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Even Reynolds's portrait of his first wife as Saint Cecilia passed from his possession. In the spring of 1815, he was arrested and carried to a sponging-house, where he was retained two or three days. His life sufficiently shows that his sense of shame was not quick, but he was deeply humiliated at this arrest, feeling it as "a profanation of his person."

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And now came the misery of his last scene. appeared to feel that his life was drawing to a close. To some sharp remonstrances from his wife on his continued irregularities, he replied in an affecting letter. "Never again," he wrote, "let one harsh word pass between us during the period, which may not perhaps be long, that we are in this world together, and life, however clouded to me, is spared to us." His last illness soon followed. Even his dying bed was not free from the incursions of writs and sheriffs. He was arrested, and would have been taken away in his blankets, had not his physician threatened the officer with the consequences of committing murder. At last, on the seventh of July, 1816, in his sixty-fifth year, he died.

Then came the mockery of a splendid burial. Dukes, royal and noble, bishops, marquesses, earls, viscounts, right honorables, emulously swelled the train of his funeral. "France," said a French journalist at the time, "is the place for an author to live in, and England the place for him to die in." In the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, the only spot remaining unoccupied was reserved for the body of him whose death-bed was not safe from the sheriff's writ. Tom Moore, in a fine strain of poetical indignation, published just after Sheridan's death, thus cuttingly refers to the noble lords who "honored" the funeral: :

"How proud they can press to the funeral array

Of him whom they shunned in his sickness and sorrow!
How bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day,

Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!"

The task of lightening the misery of Sheridan's last hours was left to such commoners as Samuel Rogers, Thomas Moore, and good Doctor Bain.

The moral of Sheridan's life lies on the surface, and we shall not risk any commonplaces of ethical horror in commenting upon its hollowness and its sins. The vices for which he was distinguished are generally reprobated, and their position in the scale of wickedness is sufficiently marked; but they are not the darkest kind of vices. We are not of that number who select him from his contemporaries, and expend upon his follies and errors the whole strength of their indignation. Allowing him to have been as bad as his nature would allow, we believe he was a much better man than many of his contemporaries who are commonly praised as virtuous. The man who brings misery upon himself and his family by intemperance and sloth is justly condemned, but he is innocent compared with one who, from bigotry or lust of power, would ruin or injure a nation. George the Third is praised as a good king; but the vices of Sheridan's character were mere peccadilloes compared with the savage vices which raged and ruled in the heart of his Majesty. In a moral estimate which included all grades of sin, Sheridan would compare well even with Lord North, William Pitt, or Spencer Perceval, with all their social and domestic merits. The American war and the war with France originated, or, at least, were continued, in a spirit which approaches nearer to the diabolical than the sensuality of Sheridan; and we feel

little disposed to chime in with that morality which passes over all the rats and liberticides, the servile politicians and selfish statesmen, the bad and bigoted spendthrifts of blood and treasure, during a whole generation, to hurl its heaviest anathemas upon one poor, weak, volatile, brilliant, and hard-pressed roué.

But while we thus remember that there are natures which have contrived to indulge darker passions than he ever dreamed, without coming under the ban of either historian or moralist, and while we therefore have little sympathy with one class of Sheridan's judges and critics, we do not join in the absurd sentimentality of another class, who strive hard to place his case among the infirmities and calamities of genius. The sources of his errors were not those which have sometimes hurried large and unregulated minds into evil, and there is something ridiculous in placing him by the side of the Otways, the Savages, the Chattertons, the Burnses, and the Byrons. With regard to his calamities, there is hardly another instance in literary history of a man who enjoyed so much fame with such moderate powers, and who was enabled to run so undisturbed a career of sensuality from manhood to within three years of his death. What commonly goes under the name of enjoyment of life he had in full measure, not only without the check which comes from means limited by honest scruples, but almost without the remorse with which conscience usually dashes unhallowed pleasure. And with respect to the desertion of which he complained in the last years of his life, it was, as far as regarded his political connections, the result of his political treachery; and as his personal friendships sprang from the fellowship of vice rather

than feeling, he had no right to expect that the rakes and good fellows, his companions of the bottle and the debauch, would be the bankers of his poverty, or the consolers of his dying hours.

HENRY FIELDING.*

THERE is no word more provokingly equivocal than history. In one sense, it simply indicates a department of literature; in another, the sum and substance of all departments. He who should read all the so-called historians of the world, from Herodotus to Hallam, would, in common phrase, be considered as possessing a knowledge of history; but in respect to the thing itself, he might be more ignorant of many ages and nations than one who had devoted his time to plays and novels. In regard to the history of England, especially, it is curious how small a portion of our realized and available knowledge of the English mind and people is derived from the standard narratives of public events. When, after exhausting the strictly historical department of English literature, we turn to its works of imagination, and from these to the numerous trifles in poetry and romance which every age has poured forth, we discover that we are increasing our historical information, while we are seemingly gratifying only taste, indolence, or whim. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the causes of England's material supremacy in any summary now extant of the persons and events connected with its differ

* The Works of Henry Fielding, with a Life of the Author. By Thomas Roscoe. London: Henry G. Bohn 1843. 8vo. pp. 1116.- North American Review, January, 1849.

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