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finding themselves on the side of prerogative, the Tories on that of the Parliament. As William Grenville wrote at the time, Fox was irritating every Whig sentiment by his high Tory doctrine, and Sheridan positively caps his leader by 'committing such a blunder as I never knew any man of the meanest talent guilty of before. During the whole time I have sat in Parliament-a pretty warm time I never remember such an uproar as was raised by Sheridan's threatening us "with the danger of provoking the Prince to assert his right," which were the exact words he used. You may conceive what advantage all this gives us, especially when coupled with the strong hopes of the King's recovery.'

Pitt's Regency Bill passed the House of Commons, but whilst it was still in committee in the House of Lords the King recovered his health, and the hopes of Fox and his friends were dashed to the ground. As Mr. Rae says, 'the Whigs had played the party game in a blundering fashion.' The King was immensely popular, the rejoicings upon his recovery were thoroughly national, and those who had been calculating upon the continuance of his incapacity naturally suffered in the popular esteem. Fox and Sheridan were as great losers by their conduct during the debates on the Regency as they had been by coalescing with Lord North,' and when several years later they advocated the cause of France and the Revolution their conduct was watched by a public already prepared to view it with suspicion. In the Regency debates we find Sheridan outdoing even Fox in his enthusiasm for what he contended were the rights of the Prince of Wales.

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When the great crisis of the French Revolution came Sheridan, as a matter of course, held with Fox. No statesman ever loved peace more than Pitt, and, as appears from his own letters, no one more fully held that the French had a right to reconstitute their internal system as they chose. But to represent that the question of peace or war with France in 1793 turned upon the views held in the abstract for or against a Republican system of government is to mistake fundamentally the facts of the time. The French, when war was declared between the two countries, were not merely engaged in internal revolution or reconstruction. They were already in armed occupation of Belgium and Antwerp, and of the line of the Scheldt, of the Palatinate and Mayence, of Savoy, Nice, and Geneva; and Lord Rosebery has recently pointed out in his admirable little Life of Pitt' that every consideration of national interest, of national honour, and of direct national obligation com

pelled Pitt, as they would have compelled any other British minister, to resist the aggressions of the French Republic. Mr. Rae, as many others have done before him, forgets the change that four years had worked in the position of France. In 1789 and 1790 British public opinion-certainly that of the Whig party-looked with sympathy and hope towards the growth of French liberties. At first Burke's passionate eloquence shot far beyond the temper of the time, and his anti-Gallican zeal was condemned by many who ultimately recognised that the safety of their own country depended upon their power of defeating the French Republic. That Pitt was at war with France was itself almost enough to throw the sympathies of Fox on the other side. Sheridan went with him, but almost all the responsible statesmen who in 1789 had looked upon Fox as their leader-such men as Windham, Lord Spencer, the Duke of Portland, and Thomas Grenville-rallied to the cause of Pitt, and did much in a terrible time of trial to save their country. Mr. Fraser Rae asks his readers to remember that Fox and Sheridan kept their heads cool and their armour bright, knowing that they were fighting for the cause of freedom, which, though often imperilled, has always prevailed.' Fox and Sheridan possessed great qualities, and in many respects will always deserve the admiration of their countrymen; but we are not prepared to count calmness of judgement amongst their most conspicuous virtues, nor identify the cause of liberty with the advance of the conquering armies of revolutionary France.

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Mr. Rae treats very cursorily Sheridan's political career between 1793 and 1806. In 1798 he spoke in favour of continuing the war, and he was, on that account perhaps, supposed to have had some sort of understanding with the ministry; whilst during the government of Addington he was certainly more or less in friendly communication with that most inefficient of the governments of George III. In 1801 he opposed the union with Ireland. In 1806 Pitt died, and Lord Grenville's Ministry of All the Talents' was formed, with Fox as its real chief. And now surely was the time when after so many years of party service Sheridan would have his reward, and would take his place amongst the Cabinet ministers of the Crown. He was once more disappointed, and expressed in a letter to Fox his dissatisfaction at receiving no more important a place than that of Treasurer to the Navy. Even this lasted but a short time, as Lord Grenville's Ministry fell on the Catholic

question after a life of only nine months. Thus Sheridan's official life consisted of three periods, amounting altogether to about two years out of the thirty-one years of his parliamentary career. In 1807 he was returned for Ilchester. În 1812 he stood again for Stafford, but was defeated. His relations were now no longer friendly with the Whig leaders, and he never stood again. He died in 1816, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Mr. Fraser Rae, we cannot help thinking, would have given us a more lifelike portrait of the real Sheridan' had his advocacy of his hero's virtues been less vehement and more discriminating. No doubt Sheridan, like many another public man, was the victim of much calumny; but, unless previous biographers and most of his contemporaries were in a conspiracy to defame him, Sheridan cannot be truly regarded as standing on a higher level either in his public or his private life than other men of his day. We are told that in his public life had Sheridan been less scrupulous he would have received higher praise, and that 'his contemporaries and their successors have accused him of 'failings from which he was free, because he practised 'virtues which they regarded as utterly Quixotic.' Again, in his private life, we are assured that he was devoted to his wife to the point of uxoriousness, a bold statement, having regard to what is narrated even in these volumes! We are told that if there was one vice he detested it was that of gambling. He was prepared to legislate against it. He denounced it in the House of Commons. Surely, then, he must have suffered much in spirit from the wicked ways of his chief associates and patrons, Charles Fox and the Prince of Wales! Stories have been told of his irregular hours, of when he went to bed and when he got up in the morning. 'Probably the truth was that, suffering from insomnia for many years of his life, and finding his eyelids heavy in the morning, he may have often remained in bed longer than he would have done if refreshed with balmy sleep during 'the night.'

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Again, it has been calumniously said that he drank more and ran into debt more than other men, and Sir Gilbert Elliot is quoted to the effect that Fox drinks a great deal . . Sheridan excessively, and Grey more than any of them,' from which degrees of comparison we are asked to infer the moderation, on the whole, of Sheridan's potations. In later

* Vol. ii. p. 244.

years, at all events, Sheridan had a very red face, and the story is told that when he first met Miss Ogle (his second wife) at Devonshire House, she, frightened by his rubicund countenance, exclaimed, 'Keep away, you terrible creature!' But it was a most unwarrantable inference on the part of Sheridan's contemporaries to attribute a red face to a want of temperance, for Mr. Fraser Rae has laid all the facts of the case before Mr. Malcolm Morris, the distinguished doctor and dermatologist, and has obtained an opinion, which he has been allowed to make public, that Sheridan 'may have suffered, as even water-drinkers do, from a 'disease of the skin called acne rosacea.' On a later page Mr. Fraser Rae boldly states as a fact, on the strength of this hypothetical opinion, that Sheridan suffered from an affection of the skin!

Sheridan, in 1786, had been travelling in the West of England with his wife, her sister and her husband. From Plymouth he writes to a lady correspondent of the ungodly habits of his fellow-travellers, which had prevented him going to church as often as he could wish, and he breaks off his letter in order to rush off to garrison prayers.'

We cannot help rejoicing that we now have it on unimpeachable authority that Sheridan was at least no teetotaler. The delightful, and surely characteristic, story of how he was brought home by the night-watchman is now vouched for, not by the humbug Whigs or still more calumnious Tories, but by his own sister, who, truth to tell, appears to be little shocked by her brother's late hours and unsteady condition. Sheridan had asked the watchman did he know him, and on the latter's replying in the negative, Why,' said Sheridan, it is odd you should not know me. I am Mr. 'Wilberforce.' The watchman, his sister continues, dropped his pole and lantern with astonishment at finding, at four o'clock in the morning, in no very sober condition, the greatest saint in England. This,' says his biographer,

was Sheridan's last practical joke,' and his readers will deplore that it is almost the only one recorded in these pages.

The author has warned his readers in his preface not to expect to find in his book any of the stories of the wit and humour, the scrapes and frolics, which have clustered so abundantly round the name of Sheridan. Yet we doubt whether the severe method in which Mr. Rae has delineated his hero has quite brought the true portrait of his striking personality before us. Would his contemporaries

here find the real Sheridan '? Far better than this laborious white-washing we like the tone of Byron's advice to Moore, when he was preparing the Life of Sheridan ' we quote from Mr. Rae-Never mind the angry lies of the humbug Whigs. Recollect that he was an Irishman and a clever fellow; and that we have had some very pleasant days with him. Don't forget he was at school at 'Harrow.'

In the opinion of Wraxall, Sheridan's whole political life showed far more real public spirit and love of his country than was shown by Fox, and his pages abound with frequent praise of his brilliant qualities. It was his private life and conduct, says Wraxall, that prevented his rising to the highest places in the service of the State. It was not his poverty that kept him back, for neither Pitt nor Fox had any patrimony remaining when they occupied the highest offices. But Sheridan's expedients for raising the wind' and his ingenious evasions of his creditors would have discredited any public man. These stories were current in every society and would fill a volume. This is Wraxall's account, and we cannot doubt that, whether or not Wraxall's belief in Sheridan's want of character was well founded, this belief was almost universally current in his own day.

The death of his first wife, whose virtues and charms are admirably sketched by Mr. Rae, was to Sheridan an irreparable loss. His second wife, a daughter of the Dean of Winchester, was a lady of a different stamp. Though she probably hardly understood her husband's great endowments, she was deeply interested in his success, and on one occasion actually appeared under the gallery of the House of Commons in male attire in order to hear him speak. The end of his career did not fulfil the brilliant promise of earlier days. Whatever the reason, Fox, in 1806, appears not to have pressed the claims of the brother-in-arms who had fought by his side for five and twenty years. The close connexion with the Prince of Wales had not raised him in the public estimation, and his intimacy with the Addington Ministry may have done him harm with strong party-men amongst the Whigs.

Sheridan's was a brilliant career, but it is a mistake to rank him amongst the greatest of English statesmen. Amongst the very first of our dramatists, our orators, and our wits he will always stand. And when we are considering his character, it should not be forgotten that his plays, so remarkable for brilliant cleverness and wit, are marked by a

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