Born, in Dublin, 30 Oct. 1751. Parents removed to London, 1758. Educated at Harrow, 1762–68. Parents removed to Bath, 1771. Eloped with Elizabeth Linley, 1772; secretly married to her at Calais. Formally married in London, 13 April 1773. Settled in London, spring of 1774. “The Rivals” produced at Covent Garden, 17 Jan. 1775; “St. Patrick’s Day; or, The Scheming Lieutenant,” Covent Garden, May 1775; “The Duenna,” Covent Garden, 21 Nov. 1775. Purchased a share in Drury Lane Theatre, June 1776; Manager, Sept. 1776 to Feb. 1809. “A Trip to Scarborough” (adapted from Vanbrugh’s “The Relapse”) produced at Drury Lane, 24 Feb. 1777; “The School for Scandal,” Drury Lane, 8 May 1777; “The Critic,” Drury Lane, 30 Oct. 1779. M.P. for Stafford, 1780. Under Secretary of State, 1782. Concerned in impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1787–88. Intimacy with Prince of Wales begun, 1787. Wife died, 1792. Drury Lane Theatre rebuilt, 1792–94; new house opened, 21 April 1794. Married (ii.) Esther Ogle, 27 April 1795. “Pizarro” (adapted from Kotzebue’s “Spaniards in Peru”) produced at Drury Lane, 24 May 1799. Privy Councillor and Treasurer of Navy, 1799. Receiver of Duchy of Cornwall, 1804. Drury Lane Theatre burnt down, 24 Feb. 1809. Died, in London, 7 July 1816. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Clio’s Protest” (under pseud.: “Asmodeo”) [1771]; “The Rivals,” 1775; “St. Patrick’s Day; or, The Scheming Lieutenant,” 1775; “The General Fast” (anon.) [1775?]; “The Duenna,” 1775; “A Trip to Scarborough,” 1777; “The School for Scandal” (anon.), 1777; “Verses to the Memory of Garrick,” 1779; “The Critic,” 1781; “The Legislative Independence of Ireland” (a speech), 1785; “Speech … against Warren Hastings,” 1788; “A Comparative Statement of the two Bills for the better Government of the British Possessions in India,” 1788; “Dramatic Works” [1795?]; “Pizarro,” 1799; “Speech … on the Motion to address His Majesty” [1798]; “Speech … on the Union with Ireland,” 1799; “Speech … on the Army Estimates,” 1802. Posthumous: “Speeches” (5 vols.), 1816; “An Ode to Scandal,” 2nd edn. 1819; “Speeches in the Trial of Warren Hastings,” ed. by E. A. Bond (4 vols.), 1859–61. He translated: “The Love Epistles of Aristænetus” (with N. B. Halhed), 1771. Collected Works: ed. by F. Stainforth, 1874. Life: by T. Moore, 1825; by Mrs. Oliphant, 1883; by W. F. Rae, 1896.

Personal

  Mr. Sheridan has a very fine figure, and a good though I don’t think a handsome face. He is tall, and very upright, and his appearance and address are at once manly and fashionable, without the smallest tincture of foppery or modish graces. In short, I like him vastly, and think him every way worthy his beautiful companion…. He evidently adores her, and she as evidently idolises him. The world has by no means done him justice.

  Sheridan is very little consulted at present; and it is said, will not have a seat in the cabinet. This is a distressing necessity. His habits of daily intoxication are probably considered as unfitting him for trust. The little that has been confided to him he has been running about to tell; and since Monday, he has been visiting Sidmouth. At a dinner at Lord Cowper’s on Sunday last, where the Prince was, he got drunk as usual, and began to speak slightingly of Fox. From what grudge this behaviour proceeds I have not learned. The whole fact is one to investigate with candour, and with a full remembrance of Sheridan’s great services, in the worst times, to the principles of liberty.

  I find things settled so that £150 will remove all difficulty. I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted. I shall negotiate for the Plays successfully in the course of a week, when all shall be returned. I have desired Fairbrother to get back the Guarantee for thirty. They are going to put the carpets out of window, and brake into Mrs. S.’s room and take me—for God’s sake let me see you.

  Sheridan’s worst can effect but few; his best will redound to the good of his country, and to the delight of thousands to come.

  I must differ from Moore in his view of Sheridan’s heart. Notwithstanding his passion for Miss Linley and his grief for his father’s death, who used him ill, I question his having a “really good heart.” His making love to Pamela, Madame de Genlis’s daughter, so soon after his lovely wife’s death, and his marriage, in two years, with a young girl as a compliment to her remembrance, renders one very suspicious of the real depth of his passion. No man of wit to the full extent of the word can have a good heart, because he has by nature less regard for the feelings of others than for the brilliancy of his own sayings. There must be more mischief than love in the hearts of all radiant wits. Moore’s life of him wants courage.

  Sheridan was a man of quick but not deep feelings; of sudden but not lasting excitements. He was not one of those who suffer a single passion to influence the whole course of their lives. Even the desire to dazzle by his wit, great as was its power over him, was not always awake, for we are told that he would sometimes remain silent for hours in company, too lazy to invent a smart saying for the occasion, but idly waiting for the opportunity to apply some brilliant witticism already in his memory…. His griefs might have been violent, but they were certainly brief, and he quickly forgot them when he came to look again at the sunny side of things. Even his political disappointments do not seem in the least to have soured his temper, or abated his readiness to adopt new hopes and new expedients.

  I was present on the second of Hasting’s trial in Westminster Hall; when Sheridan was listened to with such attention that you might have heard a pin drop.—During one of those days, Sheridan, having observed Gibbon among the audience, took occasion to mention “The luminous author of ‘The Decline and Fall.’” After he had finished one of his friends reproached him with flattering Gibbon. “Why, what did I say of him?” asked Sheridan.—“You called him the luminous author,” &c.,—“Luminous! oh, I meant—voluminous.”… Sheridan did not display his admirable powers in company till he had been warmed by wine. During the earlier part of dinner he was generally heavy and silent: and I have heard him, when invited to drink a glass of wine, reply, “No, thank you; I’ll take—a little small beer.” After dinner, when he had had a tolerable quantity of wine, he was brilliant indeed. Put when he went on swallowing too much, he became downright stupid: and I once, after a dinner-party at the house of Edwards the bookseller in Pall Mall, walked with him to Brookes’s, when he had absolutely lost the use of speech…. Sheridan had very fine eyes, and he was not a little vain of them. He said to me on his death-bed, “Tell Lady Besborough that my eyes will look up to the coffin-lid as brightly as ever.”… In his dealings with the world, Sheridan certainly carried the “privileges of genius” so far as they were ever carried by man.

  Poor Sherry! poor Sherry! drunkard, gambler, spendthrift, debtor, godless and worldly as thou wert, what is it that shakes from our hand the stone we would fling at thee? Almost, we must confess it, thy very faults; at least those qualities which seem to have been thy glory and thy ruin; which brought thee into temptation; to which, hadst thou been less brilliant, less bountiful, thou hadst never been drawn. What is it that disarms us when we review thy life, and wrings from us a tear when we should utter a reproach? Thy punishment; that bitter, miserable end; that long battling with poverty, debt, disease, all brought on by thyself; that abandonment in the hour of need, more bitter than them all; that awakening to the terrible truth of the hollowness of man and rottenness of the world!

  The account of Sheridan’s death-bed is as nearly fabulous as any narration can be; but it is the current “copied” account, and passes muster with the rest. And now, we may fairly ask, if such “biographies” be true, how came this man, so abused, so run down, whose faults were so prodigious, whose merits were nil, to occupy the position he did when living?… How did it happen, then, that a man labouring under such a disadvantage of birth, and also described as a common-place swindler, drunkard, and driveller, excelled in everything he attempted, and, from the obscure son of the Bath actor and schoolmaster, became minister of state and companion of princes? What dazzled fools does it make all his contemporaries that they admitted him unquestioned to a superiority which is now denied to have existed! What an extraordinary anomaly does that famous funeral in Westminster Abbey present, amid a crowd of onlookers so dense that they seemed “like a wall of human faces,” if it was merely the carrying of a poor old tipsy gentleman to his grave by a group of foolish lords!

  When Sheridan was dying, in the extremity of poverty, an article appeared from a generous enemy in the “Morning Post,” saying that relief should be given before it was too late: “Prefer ministering in the chamber of sickness” to ministering at “the splendid sorrows that adorn the hearse”—“life and succor, against Westminster Abbey and a funeral.” But it was too late; and Westminster Abbey and the funeral, with all the pomp that rank could furnish, was the alternative. It was this which suggested the remark of a French journal: “France is the place for a man of letters to live in, and England the place for him to die in.”

  He was the contemporary of Beaumarchais, and resembled him in his talent and in his life. The two epochs, the two schools of drama, the two characters correspond. Like Beaumarchais, he was a lucky adventurer, clever, amiable, and generous, reaching success through scandal, who flashed up and shone in a moment, scaled with a rush the empyrean of politics and literature, settled himself, as it were, among the constellations, and, like a brilliant rocket, presently went out in the darkness. Nothing failed him; he attained all at the first leap, without apparent effort, like a prince who need only show himself to win a place. All the most surpassing happiness, the most brilliant in art, the most exalted in worldly position, he took as his birthright. The poor unknown youth, wretched translator of an unreadable Greek sophist, who at twenty walked about Bath in a red waistcoat and a cocked hat, destitute of hope, and ever conscious of the emptiness of his pockets, had gained the heart of the most admired beauty and musician of her time, and carried her off from ten rich, elegant, titled adorers, had fought with the best-hoaxed of the ten, beaten him, had carried by storm the curiosity and attention of the public. Then, challenging glory and wealth, he placed successively on the stage the most diverse and the most applauded dramas, comedies, farce, opera, serious verse; he bought and worked a large theatre without a farthing, inaugurated a reign of success and pecuniary advantages, and led a life of elegance amid the enjoyments of social and domestic joys, surrounded by universal admiration and wonder. Thence, aspiring yet higher, he conquered power, entered the House of Commons, showed himself a match for the first orators…. Whatever the business, whoever the man, he persuaded; none withstood him, every one fell under his charm. What is more difficult than for an ugly man to make a young girl forget his ugliness? There is one thing more difficult, and that is to make a creditor forget you owe him money. There is something more difficult still, and that is, to borrow money of a creditor who has come to demand it…. In the morning, creditors and visitors filled the rooms in which he lived; he came in smiling, with an easy manner, with so much loftiness and grace, that the people forgot their wants and their claims, and looked as if they had only come to see him. His animation was irresistible; no one had a more dazzling wit; he had an inexhaustible fund of puns, contrivances, sallies, novel ideas. Lord Byron, who was a good judge, said that he had never heard nor conceived of a more extraordinary conversation. Men spent nights in listening to him.

  He had been born in obscurity—he died in misery. Out of the humblest, unprovided, unendowed poverty he had blazed into reputation, into all the results of great wealth, if never to its substance; more wonderful still, he had risen to public importance and splendour, and his name can never be obliterated from the page of history; but had fallen again, down, down into desertion, misery, and the deepest degradation of a poverty for which there was neither hope nor help: till death wiped out all possibilities of further trouble or embarrassment, and Sheridan became once more in his coffin the great man whom his party delighted to honour—a national name and credit, one of those whose glory illustrates our annals. It may be permitted now to doubt whether these last mournful honours were not more than his real services to England deserved; but at the moment it was, no doubt, a fine thing that the poor, hopeless “Sherry” whom everybody admired and despised, whom no one but a few faithful friends would risk the trouble of helping, who had sunk away out of all knowledge into endless debts, and duns, and drink, should rise at an instant as soon as death had stilled his troubles into the Right Honourable, brilliant, and splendid Sheridan, whose enchanter’s wand the stubborn Pitt had bowed under, and the noble Burke acknowledged with enthusiasm. It was a fine thing; but the finest thing was that death which in England makes all glory possible, and which restores to the troublesome bankrupt, the unfortunate prodigal, and all stray sons of fame, at one stroke, their friends, their reputation, and the abundant tribute which it might have been dangerous to afford them living, but with which it is both safe and prudent to glorify their tomb.

  Perhaps Sheridan was never a wise man, he can hardly be called a good one, yet he was free from the worse vices of his condition and craft. He never exhibited envy of his favoured rivals; his temper was never soured by misfortune. People said he had stolen his wit and borrowed his plots, that his fertile soil was capable of one crop and no more. But he was too well versed in the infirmities of human nature to look for generosity where he was more likely to meet with malice, and too sensible or too indolent to be angry when his experience justified his insight. Sheridan’s own infirmities were inconvenient certainly, but not noxious…. Sheridan had just that minimum of selfishness which perforce adheres to the profligate; he had few or none of the higher virtues which belong to the chivalrous spirit; but force of character he certainly possessed. It is a grave error to say that either the middle or the end of life found him deficient in strength.

  Doubtless, in any attempt to judge of Sheridan as he was apart from his works, we must make considerable deductions from the mass of floating anecdotes that have gathered round his name. It was not without reason that his granddaughter Mrs. Norton denounced the unfairness of judging of the real man from unauthenticated stories about his indolent procrastination, his recklessness in money matters, his drunken feats and sallies, his wild gambling, his ingenious but discreditable shifts in evading and duping creditors. The real Sheridan was not a pattern of decorous respectability, but we may fairly believe that he was very far from being as disreputable as the Sheridan of vulgar legend. Against the stories about his reckless management of his affairs we must set the broad facts that he had no source of income but Drury Lane theatre, that he bore from it thirty years all the expenses of a fashionable life, and that the theatre was twice burnt to the ground during his proprietorship. Enough was lost in those fires to account ten times over for all his debts. His biographers always speak of his means of living as a mystery. Seeing that he started with borrowed capital, it is possible that the mystery is that he applied much more of his powers to plain matters of business than he affected or got credit for.

  No man has ever lived in more worlds than Sheridan, or has ever shone with such brilliancy in all. In the world of fashion, in the company of wits, among authors, painters and poets, in the House of Commons, at the Court of the Prince Regent,—whatever society he frequented,—he moved a star. His charming manners, his handsome person, his gaiety, and, above all, his good nature, which was one of his principal characteristics, rendered him universally popular. But these engaging qualities were sometimes marred by the foibles and peculiarities which are most apt to attract attention and to serve as weapons in the hands of a man’s enemies. In early manhood he became one of the chiefs of a political party when party strife ran high, and when virulent calumny and abuse, in an age more coarse than ours, were considered legitimate means of offence, and his memory has suffered accordingly. Moreover, from his youth, two impediments clogged and embarrassed his every step,—his poverty and his Irish origin…. Sheridan’s conviviality has been more rigorously denounced than many a contemporary toper’s sodden and unredeemed intemperance. Wine quickly disordered his high-strung nervous system; and, while delighting the harder-headed drinkers around him with the sallies of his wit, two or three glasses were sufficient to overset the delicate poise of his brain. As a consequence, his cheerful and comparatively innocent indiscretions over the bottle have been more frequently in men’s mouths than the results of deeper potations of his more stolid boon companions. In later life, alas! for a certain period, grief and accumulated misfortunes drove him into more serious lapses, but from the dominion of these, to his great credit be it said, he eventually redeemed himself.

  He appears to have entered the world to demonstrate by his example and conduct the utter and contemptible absurdity of proclaiming that all men can remain equal, or ought to rest satisfied with their lot. It is unhappily true that a dead level in humanity does exist; but it can only be found within the walls of an asylum for idiots. Sheridan’s confidence in himself could not be repressed by penury, nor deadened by the predominance of those who were elevated above him by the accident of high birth or inherited wealth. When a boy he had resolved to rise to the top; he neither flinched nor failed in his upward course, and he lived to look down with serenity from the pinnacle of fame upon the applauding multitude below. It is inspiring to follow his steps; it is instructive to contemplate how he always despised the aid of unworthy means, and disdained employing any of the despicable tricks to which such men as his own Joseph Surface frequently resort for the attainment of their miserable ends. He was always dissatisfied and he was often imprudent; but there is an imprudence which is sublime as well as a discontent which is noble, and their manifestation in his person constitutes one of his titles to esteem.

  It is impossible to close this rapid and slight sketch without one word at least on Mrs. Sheridan. One of the strong titles of Sheridan to the favour of posterity is to be found in the warm attachment of his family and his descendants to his memory. The strongest of them all lies in the fact that he could attract, and could retain through her too short life, the devoted affections of this admirable woman, whose beauty and accomplishments, remarkable as they were, were the least of her titles to praise. Mrs. Sheridan was certainly not strait-laced: not only did she lose at cards fifteen and twenty-one guineas on two successive nights, but she played cards, after the fashion of her day, on Sunday evenings. I am very far from placing such exploits among her claims on our love. But I frankly own to finding it impossible to read the accounts of her without profoundly coveting, across the gulf of all these years, to have seen and known her. Let her be judged by the incomparable verses (presented to us in these volumes) in which she opened the floodgates of her bleeding heart at a moment when she feared that she had been robbed, for the moment, of Sheridan’s affections by the charms of another. Those verses of loving pardon proceed from a soul advanced to some of the highest Gospel attainments. She passed into her rest when still under forty; peacefully absorbed for days before her departure, in the contemplation of the coming world.

  It might indeed be said that the low opinion of Sheridan’s character is so general that hardly a single respectable man of his time is found to mention him without contempt or reproach. In every direction we hear of some trickeries and faithlessness.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the most distinguished member of a distinguished family. His grandfather was Dr. Sheridan, the friend and correspondent of Swift. His father was Thomas Sheridan, elocutionist, actor, manager, and lexicographer. His mother was Frances Sheridan, author of the comedy of “The Discovery” (acted by David Garrick), and of the novel “Miss Sidney Biddulph” (praised by Samuel Johnson). His three granddaughters, known as the beautiful Sheridans, became, one the Duchess of Somerset, another the Countess of Dufferin, and the third the Hon. Mrs. Norton (afterward Lady Stirling-Maxwell). His great-grandson is Lord Dufferin, author and diplomatist. Thus, in six generations of the family, remarkable power of one kind or another has been revealed.

Speeches

  If you could bring over Mr. Sheridan, he would do something: he talked for five hours and a half on Wednesday, and turned everybody’s head. One heard everybody in the streets raving on the wonders of that speech; for my part, I cannot believe it was so supernatural as they say—do you believe it was, Madam? I will go to my oracle, who told me of the marvels of the pamphlet, which assures us that Mr. Hastings is a prodigy of virtue and abilities; and, as you think so too, how should such a fellow as Sheridan, who has no diamonds to bestow, fascinate all the world?—Yet witchcraft no doubt, there has been, for when did simple eloquence ever convince a majority?

  Mr. Sheridan, I hear, did not quite satisfy the passionate expectation that had been raised; but it was impossible he could, when people had worked themselves into an enthusiasm of offering fifty—ay, fifty guineas for a ticket to hear him.

  Yesterday the august scene was closed for this year. Sheridan surpassed himself and though I am far from considering him as a perfect orator, there were many beautiful passages in his speech on justice, filial love, &c.; one of the closest chains of argument I ever heard, to prove that Hastings was responsible for the acts of Middleton; and a compliment, much admired, to a certain historian of your acquaintance. Sheridan, in the close of his speech, sunk into Burke’s arms: but I called this morning, he is perfectly well. A good Actor!

  Burke caught him in his arms as he sat down…. I have myself enjoyed that embrace on such an occasion, and know its value.

  He possessed a ductility and versatility of talents, which no public man in our time has equalled; and these intellectual endowments were sustained by a suavity of temper, that seemed to set at defiance all attempts to ruffle or discompose it. Playing with his irritable or angry antagonist, Sheridan exposed him by sallies of wit, or attacked him by classic elegance of satire; performing this arduous task in the face of a crowded assembly, without losing for an instant either his presence of mind, his facility of expression, or his good humour. He wounded deepest, indeed, when he smiled; and convulsed his hearers with laughter, while the object of his ridicule or animadversion was twisting under the lash. Pitt and Dundas, who presented the finest marks for his attack, found by experience, that though they might repel, they could not confound, and still less could they silence or vanquish him. In every attempt that they made by introducing personalities, or illiberal reflections on his private life, and literary or dramatic occupations, to disconcert him, he turned their weapons on themselves. Nor did he, while thus chastising his adversary alter a muscle of his own countenance; which, as well as his gestures, seemed to participate and display the unalterable serenity of his intellectual formation. Rarely did he elevate his voice, and never except in subservience to the dictates of his judgment, with a view to produce a corresponding effect on his audience. Yet he was always heard, generally listened to with eagerness, and could obtain a hearing at almost any hour. Burke, who wanted Sheridan’s nice tact, and his amenity of manner, was continually coughed down; and on those occasions lost his temper. Even Fox often tired the House by the repetitions which he introduced into his speeches. Sheridan never abused their patience. Whenever he rose they anticipated a rich repast of wit without acrimony, seasoned by allusions and citations the most delicate yet obvious in their application.

  The most deliberate criticism must allow his eloquence to be distinguished by strong sense and brilliant wit; by a vigour of argument not too ingenious for business, nor too subtle for conviction; by a great command of pure English words, and by a vivid power of imagination in those passages which aimed at grandeur and pathos, though they must be owned to be too artificial and ostentatious to produce the highest effect, and to be approved by a severe taste.

  His reputation as an orator may be said to rest substantially on his two speeches against Mr. Warren Hastings; and it unfortunately happens, as we have already hinted, that both of these are miserably reported in the parliamentary debates. When he delivered those far-famed philippics, he was a new man in St. Stephens’—the extent of his genius and the truth of his character were yet to be developed; and we must be permitted to doubt whether, if he had spoken the same words a few years later, the world would ever have heard so much about the matter.

  His most celebrated speech was certainly the one upon the “Begum Charge” in the proceedings against Hastings; and nothing can exceed the accounts left us of its unprecedented success…. All men on all sides vied with each other in extolling so wonderful a performance. Nevertheless, the opinion has now become greatly prevalent that a portion of this success was owing to the speech having so greatly surpassed all the speaker’s former efforts; to the extreme interest of the topics which the subject naturally presented, and to the artist-like elaboration and beautiful delivery of certain fine passages, rather than to the merits of the whole. Certain it is, that the repetition of great part of it, presented in the short-hand notes of the speech on the same charge in Westminster Hall, disappoints every reader who has heard of the success of the earlier effort. In truth, Mr. Sheridan’s taste was very far from being chaste, or even moderately correct; he delighted in gaudy figures; he was attracted by glare, and cared not whether the brilliancy came from tinsel or gold, from broken glass or pure diamond; he overlaid his thoughts with epigrammatic diction; he “played to the galleries,” and indulged them, of course, with an endless succession of claptraps. His worst passages by far were those which he evidently preferred himself.

  The charge touching the spoliation of the Begums was brought forward by Sheridan, in a speech which was so imperfectly reported that it may be said to be wholly lost; but which was, without doubt, the most elaborately brilliant of all the productions of his ingenious mind. The impression which it produced was such as has never been equalled. He sat down, not merely amidst cheering, but amidst the loud clapping of hands, in which the Lords below the bar, and the strangers in the gallery, joined. The excitement of the House was such that no other speaker could obtain a hearing, and the debate was adjourned. The impression made by this remarkable display of eloquence on severe and experienced critics, whose discernment may be supposed to have been quickened by emulation, was deep and permanent. Mr. Windham, twenty years later, said that the speech deserved all its fame, and was, in spite of some faults of taste, such as were seldom wanting either in the literary or in the parliamentary performances of Sheridan, the greatest that had been delivered within the memory of man. Mr. Fox, about the same time, being asked by the late Lord Holland what was the best speech ever made in the House of Commons, assigned the first place, without hesitation, to the great oration of Sheridan on the Oude charge.

  There was, undoubtedly, some bombast in Mr. Sheridan’s speeches; but they were marked by glowing eloquence, and not unfrequently by brilliant wit. Although some of his jokes were the result of great study, yet, as they were perfect in their kind, and that kind of the very highest, we may forgive the labour. Few men have possessed the power to make such a speech as that which dazzled the House of Commons on the Begum Charge; few ever wrote so good a comedy as “The School for Scandal.” It is melancholy to reflect that the possessor of such talents should, as it were in mere wantonness, have thrown away the influence which he was so well qualified to exercise over the destiny of his country.

  Sheridan, like Whitefield, was a great rhetorician, not a great orator.

  He cannot be called a classic orator. His oriental exuberance of imagination is Asiatic rather than Greek. With a Celtic intellect that was always in extremes, joined to a native sense of humor he could not be reckoned with the grand orators of the Demosthenean type. Impetuous and heedless he plunged into the very errors he was quick to detect and expose. But for conjouring up a storm of eloquence that should bear his hearers away from their sober sense, stirring their emotions and moving their will his magnetic and impulsive oratory was surpassed by none and equalled by few.

The Rivals, 1775

  I prefer Sheridan’s “Rivals” to his “School for Scandal:” exquisite humour pleases me more than the finest wit.

  In such a play as “The Rivals” the reader is kept in a state of continual hilarious delight by a profusion of sallies, rejoinders, blunders, contrasts, which seem to exhaust all the resources of the ludicrous. Mrs. Malaprop’s “parts of speech” will raise the laughter of unborn generations, and the choleric generous old father will never find a more perfect representative than Sir Anthony Absolute.

  After the lapse of a hundred years, “The Rivals” still remains, next to its author’s greater work, the most popular comedy of the last century.

  “The Rivals” is artificial comedy, inclining on one side to farce, and, in the parts of Falkland and Julia, to the sentimental. But it is, on its own rather artificial plan, constructed with remarkable skill and tightness; and the characters of Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Lucius O’Trigger, and Bob Acres, with almost all the rest, combine fun with at least theatrical verisimilitude in a very rare way. Indeed, Sir Anthony and Mrs. Malaprop, though heightened from life, can hardly be said to be false to it, and though in the other pair the license of dramatic exaggeration is pushed to its farthest, it is not exceeded. The effect could not have been produced without the sparkling dialogue, but this alone could not have given it.

  “The Rivals,” from the date of its first night’s failure, has neither merited nor enjoyed a like measure of success as, throughout the world, has followed the “School for Scandal;” while I venture to think the incidents of the comedy are too fragile and farcical to bear such elaborate scenic treatment as we endeavoured to depict of last-century life, when Beau Nash reigned in the pumproom at Bath.

The Duenna, 1775

  This drama has a charm for the public beyond its own intrinsic worth—it was written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. If that name has no power over the reader’s imagination, so as to give to every sentence a degree of interest, let him throw aside the book, and forbear to seek after literary pleasures, for he has not the taste to enjoy them. Although “The Duenna’s” highest claim to notice depends, now, upon the reputation of its author, yet the author was first indebted to “The Duenna” for the honour of ranking among poets, and of receiving from the fashionable world all those animating caresses, so dear to a poet’s heart…. Divested of all adventitious aid, the value of the opera consists in the beautiful poetry of many of the songs; for though it is a production of much ingenuity and skill, it does not give a presage, either in wit or incident, of such a work, from the same hand, as “The School for Scandal.”

  The “Duenna” is a perfect work of art. It has the utmost sweetness and point. The plot, the characters, the dialogue, are all complete in themselves, and they are all his own; and the songs are the best that ever were written, except those in the “Beggar’s Opera.” They have a joyous spirit of intoxication in them, and a strain of the most melting tenderness.

  One of the very few operas in our language, which combines the merits of legitimate comedy with the attractions of poetry and song.

  The “Duenna” is partly a pasticcio, consisting of original music mingled with popular airs, glees, &c., adapted to new words; and it appears from the above passages in Sheridan’s letters, that he himself had a hand in the selection and adaptation of the old music. Several of the original pieces were contributed by Thomas Linley, the composer’s eldest son. These were, the overture; the songs, “Could I each fault remember,” “Friendship is the bond of reason,” and “Sharp is the woe;” the duet, “Turn thee round, I pray thee;” and the trio which concludes the first act. These are all charming things, and do honour to the genius of a young musician, who, but for his untimely fate, would undoubtedly have achieved the highest triumphs in his art.

  The songs in his opera of the “Duenna” are as superior to the productions of the century before, as they are inferior to those of the Elizabethan age. They have the sharpness and the grace of a fine intaglio: Ovid might have been proud of them: they have as much tenderness as the best portions of his “Amores,” and the tour de malice of his epigrammatic couplets. If Sheridan had turned his attention to the writing of lyrical dramas, Gay would have had a formidable rival for his “Beggar’s Opera.”

  Not only in the drawing of character, but also in dialogue, is “The Duenna” inferior to Sheridan’s better-known plays. In spite of all its brightness and lightness, it is impossible not to acknowledge that it does not contain his best work. It has few specimens of the recondite wit and quaint fancy which make “The School for Scandal” so brilliant and unequalled a comedy. If Sheridan’s wit, like quicksilver, is always glistening, perhaps at times, like mercury it seems a little heavy. Now and again the dialogue vies in sparkle and point with the talk of its author’s other plays, but not as often as might be wished.

  A lyric poet of somewhat limited powers.

  With the progress of musical compositions, especially in connexion with the Drama, “The Duenna,” greatly admired as it was on its first production, passed out of fashion; and in spite of the simplicity and the charm of many of the melodies composed for the work by Linley, in spite, above all, of the ingenuity, wit and humour of the piece, it may be doubted whether Sheridan’s “Duenna,” will ever be played again in its original form…. A justly admired composer of our time, Mr. J. L. Roeckel, has set to music Sheridan’s ancient opera-book with such lyrical additions as the taste and fashion of the day seemed to render necessary, but with no change whatever in the original dialogue, and “The Duenna” with music by Roeckel will probably supersede “The Duenna” with music by Linley, just as the operatic version of Beaumarchais’ “Barber of Seville” with music by Rossini has displaced the older operatic version of the same work with music by Paisiello.

School for Scandal, 1777

  How is the Saint to-day? A gentleman who is as mad as myself about y^e School remark’d, that the characters upon the stage at y^e falling of the screen stand too long before they speak;—I thought so too y^e first night:—he said it was the same on y^e 2^nd, and was remark’d by others;—tho’ they should be astonish’d, and a little petrify’d, yet it may be carry’d to too great a length.—All praise at Lord Lucan’s last night.

  I have seen Sheridan’s new comedy, and liked it much better than any I have seen since “The Provoked Husband.” There is a great deal of wit and good situations; but it is too long, has two or three bad scenes that might easily be omitted, and seemed to me to want nature and truth of character; but I have not read it, and sat too high to hear it well.

  The “School for Scandal” is, if not the most original, perhaps the most finished and faultless comedy which we have. When it is acted you hear people all around you exclaiming: “Surely it is impossible for anything to be cleverer.” The scene in which Charles sells all the old family pictures but his uncle’s, who is the purchaser in disguise, and that of the discovery of Lady Teazle when the screen falls, are among the happiest and most highly wrought that comedy, in its wide and brilliant range, can boast. Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs. It professes a faith in the natural goodness as well as habitual depravity of human nature. While it strips off the mask of hypocrisy it inspires a confidence between man and man. As often as it is acted it must serve to clear the air of that low, creeping, pestilent fog of cant and mysticism, which threatens to confound every native impulse, or honest conviction, in the nauseous belief of a perpetual lie, and the laudable profession of systematic hypocrisy.

  Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the “School for Scandal” in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—to express it in a word—the downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,—the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,—which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well…. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

  The beauties of this Comedy are so universally known and felt, that criticism may be spared the trouble of dwelling upon them very minutely. With but little interest in the plot, with no very profound or ingenious development of character, and with a group of personages, not one of whom has any legitimate claims upon either our affection or esteem, it yet, by the admirable skill with which its materials are managed,—the happy contrivance of the situations, at once both natural and striking,—the fine feeling of the ridiculous that smiles throughout, and that perpetual play of wit which never tires, but seems, like running water, to be kept fresh by its own flow,—by all this general animation and effect, combined with a finish of the details almost faultless, it unites the suffrages, at once, of the refined and the simple, and is not less successful in ministering to the natural enjoyment of the latter, than is satisfying and delighting the most fastidious tastes among the former.

  Many of the situations are so exquisitely comic, though a large portion of the piece is passed in talk which does not advance the action, the habit of scandal and tale-bearing is so admirably ridiculed, and the tone of the whole is so brilliant and refined, that it is equally delightful when read or when acted.

  The surpassing merits of the “School for Scandal” become the more brilliant, the more minutely they are scanned, and the more fairly the faults of the play are in juxtaposition with its beauties. Its merits are not so much to be sought in the saliency of any predominating excellence as in the harmonious combination of great varieties of excellence, in a unity of purpose sufficiently philosophical for the intellect of comedy, but not so metaphysical as to mar the airy playfulness of comic mirth. The satire it conveys is directed, not to rare and exceptional oddities in vice or folly, but to attributes of human society which universally furnish the materials and justify the ridicule of satire. It is one of the beauties of this great drama, that its moral purpose is not rigidly narrowed into the mere illustration of a maxim—that the outward plot is indeed carried on by personages who only very indirectly serve to work out the interior moral.

  Seems fairly to deserve the character generally given to it of being the most perfect comedy which has been composed since the time of Shakespeare…. The justice of the general verdict of its pre-eminent excellence is sufficiently confirmed by its remaining undisturbed after the lapse of little less than a century.

  Is perhaps the best existing English comedy of intrigue.

  Since the “School for Scandal” no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage.

  Sheridan is not of course to be likened to Molière: the Frenchman had a depth and a power to which the Irishman could not pretend. But a comparison with Beaumarchais is fair enough, and it can be drawn only in favor of Sheridan; for brilliant as the “Marriage of Figaro” is, it lacks the solid structure and the broad outlook of the “School for Scandal.” Both the French wit and the Irish are masters of fence, and the dialogue of these comedies still scintillates as steel crosses steel. Neither of them put much heart into his plays; and perhaps the “School for Scandal” is even more artificial than the “Marriage of Figaro,”—but it is wholly free from the declamatory shrillness which to-day mars the masterpiece of Beaumarchais.

The Critic, 1779–81

  I have read Sheridan’s “Critic,” but, not having seen it, for they say it is admirably acted, it appeared wondrously flat and old, and a poor imitation: it makes me fear I shall not be so much charmed with “The School for Scandal” on reading, as I was when I saw it.

  In some of its most admired passages little better than an exquisite cento of the wit of the satirists before him. Sheridan must have felt himself emphatically at home in a production of this kind, for there was every call in it upon the powers he abounded in,—wit, banter, and style,—and none upon his good nature.

  Sir Fretful, between his two tormentors, and the cheerful bustle and assured confidence of Mr. Puff, have held their ground when hundreds of sensational dramas have drooped and died. Never was a more wonderful literary feat. The art of puffing has been carried to a perfection unsuspected by Mr. Puff, and not one person in a thousand has the most remote idea who Cumberland was; but “The Critic” is as delightful as ever, and we listen to the gentlemen talking with as much relish as our grandfathers did. Nay, the simplest-minded audience, innocent of literature, and perhaps not very sure what it all means, will still answer to the touch and laugh till they cry over the poor author’s wounded vanity and the woes of Tilburina. Shakspeare, it is evident, found the machinery cumbrous, and gave up the idea of making Sly and his mockers watch the progress of the “Taming of the Shrew,” and Beaumont and Fletcher lose our interest altogether in their long-drawn-out by-play, though the first idea of it is comical in the highest degree. Nor could Fielding keep the stage with his oft-repeated efforts, notwithstanding the wit and point of many of his dialogues. But Sheridan at last, after so many attempts, found out the right vein.

  “The Critic” is perhaps the highest proof of Sheridan’s skill as a dramatist, for in it he has worked out, with perfect success for all time, a theme which, often as it has been attempted, no other dramatist has ever succeeded in redeeming from tedious circumstantiality and ephemeral personalities. The laughable infirmities of all classes connected with the stage,—authors, actors, patrons, and audience,—are touched off with the lightest of hands; the fun is directed, not at individuals, but at absurdities that grow out of the circumstances of the stage as naturally and inevitably as weeds in a garden.

General

  At the same age with Congreve, he composed comedies of similar, and one of almost equal, merit: like his great master, he neglected incident and character, and sought only brilliancy of dialogue: what he sought, he attained, even to excess; and his wit was fertile enough to betray him into the splendid fault of rendering his dialogue more dazzling and poignant than suited his own personages, or, indeed, any human conversation.

  Lord Holland told me a curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan. The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans, and mine was this: “What ever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy (‘School for Scandal’), the best drama (in my mind, far before that St. Giles’s lampoon, ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’) the best farce (‘the Critic’—it is only too good for a farce), and the best Address (‘Monologue on Garrick’), and, to crown all, delivered the very best Oration (the famous Begum Speech) ever conceived or heard in this country.” Somebody told S. this the next day, and on hearing it he burst into tears! Poor Brinsley! if they were tears of pleasure, I would rather have said these few, but most sincere, words than have written the Iliad or made his own celebrated Philippic. Nay, his own comedy never gratified me more than to hear that he had derived a moment’s gratification from any praise of mine, humble as it must appear to “my elders and my betters.”

  The comedy of the fourth period is chiefly remarkable for exhibiting “The Rivals” and “The School for Scandal.” Critics prefer the latter; while the general audience reap, perhaps, more pleasure from the former, the pleasantry being of a more general cast, the incident more complicated and varied, and the whole plot more interesting. In both these plays, the gentlemanlike ease of Farquhar is united with the wit of Congreve. Indeed, the wit of Sheridan, though equally brilliant with that of his celebrated predecessor, flows so easily, and is so happily elicited by the tone of the dialogue, that in admiring its sparkles, we never once observe the stroke of the flint which produces them. Wit and pleasantry seemed to be the natural atmosphere of this extraordinary man, whose history was at once so brilliant and so melancholy.

  There is too much merely ornamental dialogue, and, with some very fine rhetorical situations, too much intermission in the action and business of the play; and, above all, there is too little real warmth of feeling, and too few indications of noble or serious passion, thoroughly to satisfy the wants of English readers and spectators—even in a comedy. Their wit [that of “The Rivals” and “The School for Scandal”] is the best of them.

  The dramas of Sheridan … have placed him at the head of the genteel comedy of England; and while truth of character and manners, chastised brilliancy of wit, humour devoid of the least stain of coarseness, exquisite knowledge of stage-effect, and consummate ease and elegance of idiomatic language are appreciated, there can be no doubt that the name of Sheridan will maintain its place.

  No writers have injured the Comedy of England so deeply as Congreve and Sheridan. Both were men of splendid wit and polished taste. Unhappily they made all their characters in their own likeness. Their works bear the same relation to the legitimate drama which a transparency bears to a painting; no delicate touches; no hues imperceptibly fading into each other; the whole is lighted up with a universal glare. Outlines and tints are forgotten, in the common blaze which illuminates all. The flowers and fruits of the intellect abound; but it is the abundance of a jungle, not of a garden—unwholesome, bewildering, unprofitable from its very plenty, rank from its very fragrance. Every fop, every boor, every valet is a man of wit. The very butts and dupes, Tattle, Urkwould, Puff, Acres, outshine the whole Hôtel de Rambouillet. To prove the whole system of this school absurd, it is only necessary to apply the test which dissolved the enchanted Florimel—to place the true by the false Thalia, to contrast the most celebrated characters which have been drawn by the writers of whom we speak, with the Bastard in King John, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

  Sheridan is, indeed, a golden link which connects us with the Authors of better days. He has wit; pure, polished, genuine wit. He has humour; not, perhaps, of quite so pure an order, a little forced and overstrained, but its root is in Nature, whatever aberrations it may spread into in its branches. His dialogue is of matchless brilliancy; so brilliant as to enchain the attention, and to blind us to the grand defect of his Plays, their want of action, and of what is technically called, business. This defect alone shuts out Sheridan from taking his place by the side of the elder Dramatists, and assigns him his situation a step lower among the writers of the age of Charles. He is, however, free from their impurities of thought and language; their equal in wit, and their superior in genuine humour.

  Sheridan’s defects as a dramatist answer to the defects of his mind and character. Acute in observing external appearances, and well informed in what rakes and men of fashion call life, he was essentially superficial in mind and heart. A man of great wit and fancy, he was singularly deficient in the deeper powers of humor and imagination. All his plays lack organic life. In plot, character, and incident, they are framed by mechanical, not conceived by vital, processes. They evince no genial enjoyment of mirth, no insight into the deeper springs of the ludicrous. The laughter they provoke is the laughter of antipathy, not of sympathy. It is wit detecting external inconsistencies and oddities, not humor representing them in connection with the inward constitution whence they spring.

  The close of the last century gave birth to the finest prose comedy in the English, or perhaps any other language. In abstract wit, Congreve equals, and, in the opinion of some critics, even surpasses, Sheridan; but Congreve’s wit is disagreeably cynical; Sheridan’s wit has the divine gift of the Graces—charm. The smile it brings to our lips is easy and cordial; the smile which Congreve brings forth is forced and sardonic. In what is called vis comica, Farquhar, it is true, excels Sheridan by the rush of his animal spirits, by his own hearty relish of the mirth he creates. Sheridan’s smile, though more polished than Farquhar’s, has not less ease; but his laugh, though as genuine, has not the same lusty ring. It is scarcely necessary, however, to point out Sheridan’s superiority to Farquhar in the quality of the mirth excited. If in him the vis comica has not the same muscular strength, it has infinitely more elegance of movement, and far more disciplined skill in the finer weapons at its command; and whatever comparison may be drawn between the general powers of Sheridan for comic composition and those of Farquhar and Congreve, neither of the two last-named has produced a single comedy which can be compared to the “School for Scandal.”

  His comedies were comedies of society, the most amusing ever written, but merely comedies of society.

  Sheridan’s Irish birth and Celtic temperament must be largely credited with the brightness and permanent attractiveness of his plays.

  His comedies are a continual running fire of wit; not true to nature and utterly destitute of that highest kind of humour which approaches pathos, but full of happy turns of expression and admirably constructed with a view to stage representation. He is the last of our play-writers who have produced works both excellent as literature and also good acting dramas.

  He had a fit of writing, a fit of oratory, but no impulse to keep him in either path long enough to make anything more than the dazzling but evanescent triumph of a day. His harvest was like a Southern harvest, over early, while it was yet but May; but he sowed no seed for a second ingathering, nor was there any growth or richness left in the soon exhausted soil.

  Sheridan’s was a brilliant, shallow intellect, a shifty, selfish nature; his one great quality, his one great element of success as a dramatist, as an orator and as a man, was mastery of effect. His tact was exquisitely nice and fine. He knew how to say and how to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. This was the sum of him; there was no more. Without wisdom, without any real insight into the human heart, without imagination, with a flimsy semblance of fancy, entirely devoid of true poetic feeling, even of the humblest order, incapable of philosophic reflection, never rising morally above the satirizing of the fashionable vices and follies of his day, to him the doors of the great theatre of human life were firmly closed. His mind flitted lightly over the surface of society, now casting a reflection of himself upon it, now making it sparkle and ripple with a touch of his flashing wing. He was a surface man, and the name of the two chief agents in the plot of his principal comedy is so suitable to him as well as to their characters, that the choice of it would seem to have been instinctive and intuitive. He united the qualities of his Charles and Joseph Surface; having the wit, the charming manner, the careless good-nature of the one, with at least a capacity of the selfishness, the duplicity, the crafty design, but without the mischief and the malice, of the other.

  Compared even with Congreve himself, he stands high as a dialoguist, for though his wit is not quite so keen or so nimble, or his style quite so polished, his epigrams and jests seem to grow more naturally and unforcedly out of the circumstances of the play; his geniality, too, is much greater, and is contagious. After a play of Sheridan’s we feel on better terms with human nature. His plots are admirable—not solutions of any of the problems of social life as, according to some critics, comedies should be, but easy, pleasant, and fluent, and full, as such ease and pleasantness implies, of much concealed art. The spirit of Sheridan’s plays is so thoroughly modern, they are salted with so good and true a wit, have so much of honest stagecraft in them, and are so full of a humour which is wholly that of the present period, that a play of his adequately put upon the stage will hold its own to this day triumphantly against the most successful of modern pieces.

  There is more freedom, more freshness of impulse, more kindness, more joy, more nature in “The Rivals” than there is in the “School for Scandal;” but both are artificial; both reflect, in a mirror of artistic exaggeration, the hollow, feverish, ceremonious, bespangled, glittering, heart-breaking fashionable world, in which their author’s mind was developed and in which they were created. The “School for Scandal,” indeed, is completely saturated with artificiality, and the fact that it was intended to satirise and rebuke the faults of an insincere, scandal-mongering society does not—and was not meant to—modify that pervasive and predominant element of its character.

  His wit was an incessant flame.—He sometimes displayed a kind of serious and elegant playfulness, not apparently arising to wit, but unobservedly saturated with it, which was unspeakably pleasing.—His wit is the wit of common sense.—Grace of manner, charm of voice, fluency of language, and, above all, a brilliancy of sarcasm, a wit and a humour; and again a felicity of statement that made him the delight of every audience and that excited the admiration of his very opponents themselves.—The wit displayed by Sheridan in Parliament was perhaps, from the suavity of his temper, much less sharp than brilliant.

  Can any one see such plays acted, for instance, as Sheridan’s, without being forcibly struck by the total absence of spontaneity and the absolute submission to social routine of the average society man and woman of those days. Sheridan’s comedies are undoubtedly as true to their times on the one hand as they are to human nature on the other, but the humanity of them is thrown into vivid and strong relief by the artificiality of the elements in the midst of which the chief actors have their being. As for the literature, it is hardly necessary for me to defend the statement that it was conventional.

  The real risk to which “The School for Scandal” is more and more exposed as the years roll by, is lest it may be found trespassing on the borderlands of truth and reality, and evoking genuine feeling; for as soon as it does this, the surroundings must become incongruous and therefore painful. Too long ago, when Miss Ellen Terry used to act Lady Teazle at the Vaudeville with a moving charm still happily hers, I remember hearing behind me a youthful voice full of tears and terror (it was of course when Joseph Surface was making his insidious proposals to Lady Teazle) exclaim, “Oh, mother, I hope she won’t yield!” and I then became aware of the proximity of some youthful creature to whom all this comic business (for one knew the screen was soon to fall) was sheer tragedy. It made me a little uncomfortable. To Sheridan, nearer to Congreve than we are now to Sheridan, it was all pure comedy. We see this from the boisterous laughter with which Charles Surface greets the dénouement. Charles was no doubt a rake, but he was not meant to be a heartless rake after the fashion of the Wildairs of an earlier day. Had he not refused five hundred pounds for a trumpery picture of his uncle, for whose fortune he was waiting? It was all comedy to Sheridan, and if it ever ceases to be all comedy to us, it will be the first blow this triumphant piece has ever received.

  Sheridan brought the comedy of manners to the highest perfection, and “The School for Scandal” remains to this day the most popular comedy in the English language. Some of the characters both in this play and in “The Rivals” have become so closely associated with our current speech that we may fairly regard them as imperishable. No farce of our time has so excellent a chance of immortality as “The Critic.” A playwright of whom these things are commonplaces must have had brilliant qualities for his craft; but the secret in this case, I think, lies in the pervading humanity of Sheridan’s work. That is the only preservative against decay.

  As a dramatist Sheridan carried the comedy of manners in this country to its highest pitch, and his popularity as a writer for the stage is exceeded by that of Shakespeare alone.

  The fact that Sheridan has held the stage, while his far greater predecessor, Congreve, has disappeared from it, is due to an accident of time. Luckily for Sheridan’s permanence, he began to write when that wave of squeamishness and reticence in regard to certain things … had fairly washed over England…. No one who knows them both can doubt that Sheridan helped himself from Congreve with a generous hand. It is probable that he consciously “refined” him: it is certain that he unconsciously vulgarised him…. In this matter of breeding Sheridan comes off ill. In the more important matter of intellect he comes off worse. Epigrams and witty remarks apart, in which Congreve can beat the whole of Sheridan with one act of “The Way of the World,” there is a meaning, a thought, in Congreve’s characters and oppositions of characters which Sheridan never approaches. In this respect, at least, Sheridan is by far the coarser of the two…. Congreve’s plays are more genuine comedies than Sheridan’s. Sheridan had an eye for fantastic accessories and little more in his plays: Congreve was concerned, not primarily perhaps, but because he could not help using his intellect and his knowledge of life, with essentials of character and human relations…. Sheridan, then, is popularly regarded as the great and permanent exemplar of witty old English comedy by an accident. He does not deserve this pre-eminence, which should have been Congreve’s. But he does deserve to hold the stage, and to be revived at the expense of contemporary dramatists. His wit is superficial and intellectually coarse, but there is plenty of it. His characters are rather thin and farcical, but they are distinct and act funnily on one another. A few lapses excepted, he is gay and lively. He has a style and a manner. Above all, he is an ingenious and effective craftsman, and therefore a good friend and a stimulus to the players. He is a fair task master to them. If they act well, they are sure of their due effect: he does not stultify them with inconsistencies or negations.