It is melancholy, as we might infer from the title, and the catastrophe is made gratuitously mournful, but the sombre colouring is artistically toned down, and the author has drawn three living portraits. The sisters who are laid to rest in the green graves after a sad though short experience of life's fitful fever, fall victims to the intensity of their mutual love, to the insane crotchets of a feather-brained mother, and to the caprice of a gay young cavalier, who courts, who conquers, and who rides away. But we feel more for the sufferings of the grave clergyman who, having petted the luckless children in the nursery, and won the love of the elder and more thoughtful, buries his affections in one of the graves, and is doomed to an old age unconsoled by oblivion. Yet really he has no cause for regret, since sorrow has sanctified a worldly nature. In 'Robert Urquhart' the canvas is rather overcrowded with such parochial worthies as flourished in Glen Quharity and Drumtochty, but though the author seeks his adventurous heroes among school teachers, he makes them human, impressionable, and inflammable. They make love with a spirit and gallantry which leaves little to desire, and their experiences among the Scottish Bohemianism of literary London are as exciting as those in Mr. Barrie's When a Man's Single.' Whether the popularity of the new Scotch novel will endure is a question we hesitate to answer in the affirmative. A moderate amount of the semi-intelligible Scottish dialect must go a long way with Southern readers, and already we see signs that even the apostles of the new dispensation cannot repeat themselves with impunity, preserving freshness and originality. There is a certain picturesqueness in weaving Thrums, and there is the sublimity of Highland grandeur in Drumtochty; but, after all, a novelist must rely upon human interest for his effects, and even genius must sooner or later exhaust the materials in a backof-the-world industrial townlet, or a secluded Highland glen. The variety of individual types is limited, and the general characteristics have been stereotyped by time and custom. It is as tacking and beating about in a land-locked Highland loch to launching out on the wide Atlantic or braving the storms of Cape Horn. ART. III.-Sheridan. A Biography by W. FRASER RAE, with an Introduction by Sheridan's Great-Grandson, the Marquess of DUFFERIN AND AVA. 2 vols. London: 1886. Y By the universal consent of his contemporaries Sheridan was the most brilliant man of his day. A century has elapsed since he was at the summit of his fame, and the verdict of posterity is unanimous that, as orator, as dramatist, as wit, Sheridan stands out, not only as first amongst his contemporaries, but as second to none who since his time. have added fresh lustre to English literature and eloquence. Sheridan died at the age of sixty-five, in 1816. As Byron wrote: "The flash of Wit-the bright Intelligence, Yet, in spite of this immortality, his many biographers, from carelessness, from want of sympathy, or from want of material, have hitherto failed to present Sheridan's countrymen with a living portrait of the man who so greatly impressed his own age, and whose works still give so much delight to our own. As a matter of fact, the most brilliant of his oratorical achievements have not 'endured,' for no really authentic reports of them remain. They have been described, often with discriminating fulness, in contemporary letters and diaries; occasionally short passages have come down to us, probably in their original form; but the actual speeches as they were delivered, the ipsissima verba, by which his hearers were entertained, have perished for ever. No fresh work was needed to establish the fame of Sheridan as dramatist or orator, and this is not the main object of the biography whose title we have placed at the head of our article. Lord Dufferin, two years ago, in a delightful sketch of his mother, Sheridan's grand-daughter, referred to the want of appreciation Sheridan's biographers had hitherto shown to the nobler side of his character: No famous man had been 'more unfortunate in his biographers.' And Lord Dufferin led us to look at an early date for the appearance of a 'Life' which would remove the unfortunate impressions left by the * Monody on the Death of Sheridan. works of Moore and Professor Smyth. Mr. Fraser Rae has had access to all the existing papers in possession of Sheridan's descendants, and has had recourse in the libraries of Devonshire House and at Stowe to documents bearing on his career, and he is thus able to bring before the public much material with which previous biographers were unacquainted. What sort of man, then, was the real Sheri'dan '? Neither his biographers nor the world have sought to minimise the praise of Lord Byron so often quoted-viz., that Sheridan had written the best comedy, the best opera, the best farce, the best address, and, to crown Iall, delivered the best oration ever conceived or heard in this country.' What kind of man, then, was this brilliant genius in his political, his social, his private life? Was his political career determined by high principle, patriotic aspiration, and enlightened views? Has he a claim to stand in the very front rank of English statesmen? To answer these questions in favour of Sheridan is the main object of this latest of the Lives,' and it is in this aspect that the chief importance of Mr. Fraser Rae's work lies. 6 Sheridan belonged to an old Irish family. His ancestors, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, were as princes in the land, and his own branch of the family were chiefs of the name. But, as has so often happened with Irish families, the grandeur of the ancient ancestry had passed away long before we reach modern times; and Mr. Rae is right not to take his readers further back than his hero's grandfather, a scholarly and, for a time, very successful schoolmaster in Dublin-Dr. Sheridan, the friend of Swift. As with his son and his grandson, the Doctor's career was a strange mixture of success and failure. His admirable school was ruined by a rival establishment, started by his former patrons; and we find him animadverting, in a letter to Swift, in 1736, on these quondam friends -'quon-dam them all!'--with as much severity as he thinks permissible to his clerical profession. He was subsequently appointed chaplain to the lord-lieutenant, but gave much offence, and lost his place, by chancing to preach a sermon, on the anniversary of the accession of the House of Hanover, on the unhappily chosen text, Sufficient unto the day is the 'evil thereof!' Later in life he became possessed of valuable property, but his income increased less fast than his expenditure, and he was always poor and in debt. His son, Thomas Sheridan, father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was a man of some capacity and, perhaps, genius, whose vanities and eccentricities ruined any prospect that he might have had of achieving permanent success. He was, for a time, a popular actor in Dublin; and it was whilst manager of the Theatre Royal there that he wrote to Garrick to ask him to divide 'his immortality with him, so that we may, like Castor and Pollux, appear always in different hemispheres-in plain English, what think you of dividing the kingdoms between 'us, to play one winter in Dublin and another in London?' The great purpose of his life was the cultivation of oratory, and the provision of a perpetual standard for the correct pronunciation of English. Sheridan's Pronouncing Dictionary' was to follow at no great distance after the work of Johnson. He lectured on his favourite topics in the great towns of England, and amusing accounts are given how the bold Irishman became the fashion in Edinburgh, and, speaking with a strong brogue, set himself to teach Scotchmen English. Doubtless it was in consequence of his successful efforts in this direction that he secured the freedom of the City of Edinburgh. His wife Sheridan's mother, the daughter of a Dublin clergyman-was possessed of considerable talent, and was much respected and admired by Richardson, and Johnson, and Garrick. On the recommendation of the first, she published her novel of Sidney 'Biddulph,'' which took the town by storm.' Lord North delighted in it, and Fox declared it the best novel of the age. Garrick produced, at Drury Lane, her comedy called The Discovery,' which was received with the heartiest applause, and ran for some time; but her subsequent attempts, either at fiction or at the drama, were less successful. The pressure of debt compelled Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan, in 1764, to betake themselves to France, where a couple of years later she died, at the early age of forty-two, leaving behind her an unpublished MS., in which her son found the prototype of the immortal Mrs. Malaprop.' Sheridan, the second son of this marriage, was at the time a boy of thirteen and at school at Harrow, where, though it is probable that he neither gained nor sought school distinctions, he could not fail to establish a reputation for cleverness with all who knew him, whether masters or boys. A leader in school pranks and the favourite of his schoolfellows, he was by the masters often suspected of breaches of school discipline; but, it is said, was never found out-from which circumstances, perhaps, one can estimate the boy's character better than from the formal disquisition of school authorities. He left Harrow at eighteen, and for a time lived at his father's house in London, where men of very varied distinction, such as Wedderburn, and Foote, and Boswell, and General Paoli were constant visitors. At the end of 1770 his father set up his family house at Bath, then the most fashionable resort in England outside the metropolis; and here, before many months had passed, events occurred which moulded the future course of young Sheridan's life. Our author brings rapidly before us the glories of Bath as described from different points of view by Smollett, Miss Burney, Hannah More, and Jane Austen. It was a city of palaces, a town of hills, and a hill of towns.' Distinguished men and women of every kind sought its healing springs or mingled in its social life. Balls and ridottos, the theatre, music, cards, in never-ending succession, made the Bath season outrival that of London itself. Bath, happy Bath,' sighed Hannah More in 1792, 'is as gay as if there is no war, nor sin, nor misery in the 'world!' Even the staid Wilberforce, a few years earlier, had felt the attraction of its temptations. "Too dissipated 'a place,' he writes in his journal, except the waters are necessary. Habits of idleness almost inseparable from it, ' and one grows insensibly fond of them.' In this gay world young Sheridan, whose Harrow schoolfellows were now starting undergraduate life at Oxford and Cambridge, soon became a prime favourite, both with men and women. Singularly handsome, overflowing with spirits, with a ready wit, he would naturally shine in every social gathering. At this time, according to Miss Burney, there was nothing more tonish in Bath than to visit Lady 'Miller at Bath-Easton,' where the wits contended for prizes awarded to the best versifier, and where a high character for refined taste and cultured æstheticism was somewhat laboriously maintained. Young Sheridan attended frequently at the Parnassus Fair,' as Horace Walpole calls it, held weekly at Bath-Easton, where he must have seen much to delight his keen sense of humour, and where he must also have made acquaintance with many men and women of wider tastes than the mere pleasure-seekers of the city. Of his life and conduct at Bath almost nothing is known. His sisters always regarded him with a warm affection,' says the good-natured Mr. Fraser Rae, and a good brother is seldom a bad boy.' There is, however, more evidence as to his aspirations than as to his actions, and with young men character may often be better read in the former than in the latter. His greatest Harrow friend, young Halhed, 6 6 |