[Illustration:  Mrs Sheridan by Reynolds]

ST. CAECILIA

There are few names more associated with the brilliant days of Bath, the days of its social and artistic prominence, than those of Thomas Linley, the composer, and of his daughter, Eliza Anne, known abroad as “the Fair Maid of Bath.”  Linley was born there, in 1735; and after his studies in music on the Continent, under Paradies, he returned to the then fashionable city on the Avon.  He conducted oratorios and concerts there, and became a power in the community.  Delicacy, tenderness, simplicity, and taste were the characteristics of his compositions.  It was said of him, that as Garrick had restored Shakspeare, so Linley has restored the sublime music of Handel.  He trained his family to take part in the performances.  His son Thomas, born in 1756, developed a marvellous ability in music,—­playing the violin with great brilliancy and expression.  He was the friend of Mozart, and took at times his father’s place as conductor of the oratorios.  His career was cut short by drowning, in 1778.

But it was his beautiful daughter Eliza, born in 1754, who made the sensation of the time, when she sang with her sister, afterwards Mrs. Tickell.  “A nest of nightingales,” the family was termed.  Walpole writes, in 1773:  “I was not at the ball last night, and have only been to the opera, where I was infinitely struck with the Carrara, who is the prettiest creature upon earth.  Mrs. Hartley I own to still find handsomer, and Miss Linley, to be the superlative degree.  The king admires the last, and ogles her as much as he dares to do in so holy a place as an oratorio, and at so devout a service as ’Alexander’s Feast.’” Musical prominence and personal beauty in this maid of but twenty made her an attractive flower in bloom to others than the king.  The wits and gallants of the gay city sought and courted her.  The family of Tom Sheridan, the Irish actor, and then a teacher of elocution in Bath, was intimate with the Linley family.  Richard, who was born in Dublin in 1751, his elder brother Charles, and Nathaniel Halhed, a companion and literary partner with Richard, all admired the daughter Eliza.  Halhed went to India,—­afterwards becoming a judge there,—­and Charles Sheridan retired from the race, and left the literary youth to win as pure a heart as ever cheered incipient genius to works of worth.  She was lauded in verse by her young Irish suitor, and championed in deed.  He asserts his constancy in a poem, of which the first stanza is—­

   “Dry that tear, my gentlest love;
   Be hushed that struggling sigh;
   Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
   More fixed, more true than I.
   Hushed be that sigh, be dry that tear;
   Cease boding doubt, cease anxious fear;
      Dry be that tear.”

He proves his devotion by his action when appealed to by his divinity.