It was a Spirit, SHERIDAN! that breathed Now patriot Rage! And indignation high Dedicate this Work ΤΟ SIR JOHN R. ROBINSON, K.B. WITH WHOSE FRIENDSHIP I HAVE LONG BEEN HONOURED AND TO WHOSE WISE COUNSEL AND ACUTE CRITICISM I ATTRIBUTE MUCH OF THE PLEASURE WHICH MY SHORT MEMOIR OF SHERIDAN GAVE TO LORD DUFFERIN. INTRODUCTION BY SHERIDAN'S GREAT-GRANDSON. WHEN in Canada several years ago I read with infinite pleasure a work by Mr. Fraser Rae on Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox; the Opposition under George III." The spirit in which it was executed seemed to me so fair and honest, and the author showed so great a familiarity with the time and events of which he treated, that I determined, if an opportunity occurred, to suggest that he should undertake a complete biography of Sheridan. I was the more inclined to do this on account of the unfortunate treatment which the subject had received at the hands of previous writers. The biography compiled by Dr. Watkins is a piece of bookmaking of the worst type. Moore, who professed to be Sheridan's friend and admirer, and to whom his papers were entrusted, committed the fatal fault of planning his "Memoirs" of Sheridan upon too large a scale. Having got half-way through his task, he allowed six years to elapse before finishing it. By this time it had become an unwelcome burden, as he notes in his Diary, and this is only too evident from the somewhat ungenerous and subacid tone in which he continued it.1 This was followed by the scandalous sketch of Professor Smyth, who, taking advantage of his residence in Sheridan's house as his son's tutor, vented the ill-humour engendered by a position distasteful to his vanity, in spiteful libels on his patron. He committed the further crime of interpolating an atrocious falsehood about a perfectly innocent person. Subsequent biographers and essayists, having no original material at their disposal, have been obliged to fall back upon Moore's perfunctory narrative, with its many inaccuracies, or to eke out their story with the idle gossip and injurious inventions which, in the nature of things, were sure to accumulate around the reputation of a person endowed with Sheridan's gifts and idiosyncracies. 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 1 His lamentations over his "task" are frequent and strongly worded, as, for example, "I often wish Sheridan, Miss Linley and Major Mathews at the Devil." While not confessing indebtedness to Watkins in his "Memoirs" of Sheridan, he writes in his Diary: "Worked a little at Sheridan'; badly off for materials; almost reduced to Watkins" (Moore's Diary, vol. ii., pp. 173, 207). |