‘Embracing cloud, Ixion like,’

the lover of Juno, who caught a cold instead of the Queen of Heaven; and who, according to the classical legend, tortured for ever on a wheel, was in this production to be condemned for ever to trundle the machine of a ‘needy knife-grinder,’ amid a grand musical chorus of ’razors, scissors, and penknives to grind!’ This piece was amusing enough, and clever enough, though it betrayed repeatedly the youthfulness of its authors; but less so their next attempt, a weekly periodical, to be called ‘Hernan’s Miscellany,’ of which Sheridan wrote, or was to write, pretty nearly the whole.  None but the first number was ever completed, and perhaps we need not regret that no more followed it; but it is touching to see these two young men, both feeling their powers, confident in them, and sunning their halcyon’s wings in the happy belief that they were those of the eagle, longing eagerly, earnestly, for the few poor guineas that they hoped from their work.  Halhed, indeed, wrote diligently, but his colleague was not true to the contract, and though the hope of gold stimulated him—­for he was poor enough—­from time to time to a great effort, he was always ‘beginning,’ and never completing.

The only real product of these united labours was a volume of Epistles in verse from the Greek of a poor writer of late age, Aristaenetus.  This volume, which does little credit to either of its parents, was positively printed and published in 1770, but the rich harvest of fame and shillings which they expected from it was never gathered in.  Yet the book excited some little notice.  The incognito of its authors induced some critics to palm it even on such a man as Dr. Johnson; others praised; others sneered at it.  In the young men it raised hopes, only to dash them; but its failure was not so utter as to put the idea of literary success entirely out of their heads, nor its success sufficient to induce them to rush recklessly into print, and thus strangle their fame in its cradle.  Let it fail, was Richard Sheridan’s thought; he had now a far more engrossing ambition.  In a word, he was in love.

Yes, he was in love for a time—­only for a time, and not truly.  But, be it remembered, Sheridan’s evil days had not commenced.  He sowed his wild oats late in life,—­alack for him!—­and he never finished sowing them.  His was not the viciousness of nature, but the corruption of success.  ‘In all time of wealth, good Lord deliver us!’ What prayer can wild, unrestrained, unheeding Genius utter with more fervency?  I own Genius is rarely in love.  There is an egotism, almost a selfishness, about it, that will not stoop to such common worship.  Women know it, and often prefer the blunt, honest, common-place soldier to the wild erratic poet.  Genius, grand as it is, is unsympathetic.  It demands higher—­the highest joys.  Genius claims to be loved, but to love is too much to ask it.  And yet at this time Sheridan was not a matured Genius.  When his development came, he cast off this very love for which he had fought, manoeuvred, struggled, and was unfaithful to the very wife whom he had nearly died to obtain.