The last humiliation arrived in time, and the associate of a prince, the eloquent organ of a party, the man who had enjoyed L15,000, a year, was carried off to a low sponging-house.  His pride forsook him in that dismal and disgusting imprisonment, and he wrote to Whitbread a letter which his defenders ought not to have published.  He had his friends—­stanch ones too—­and they aided him.  Peter Moore, ironmonger, and even Canning, lent him money and released him from time to time.  For six years after the burning of the old theatre, he continued to go down and down.  Disease now attacked him fiercely.  In the spring of 1816 he was fast waning towards extinction.  His day was past; he had outlived his fame as a wit and social light; he was forgotten by many, if not by most, of his old associates.  He wrote to Rogers, ’I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted.’  Poor Sheridan! in spite of all thy faults, who is he whose morality is so stern that he cannot shed one tear over thy latter days!  God forgive us, we are all sinners; and if we weep not for this man’s deficiency, how shall we ask tears when our day comes?  Even as I write, I feel my hand tremble and my eyes moisten over the sad end of one whom I love, though he died before I was born.  ’They are going to put the carpets out of window,’ he wrote to Rogers, ’and break into Mrs. S.’s room and take me.  For God’s sake let me see you!’ See him!—­see one friend who could and would help him in his misery!  Oh! happy may that man count himself who has never wanted that one friend, and felt the utter helplessness of that want!  Poor Sheridan! had he ever asked, or hoped, or looked for that Friend out of this world it had been better; for ‘the Lord thy God is a jealous God,’ and we go on seeking human friendship and neglecting the divine till it is too late.  He found one hearty friend in his physician, Dr. Bain, when all others had forsaken him.  The spirit of White’s and Brookes’, the companion of a prince and a score of noblemen, the enlivener of every ‘fashionable’ table, was forgotten by all but this one doctor.  Let us read Moore’s description:  ’A sheriff’s officer at length arrested the dying man in his bed, and was about to carry him off, in his blankets, to a sponging-house, when Dr. Bain interfered.’  Who would live the life of revelry that Sheridan lived to have such an end?  A few days after, on the 7th of July, 1816, in his sixty-fifth year, he died.  Of his last hours the late Professor Smythe wrote an admirable and most touching account, a copy of which was circulated in manuscript.  The Professor, hearing of Sheridan’s condition, asked to see him, with a view, not only of alleviating present distress, but of calling the dying man to repentance.  From his hands the unhappy Sheridan received the Holy Communion; his face, during that solemn rite,—­doubly solemn when it is performed in the chamber of death, ‘expressed,’ Smythe relates, ’the deepest awe’ That phrase conveys to the mind impressions not easy to be defined, not soon to be forgotten.