Not long after, Kelly found him sitting quite composed in ‘The Bedford,’ sipping his wine, as if nothing had happened.  The musician expressed his astonishment at Mr. Sheridan’s sang froid.  ‘Surely,’ replied the wit, ’you’ll admit that a man has a right to take his wine by his own fireside.’  But Sheridan was only drowning care, not disregarding it.  The event was really too much for him, though perhaps he did not realize the extent of its effect at the time.  In a word, all he had in the world went with the theatre.  Nothing was left either for him or the principal shareholders.  Yet he bore it all with fortitude, till he heard that the harpsichord, on which his first wife was wont to play, was gone too.  Then he burst into tears.

This fire was the opening of the shaft down which the great man sank rapidly.  While his fortunes kept up, his spirits were not completely exhausted.  He drank much, but as an indulgence rather than as a relief.  Now it was by wine alone that he could even raise himself to the common requirements of conversation.  He is described, before dinner, as depressed, nervous, and dull; after dinner only did the old fire break out, the old wit blaze up, and Dick Sheridan was Dick Sheridan once more.  He was, in fact, fearfully oppressed by the long-accumulated and never-to-be-wiped-off debts, for which he was now daily pressed.  In quitting Parliament he resigned his sanctuary, and left himself an easy prey to the Jews and Gentiles, whom he had so long dodged and deluded with his ready ingenuity.  Drury Lane, as we all know, was rebuilt, and the birth of the new house heralded with a prologue by Byron, about as good as the one in ‘Rejected Addresses,’ the cleverest parodies ever written, and suggested by this very occasion.  The building-committee having advertised for a prize prologue Samuel Whitbread sent in his own attempt, in which, as probably in a hundred others, the new theatre was compared to a Phoenix rising out of the ashes of the old one.  Sheridan said Whitbread’s description of a Phoenix was excellent, for it was quite a poulterer’s description.

This same Sam Whitbread was now to figure conspicuously in the life of Mr. Richard B. Sheridan.  The ex-proprietor was found to have an interest in the theatre to the amount of L150,000—­not a trifle to be despised; but he was now past sixty, and it need excite no astonishment that, even with all his liabilities, he was unwilling to begin again the cares of management, or mismanagement which he had endured so many years.  He sold his interest, in which his son Tom was joined, for L60,000.  This sum would have cleared off his debts and left him a balance sufficient to secure comfort for his old age.  But it was out of the question that any money matters should go right with Dick Sheridan.  Of the rights and wrongs of the quarrel between him and Whitbread, who was the chairman of the committee for building the new theatre, I do not pretend to form