But I intended to write about Sheridan.  This correspondence reveals him as the evil genius of Lady Bessborough’s life; and perhaps, if all the truth were known, she may have been the evil genius of his, or one of them, anyhow.  She had adventures with him behind her in 1794, when she began adventures anew; for they became intimate at Devonshire House, where, as the crony of Charles Fox, he was always at hand.  The Duchess herself was one of his familiars.  His initials for her, in letter-writing, were T.L., which a biographer pleasantly interprets as “True Love.”  The sisters, Countess and Duchess, shared in all good and evil things, and they seem to have shared Sheridan.  His chosen initial for Lady Bessborough’s address was “F,” her second name being Frances.  Mr. Sichel prints a letter from him to her, and guesses it to be of 1788.  Extracts will suffice for the judicious:  “I must bid ’oo good-night, for by the light passing to and fro near your room I hope you are going to bed and to sleep happily with a hundred little cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your goodness.  Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity.”  It is to be feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff.  A very little more will do for us:  “And yet, and yet—­Beware!  Milton will tell you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of slumbering innocence.  Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows....  And Adam, I suppose—­was at Brooks’s ...  I shall be gone before your hazel eyes are open to-morrow....”

Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square.  Sheridan’s leaguer of the house is thus betrayed.  He never again left either her or it alone for long, but beset them until his death.  Bitterly enough she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever begotten in Ireland or fostered in England.  His wife, as lovely as a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore, pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the mire as any woman could go without suffocation.  Such experiences may be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they are in this lady’s letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.

Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make scenes about it.  In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin, Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at Sheridan’s.  “It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me, as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me.  Sheridan says, when he found I did not come