"I ne'er could any lustre see In eyes that would not look on me. I must press it to be sure." Then comes the School for Scandal, and—two years later—the Critic; and always the steaming suppers and the singing of many sirens, and deeper thrusts into the till of Old Drury; stockholders may wince and creditors too; but who shall gainsay or doubt the imperial genius who is winged with victory? Garrick, whose days of conquest are nearly over-is his friend; so is Burke, won by his wit, and by his rolling Irish r's; Goldsmith acknowledges his sovereignty: Dr. Johnson veils dislike of his radicalism and of his tirades against taxation, as he welcomes him to the Club. In 1780, while still under thirty, he entered Parliament (for Stafford) and posed there for new conquests. There came frequent occasions for the interjection of his witty collocation of apothegms, lighted by his brilliant elocution; but there was not much in his parliamentary career to attract national attention until the debates opened with reference to the Warren Hastings impeachment. These offered topics which appealed to his emotional nature, and under the indoctrination and the coaching of Burke, he made such appeal for the far-off, down-trodden princesses of India as electrified the nation. "Whatever the acuteness of the bar, the dignity of the Senate, or the morality of the pulpit could furnish [in eloquence] had not been equal to it." This was the verdict of so good a judge as Burke. Yet, reading this speech or so much of it as the records showor those others which followed, when the great trial had opened in Westminster Hall, we find it hard to understand the enthusiasm of the old plaudits. There is wit, indeed, in whatever work warms him to a glow; old truisms get a setting in his oratoric reaches which make them gleam like diamonds; but there is none of that logical method It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, by W. Fraser Rae. 1874. which wraps one around with convictions; but in place of it a beautiful mass of rhetorical spray, that delights and refreshes and passes like a summer cloud. Meanwhile the suppers abound, and so do the debts that siren wife, who had kept his accounts, and made extracts and filled his note-books (and his flasks), passes away. It is a shock that does not rally his forces, but rather disperses them. He is lié in these times with the Prince of Wales; dines with him; wines with him. Who shall say he does not troll with him some of the piquant snatches of his own verse? As this: "A bumper of good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar; So fill a cheerful glass And let good humor pass. But if more deep the quarrel, Why, sooner drain the barrel Than be the hateful fellow That's crabbed when he's mellow." He did drain the barrel; he did fall from all his dizzy eminence; he did die a drunkard of the grosser sort; without money, almost without friends.* There was a great rally of coronets at his funeral, and a pompous procession of those who went to bury him at Westminster. You will find his name there, in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey, and will give to his memory your wonder and your pity; but not, I think, much veneration. The Boy Chatterton. We shift the scenes now for a new episode in our little story of letters, although we are under the same murky sky of London. George the Third is just finishing the first decade of his long reign; most of the clubmen of whom we have spoken are still alive, and go up, with more or less of regularity, to pay their court to Dr. Johnson; but we have our eye specially upon a pale, handsomefaced, long-haired lad, not beyond the schooling age, who knows nothing of courts or clubs, who has stolen away from the thraldom of a small at * A fearful account of Sheridan's condition in his last days is to be found in the Croker Papers (1884), chap. x. It is embodied in what purports to be a literal transcript of a conversational narrative by George IV., J. Wilson Croker being interlocutor and listener. torney's office in Bristol, in the West of England, to come up to London and face the world there, and try to conquer it. He does not know the task he has undertaken. His brain, indeed, is full of fine fancies; he has the poetic fervor in full flow upon him. He has left a mother and a sisterwhom he loves dearly-his only near relatives; and he writes to that mother under date of May, 1770: "I am settled, and in such a settlement as I would desire. I get four guineas a month by one magazine; shall engage to write a History of England, or other pieces, which will more than double that sum. Occasional essays for the daily papers would more than support me. What a glorious prospect! " And, again, a few weeks later to his sister: "I employ my money now in fitting myself fashionably, as my profession (of letters) obliges me to frequent the places of best resort. But I have engaged to live with a gentleman, the brother of a lord, who is going to advance pretty deeply into the bookselling branches. I shall have lodging and boarding, genteel and elegant, gratis. I shall have likewise no inconsiderable premium. I will send you two silks this summer, and expect, in answer to this, what colors you prefer. Essay writing has this advantage: you are sure of constant pay; and when you have once wrote a piece which makes the author inquired after, you may bring the booksellers to your own terms." |