Part 13

To better men such an adventure would have been a solemn warning; such a tale, told by the ruined one herself, a sermon, every word of which would have clung to their memories. What effect, if any, it may have had on Blackstock and his companions must have been very fleeting.

It is not so very long since the Seven Dials and St. Giles' were haunts of wickedness and dens of thieves, into which the police scarcely dared to penetrate. Probably their mysteries would have afforded more amusement to the artist and the student of character than to the mere seeker of adventure, but it was still, I remember, in my early days, a great feat to visit by night one of the noted 'cribs' to which 'the profession' which fills Newgate was wont to resort. The 'Brown Bear,' in Broad Street, St. Giles', was one of these pleasant haunts, and thither the three adventurers determined to go. This style of adventure is out of date, and no longer amusing. Of course a fight ensued, in which the prince and his companions showed immense pluck against terrible odds, and in which, as one reads in the novels of the 'London Journal' or 'Family Herald,' the natural superiority of the well-born of course displayed itself to great advantage. Surely Bulwer has described such scenes too graphically in some of his earlier novels to make a minute description here at all necessary; but the reader who is curious in the matter may be referred to a work which has recently appeared under the title of 'Sheridan and his Times,' professing to be written by an Octogenarian, intimate with the hero. The fray ended with the arrival of the watch, who rescued Blackstock, Greystock, and Thinstock, and with Dogberryan stupidity carried them off to a neighbouring lock-up. The examination which took place was just the occasion for Sheridan's fun to display itself on, and pretending to turn informer, he succeeded in bewildering the unfortunate parochial constable, who conducted it, till the arrival of the magistrate, whose duty was to deliver his friends from durance vile. The whole scene is well described in the book just referred to, with, we presume, a certain amount of idealizing; but the 'Octogenarian' had probably heard the story from Sheridan himself, and the main points must be accepted as correct. The affair ended, as usual, with a supper at the 'Salutation.'

We must now follow Sheridan in his gradual downfall.

One of the causes of this--as far as money was concerned--was his extreme indolence and utter negligence. He trusted far too much to his ready wit and rapid genius. Thus when 'Pizarro' was to appear, day after day went by, and nothing was done. On the night of representation, only four acts out of five were written, and even these had not been rehearsed, the principal performers, Siddons, Charles Kemble and Barrymore, having only just received their parts. Sheridan was up in the prompter's room actually writing the fifth act while the first was being performed, and every now and then appeared in the green-room with a fresh relay of dialogue, and setting all in good humour by his merry abuse of his own negligence. In spite of this, 'Pizarro' succeeded. He seldom wrote except at night, and surrounded by a profusion of lights. Wine was his great stimulant in composition, as it has been to better and worse authors. 'If the thought is slow to come,' he would say, 'a glass of good wine encourages it; and when it does come, a glass of good wine rewards it.' Those glasses of good wine, were, unfortunately, even more frequent than the good thoughts, many and merry as they were.

His neglect of letters was a standing joke against him. He never took the trouble to open any that he did not expect, and often left sealed many that he was most anxious to read. He once appeared with his begging face at the Bank, humbly asking an advance of twenty pounds. 'Certainly, sir; would you like any more?--fifty or a hundred?' said the smiling clerk. Sheridan was overpowered. He _would_ like a hundred. 'Two or three?' asked the scribe. Sheridan thought he was joking, but was ready for two or even three--he was always ready for more. But he could not conceal his surprise. 'Have you not received our letter?' the clerk asked, perceiving it. Certainly he had received the epistle, which informed him that his salary as Receiver-General of Cornwall had been paid in, but he had never opened it.

This neglect of letters once brought him into a troublesome lawsuit about the theatre. It was necessary to pay certain demands, and he had applied to the Duke of Bedford to be his security. The duke had consented, and for a whole year his letter of consent remained unopened. In the meantime Sheridan had believed that the duke had neglected him, and allowed the demands to be brought into court.

In the same way he had long before committed himself in the affair with Captain Matthews. In order to give a public denial of certain reports circulated in Bath, he had called upon an editor, requesting him to insert the said reports in his paper in order that he might write him a letter to refute them. The editor at once complied, the calumny was printed and published, but Sheridan forgot all about his own refutation, which was applied for in vain till too late.

Other causes were his extravagance and intemperance. There was an utter want of even common moderation in everything he did. Whenever his boyish spirit suggested any freak, whenever a craving of any kind possessed him, no matter what the consequences here or hereafter, he rushed heedlessly into the indulgence of it. Perhaps the enemy had never an easier subject to deal with. Any sin in which there was a show of present mirth, or easy pleasure, was as easily taken up by Sheridan as if he had not a single particle of conscience or religious feeling, and yet we are not at all prepared to say that he lacked either; he had only deadened both by excessive indulgence of his fancies. The temptation of wealth and fame had been too much for the poor and obscure young man who rose to them so suddenly, and, as so often happens, those very talents which should have been his glory, were, in fact, his ruin.

His extravagance was unbounded. At a time when misfortune lay thick upon him, and bailiffs were hourly expected, he would invite a large party to a dinner, which a prince might have given, and to which one prince sometimes sat down. On one occasion, having no plate left from the pawnbroker's, he had to prevail on 'my uncle' to lend him some for a banquet he was to give. The spoons and forks were sent, and with them two of his men, who, dressed in livery, waited, no doubt with the most vigilant attention, on the party. Such at that period was the host's reputation, when he could not even be trusted not to pledge another man's property. At one time his income was reckoned at £15,000 a year, when the theatre was prosperous. Of this he is said to have spent not more than £5,000 on his household, while the balance went to pay for his former follies, debts, and the interest, lawsuits often arising from mere carelessness and judgments against the theatre! Probably a great deal of it was betted away, drank away, thrown away in one way or another. As for betting, he generally lost all the wagers he made: as he said himself--'I never made a bet upon my own judgment that I did not lose; and I never won but one, which I had made against my judgment.' His bets were generally laid in hundreds; and though he did not gamble, he could of course run through a good deal of money in this way. He betted on every possible trifle, but chiefly, it would seem, on political possibilities; the state of the Funds, the result of an election, or the downfall of a ministry. Horse-races do not seem to have possessed any interest for him, and, in fact, he scarcely knew one kind of horse from another. He was never an adept at field-sports, though very ambitious of being thought a sportsman. Once, when staying in the country, he went out with a friend's gamekeeper to shoot pheasants, and after wasting a vast amount of powder and shot upon the air, he was only rescued from ignominy by the sagacity of his companion, who, going a little behind him when a bird rose, brought it down so neatly that Sheridan, believing he had killed it himself, snatched it up, and rushed bellowing with glee back to the house to show that he _could_ shoot. In the same way, he tried his hand at fishing in a wretched little stream behind the Deanery at Winchester, using, however, a net, as easier to handle than a rod. Some boys, who had watched his want of success a long time, at last bought a few pennyworth of pickled herrings, and throwing them on the stream, allowed them to float down towards the eager disciple of old Izaak. Sheridan saw them coming, rushed in regardless of his clothes, cast his net and in great triumph secured them. When he had landed his prize, however, there were the boys bursting with laughter, and Piscator saw he was their dupe. 'Ah!' cried he, laughing in concert, as he looked at his dripping clothes, 'this is a pretty _pickle_ indeed!'

His extravagance was well known to his friends, as well as to his creditors. Lord Guildford met him one day. 'Well, Sherry, so you've taken a new house, I hear.'--'Yes, and you'll see now that everything will go on like clockwork.'--'Ay,' said my lord, with a knowing leer, '_tick, tick_.' Even his son Tom used to laugh at him for it. 'Tom, if you marry that girl, I'll cut you off with a shilling,'--'Then you must borrow it,' replied the ingenuous youth.[8] Tom sometimes disconcerted his father with his inherited wit--his only inheritance. He pressed urgently for money on one, as on many an occasion. 'I have none,' was the reply, as usual; 'there is a pair of pistols up stairs, a horse in the enable, the night is dark, and Hounslow Heath at hand.'

[8: Another version is that Tom replied: 'You don't happen to have it about you, sir, do you?']

'I understand what you mean,' replied young Tom; 'but I tried that last night, and unluckily stopped your treasurer, Peake, who told me you had been beforehand with him, and robbed him of every sixpence he had in the world.'

So much for the respect of son to father!

Papa had his revenge on the young wit, when Tom, talking of Parliament, announced his intention of entering it on an independent basis, ready to be bought by the highest bidder 'I shall write on my forehead,' said he, "To let."'

'And under that, Tom, "Unfurnished,"' rejoined Sherry the elder. The joke is now stale enough.

But Sheridan was more truly witty in putting down a young braggart whom he met at dinner at a country-house. There are still to be found, like the bones of dead asses in a field newly ploughed, in some parts of the country, youths, who are so hopelessly behind their age, and indeed every age, as to look upon authorship as degrading, all knowledge, save Latin and Greek, as 'a bore,' and all entertainment but hunting, shooting, fishing, and badger-drawing, as unworthy of a man. In the last century these young animals, who unite the modesty of the puppy with the clear-sightedness of the pig, not to mention the progressiveness of another quadruped, were more numerous than in the present day, and in consequence more forward in their remarks. It was one of these charming youths, who was staying in the same house as Sheridan, and who, quite unprovoked, began at dinner to talk of 'actors and authors, and those low sort of people, you know.' Sheridan said nought, but patiently bided his time. The next day there was a large dinner-party, and Sheridan and the youth happened to sit opposite to one another in the most conspicuous part of the table. Young Nimrod was kindly obliging his side of the table with extraordinary leaps of his hunter, the perfect working of his new double-barrelled Manton, &c., bringing of course number one in as the hero in each case. In a moment of silence, Sheridan, with an air of great politeness, addressed his unhappy victim. 'He had not,' he said, 'been able to catch the whole of the very interesting account he had heard Mr. ---- relating.' All eyes were turned upon the two. 'Would Mr. ---- permit him to ask who it was who made the extraordinary leap he had mentioned?--'I, sir,' replied the youth with some pride. 'Then who was it killed the wild duck at that distance?'--'I, sir.' 'Was it your setter who behaved so well?'--'Yes, mine, sir,' replied the youth, getting rather red over this examination. 'And who caught the huge salmon so neatly?'--'I, sir.' And so the questioning went on through a dozen more items, till the young man, weary of answering 'I, sir,' and growing redder and redder every moment, would gladly have hid his head under the table-cloth, in spite of his sporting prowess. But Sheridan had to give him the _coup de grace_.

'So, sir,' said he, very politely, 'you were the chief _actor_ in every anecdote, and the _author_ of them all; surely it is impolitic to despise your own professions.'

Sheridan's intemperance was as great and as incurable as his extravagance, and we think his mind, if not his body, lived only on stimulants. He could neither write nor speak without them One day, before one of his finest speeches in the House, he was seen to enter a coffee-house, call for a pint of brandy, and swallow it 'neat,' and almost at one gulp. His friends occasionally interfered. This drinking, they told him, would destroy the coat of his stomach. 'Then my stomach must digest in its waistcoat,' laughed Sheridan.

Where are the topers of yore? Jovial I will not call them, for every one knows that

'Mirth and laughter.'

worked up with a corkscrew, are followed by

'Headaches and hot coppers the day after.'

But where are those Anakim of the bottle, who _could_ floor their two of port and one of Madeira, though the said two and one floored them in turn? The race, I believe, has died out. Our heads have got weaker, as our cellars grew emptier. The arrangement was convenient. The daughters of Eve have nobly undertaken to atone for the naughty conduct of their primeval mamma, by reclaiming men, and dragging them from the Hades of the mahogany to that seventh heaven of muffins and English ballads prepared for them in the drawing-room.

We are certainly astounded, even to incredulity, when we read of the deeds of a David or a Samson; but such wonderment can be nothing compared to that which a generation or two hence will feel, when sipping, as a great extravagance and unpardonable luxury, two thimblefuls of 'African Sherry,' the young demirep of the day reads that three English gentlemen, Sheridan, Richardson, and Ward, sat down one day to dinner, and before they rose again--if they ever rose, which seems doubtful--or, at least, were raised, had emptied five bottles of port, two of Madeira, and one of brandy! Yet this was but one instance in a thousand; there was nothing extraordinary in it, and it is only mentioned because the amount drunk is accurately given by the unhappy owner of the wine, Kelly, the composer, who, unfortunately, or fortunately, was not present, and did not even imagine that the three honourable gentlemen were discussing his little store. Yet Sheridan does not seem to have believed much in his friend's vintages, for he advised him to alter his brass plate to 'Michael Kelly, Composer of Wine and Importer of Music.' He made a better joke, when, dining with Lord Thurlow, he tried in vain to induce him to produce a second bottle of some extremely choice Constantia from the Cape of Good Hope. 'Ah,' he muttered to his neighbour, 'pass me that decanter, if you please, for I must return to Madeira, as I see I cannot _double the Cape_'

But as long as Richard Brinsley was a leader of political and fashionable circles, as long as he had a position to keep up, an ambition to satisfy, a labour to complete, his drinking was, if not moderate, not extraordinary for his time and his associates. But when a man's ambition is limited to mere success--when fame and a flash for himself are all he cares for, and there is no truer, grander motive for his sustaining the position he has climbed to--when, in short, it is his own glory, not mankind's good, he has ever striven for--woe, woe, woe when the hour of success is come! I cannot stop to name and examine instances, but let me be allowed to refer to that bugbear who is called up whenever greatness of any kind has to be illustrated--Napoleon the Great; or let me take any of the lesser Napoleons in lesser grades in any nation, any age--the men who have had no star but self and self-glory before them--and let me ask if any one can be named who, if he has survived the attainment of his ambition, has not gone down the other side of the hill somewhat faster than he came up it? Then let me select men whose guiding-star has been the good of their fellow-creatures, or the glory of God, and watch their peaceful useful end on that calm summit that they toiled so honestly to reach. The difference comes home to us. The moral is read only at the end of the story. Remorse rings it for ever in the ears of the dying--often too long a-dying--man who has laboured for himself. Peace reads it smilingly to him whose generous toil for others has brought its own reward.

Sheridan had climbed with the stride of a giant, laughing at rocks, at precipices, at slippery watercourses. He had spread the wings of genius to poise himself withal, and gained one peak after another, while homelier worth was struggling midway, clutching the bramble and clinging to the ferns. He had, as Byron said in Sheridan's days of decay, done the best in all he undertook, written the best comedy, best opera, best farce; spoken the best parody, and made the best speech. Sheridan, when those words of the young poet were told him, shed tears.

Perhaps the bitter thought struck him, that he had _not_ led the best, but the _worst_ life; that comedy, farce, opera, monody, and oration were nothing, nothing to a pure conscience and a peaceful old age; that they could not save him from shame and poverty--from debt, disgrace, drunkenness--from grasping, but long-cheated creditors, who dragged his bed from under the feeble, nervous, ruined old man. Poor Sheridan! his end was too bitter for us to cast one stone more upon him. Let it be noted that it was in the beginning of his decline, when, having reached the climax of all his ambition and completed his fame as a dramatist, orator, and wit, that the hand of Providence mercifully interposed to rescue this reckless man from his downfall. It smote him with that common but powerful weapon--death. Those he best loved were torn from him, one after another, rapidly, and with little warning. The Linleys, the 'nest of nightingales,' were all delicate as nightingales should be; and it seemed as if this very time was chosen for their deaths, that the one erring soul--more precious, remember, than many just lives--might be called back. Almost within one year he lost his dear sister-in-law, the wife of his most intimate friend Tickell; Maria Linley, the last of the family; his own wife, and his little daughter. One grief succeeded another so rapidly that Sheridan was utterly unnerved, utterly brought low by them; but it was his wife's death that told most upon him. With that wife he had always been the lover rather than the husband. She had married him in the days of his poverty, when her beauty was so celebrated that she might have wed whom she would. She had risen with him and shared his later anxieties. Yet she had seen him forget, neglect her, and seek other society. In spite of his tender affection for her and for his children, he had never made a _home_ of their home. Vanity Fair had kept him ever flitting, and it is little to be wondered at that Mrs. Sheridan was the object of much, though ever respectful admiration.[9] Yet, in spite of calumny, she died with a fair fame. Decline had long pressed upon her, yet her last illness was too brief. In 1792 she was taken away, still in the summer of her days, and with her last breath uttering her love for the man who had never duly prized her. His grief was terrible; yet it passed, and wrought no change. He found solace in his beloved son, and yet more beloved daughter. A few months--and the little girl followed her mother. Again his grief was terrible: again passed and wrought no change. Yes, it did work some change, but not for the better; it drove him to the goblet; and from that time we may date the confirmation of his habit of drinking. The solemn warnings had been unheeded: they were to be repeated by a long-suffering God in a yet more solemn manner, which should touch him yet more nearly. His beautiful wife had been the one restraint upon his folly and his lavishness. Now she was gone, they burst out afresh, wilder than ever.

[9: Lord Edward Fitzgerald was one of the most devoted of her admirers: he chose his wife, Pamela, because she resembled Mrs. Sheridan.--See Moore's Life of Lord Edward.]

For a while after these afflictions, which were soon completed in the death of his most intimate friend and boyish companion, Tickell, Sheridan threw himself again into the commotion of the political world. But in this we shall not follow him. Three years after the death of his first wife he married again. He was again fortunate in his choice. Though now forty-four, he succeeded in winning the heart of a most estimable and charming young lady with a fortune of £5,000. She must indeed have loved or admired the widower very much to consent to be the wife of a man so notoriously irregular, to use a mild term, in his life. But Sheridan fascinated wherever he went, and young ladies like 'a little wildness.' His heart was always good, and where he gave it, he gave it warmly, richly, fully. His second wife was Miss Esther Jane Ogle, daughter of the Dean of Winchester. She was given to him on condition of his settling in all £20,000, upon her--a wise proviso with such a spendthrift--and he had to raise the money, as usual.