an opinion.  Sheridan was not naturally mean, though he descended to meanness when hard pressed—­what man of his stamp does not?  Whitbread was truly friendly to him for a time.  Sheridan was always complaining that he was sued for debts he did not owe, and kept out of many that were due to him.  Whitbread knew his man well, and if he withheld what was owing to him, may be excused on the ground of real friendship.  All I know is, that Sheridan and Whitbread quarrelled; that the former did not, or affirmed that he did not, receive the full amount of his claim on the property, and that, when what he had received was paid over to his principal creditors, there was little or nothing left for my lord to spend in banquets to parliamentary friends and jorums of brandy in small coffee-houses.

Because a man is a genius, he is not of necessity an upright, honest, ill-used, oppressed, and cruelly-entreated man.  Genius plays the fool wittingly, and often enough quite knowingly, with its own interests.  It is its privilege to do so, and no one has a right to complain.  But then Genius ought to hold its tongue, and not make itself out a martyr, when it has had the dubious glory of defying common-sense.  If Genius despises gold, well and good, but when he has spurned it, he should not whine out that he is wrongfully kept from it.  Poor Sheridan may or may not have been right in the Whitbread quarrel; he has had his defenders, and I am not ambitious of being numbered among them; but whatever were now his troubles were brought on by his own disregard of all that was right and beautiful in conduct.  If he went down to the grave a pauper and a debtor, he had made his own bed, and in it he was to lie.

Lie he did, wretchedly, on the most unhappy bed that old age ever lay in.  There is little more of importance to chronicle of his latter days.  The retribution came on slowly but terribly.  The career of a ruined man is not a pleasant topic to dwell upon, and I leave Sheridan’s misery for Mr. J. B. Gough to whine and roar over when he wants a shocking example.  Sheridan might have earned many a crown in that capacity, if temperance-oratory had been the passion of the day.  Debt, disease, depravity—­these words describe enough the downward career of his old age.  To eat, still more to drink, was now the troublesome enigma of the quondam genius.  I say quondam, for all the marks of that genius were now gone.  One after another his choicest properties made their way to ’my uncle’s.’  The books went first, as if they could be most easily dispensed with; the remnants of his plate followed; then his pictures were sold; and at last even the portrait of his first wife, by Reynolds, was left in pledge for a ‘further remittance.’