishments at one time-one at Wanstead, where his son resided with his tutor; another at Isleworth; and the third, his town-house, in Jermyn. Street. He raised enormous sums of money from mysterious sources, and seldom at advantageous rates. Befuddled by wine he made reckless bets at the clubs:

25th March, 1793.-Mr. S. bet Mr. Hardy one hundred guineas, that the 3 per cent. consols are as high this day twelvemonth as at the date thereof. Mr. S. bets Gen. Tarleton one hundred guineas to fifty guineas, that Mr. Pitt is first Lord of the Treasury on the 28th of May, 1795,-Mr. S. bets Mr. St. A. St. John fifteen guineas to five guineas, ditto.

On his inability to pay a bet of 500 guineas he once wrote the following confession: "At the same time that I regret your being put to any inconvenience by this delay, I cannot help reverting to the circumstance which perhaps misled me into the expectation that you would not unwillingly allow me any reasonable time I might want for the payment of the bet. The circumstance I mean, however discreditable the plea, is the total inebriety of some of the party, particularly of myself, when I made this preposterous bet."

VI

Yet his misfortunes were not always the result of his helplessness in the world. It was no fault of his that the Drury Lane Theatre, antiquated and decayed, had to be torn down in 1792, that the new one was long delayed by various negotiations and obstacles, cost £75,000 more than the architect estimated, and all that while the company was playing at enormous expense first at the Opera House and later at the Haymarket. Surely it was no fault of his that seventeen years later this theatre, still encumbered with notes and mortgages, burned to the ground. Sheridan was at the House of Commons that evening, listening to the talk of the conduct of the war in Spain, when the house was suddenly illuminated by a blaze of light as the flames leaped from the roof of his theatre. When a motion was made to adjourn, Sheridan said "Whatever might be the extent of the private calamity, he hoped it would not interfere with the public business of the country." Later he was discovered at the "Bedford," watching the flames and sipping a glass of wine. To a friend's observation that he received so vast a calamity with equanimity, he replied: "Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine at his own fireside." Perhaps he did not grasp the full importance of this disaster. Little could he foretell exactly what it meant. For when a committee was formed at his suggestion to raise money for the sale of public shares for a new theatre, Sheridan who had maintained the Drury Lane at the standard set by Garrick and made its walls echo again and again with salvos of unmatched wit, was gradually crowded out by a turncoat manager. To Samuel Whitbread, M. P. (who inherited the Thrales' brewery), he entrusted the business of a new theatre. For his moiety of the property Sheridan eventually received the generous sum of £28,000. But while he was hard pressed on every side, and begged for an advance of £2,000 to conduct an election, Whitbread stubbornly invoked one technicality after another and delayed. With merciless fidelity to the facts he reminded Sheridan that he was to have "no concern or connection, of any kind whatever, with the new undertaking." "You are in no way answerable if a bad Theatre is built," he wrote; "it is not you who built it; and if we

come to the strict right of the thing, you have no business to interfere.... Will you but stand aloof, and everything will go smooth."

VII

Forced out of the theatre and Parliament, the remaining few months of Sheridan's life were black melancholy. Distresses increased. Executions followed close on the heels of writs. He once sobbed out a night in a spunging-house. He sold the books from his library, the silver cup once presented to him by his constituency; and like Charles Surface parted with his pictures-four Gainsboroughs and a Morland; and the Reynolds portrait of "Lizzy" Linly went out of his possession. He fell a victim to disease. "I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted," he wrote to a friend less than two months before he died. The usurers no longer flocked around him. For some time his wife had been reduced to beseeching the treasurer of the Drury Lane for petty sums"four pounds for washing house linen," and the like. When the bitterness of his distress got about town, somewhat belatedly, Vaughan, Rogers and Lord Holland came willingly to his assistance. An anonymous contributor to The Morning Post called for immediate aid: "Prefer ministering in the chamber of sickness to mustering at ‘The splendid sorrows that adorn the hearse'; I say, Life and Succor against Westminster Abbey and a Funeral!" That nearly became the case. Sheridan died soon afterwards. Nobility attended his splendid funeral and solemnly, almost ironically, buried him in the Abbey. Contrasting Sheridan's dying penury and the magnificence of his funeral, a French journal said: "France is the place for a man of letters to live in, and England the place for him to die in." Thus the gods received back the tarnished spirit of the man whom they had so generously endowed. Other English men of letters have died as miserably. But none such had drunk so deep of the intoxicating draft of fame; in the ears of none had rung such deafening applause; none had played on many instruments so resourcefully. That platitudinous epitaph, “He touched nothing that he did not adorn," may be applied with full truth to Sheridan. He did many things, and brilliantly. Yet where the world touched him it did not adorn.

GERTRUDE BELL

BY JANET E. COURTNEY

In July of this year died one of the greatest Englishwomen of all time, though her name was perhaps hardly known to great masses of her fellow countrymen. For all our far flung empire, we are an insular minded people, and Gertrude Bell's greatness had proved itself in a sphere unfamiliar to many and for the time being intensely disliked by almost all. But to the few, who realize how closely our prestige in the East is inwoven with keeping faith with our Arab allies and repaying them in full for their assistance, positive and negative, during the War, what Gertrude did to build up the Kingdom of Iraq will rank as a great national service. Overburdened taxpayers may desire heartily to see us relinquish Mesopotamia to its fate. To those who know what British faith has meant in the East, such a breach of our plighted word would be less a crime than an irretrievable blunder.

But these considerations of high politics do not in themselves affect the questions of Gertrude's greatness. It was independent of outside aids. I have called her "Gertrude" simply. For those who knew her personally she had no other name. "The Great Gertrude" she became sometimes in half mocking affection. But Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was her full designation. and she was born some fifty-eight years ago, on July 14, 1868, in the county of Durham, the eldest daughter of Sir Hugh Bell and granddaughter of Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, founders of the great iron industry of Cleveland in Yorkshire. Though born just over its border, she belonged by right to that county. Her forbears were Yorkshiremen and her heart, when not given to the East, was at home on the Yorkshire moors. Her father's inherited wealth and intellectual brilliance secured her an early environment of high culture, and the social gifts and diplomati relations of Florence Bell, her stepmother,―her own mother died

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