Here Sheridan, always the most improvident of men, launched out into extravagances more suited to an income of L5000 a year than the paltry L150 which was all he could command.  He entertained on a lavish scale; and his wit and charm, supplemented by his wife’s beauty and gift of song, soon surrounded them with a fashionable crowd eager to eat his dinners and to attend his wife’s soirees.  Sheridan was in his element in this environment of luxury and prodigality; but the Bath Nightingale would gladly have changed it all for “a little quiet home that I can enjoy in comfort,” as she told her husband—­above all, for the Burnham cottage where she had been so idyllically happy.

Perhaps if Sheridan had never left the cottage and the roses, his name would never have been known to fame.  His ambition needed some such stimulus as this spasm of extravagance to wake it to activity.  He must now make money or be submerged by debts; and under this impulse of necessity it was that he wooed fortune with The Rivals, and awoke to find himself famous and potentially rich.  Other comedies followed swiftly from his eager and inspired pen—­The School for Scandal, The Duenna, and The Critic—­each greeted with enthusiasm by a world to which such dramatic triumphs were a revelation and a delight.  Sheridan was not only the “talk of the town”; he was hailed universally as the brightest dramatic star of the age.

It is needless to say that Sheridan’s fame was a delight to his wife.

“Not long ago,” she wrote to a friend, “he was known as ‘Mrs Sheridan’s husband.’  Now the tables are turned, and, henceforth, I expect I shall be just Mr Sheridan’s wife.  Nor could I wish any more exalted title.  I am proud and thankful to be the wife of the cleverest man in England, and the best husband in the world!”

That Mrs Sheridan adored her husband is evident from every letter she wrote to him.  She addresses him as “my dearest Love” and “my darling Dick,” and vows that she cannot be happy apart from him.  “I cannot love you,” she declares, “and be perfectly satisfied at such a distance from you.  I depended upon your coming to-night, and shall not recover my spirits till we meet.”  But through her letters runs the same hankering after the old simple, peaceful days—­the days of love in a cottage.  “I could draw,” she writes, “such a picture of happiness that it would almost make me wish the overthrow of all our present schemes of future affluence and grandeur.”

But greatly as he loved his wife, Sheridan was now too much wedded to his ambition to listen to such tempting.  He had conquered fame with his pen; now he aspired to subdue it with his tongue.  In 1780, while he was still in the twenties, he was sent to Parliament by Stafford suffrages; and from his first appearance at Westminster captivated his fellow law-makers by the magic of his eloquence.  A new star had arisen in the oratorical firmament, and soon began to pale all other luminaries.  Within two years he was a Minister of the Crown; and in another year he had electrified the world by the most brilliant oratory that had ever been heard in our tongue—­notably by his historic speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, to the preparation of which his wife had devoted herself body and soul.