This great man, this wonderful genius, this eloquent senator, this most applauded dramatist was—­hear it, oh, ye boys! and fling it triumphantly in the faces of your pedagogues—­Sheridan, at your age, was a dunce!  This was the more extraordinary, inasmuch as his father, mother, and grandfather were all celebrated for their quick mental powers.  The last, in fact, Dr. Sheridan, was a successful and eminent schoolmaster, the intimate friend of Dean Swift, and an author.  He was an Irish man and a wit, and would seem to have been a Jacobite to boot, for he was deprived of a chaplaincy he held under Government, for preaching, on King George’s birthday, a sermon having for its text ’Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’

Sheridan’s mother, again—­an eccentric, extraordinary woman—­wrote novels and plays; among the latter ‘The Discovery,’ which Garrick said was ‘one of the best comedies he ever read;’ and Sheridan’s father, Tom Sheridan, was famous, in connection with the stage where he was so long the rival of David Garrick.

Born of such parents, in September, 1751, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was sent in due course to Harrow, where that famous old pedant, Dr. Parr, was at that time one of the masters.  The Doctor has himself described the lazy boy, in whose face he discovered the latent genius, and whom he attempted to inspire with a love of Greek verbs and Latin verses, by making him ashamed of his ignorance.  But Richard preferred English verses and no verbs, and the Doctor failed.  He did not, even at that period, cultivate elocution, of which his father was so good a master; though Dr. Parr remembered one of his sisters, on a visit to Harrow, reciting, in accordance with her father’s teaching, the well-known lines—­

  ’None but the brave,
  None but the brave,
  None but the brave deserve the fair.

But the real mind of the boy who would not be a scholar showed itself early enough.  He had only just left Harrow, when he began to display his literary abilities.  He had formed at school the intimate acquaintance of Halhed, afterwards a distinguished Indianist, a man of like tastes with himself; he had translated with him some of the poems of Theocritus.  The two boys had revelled together in boyish dreams of literary fame—­ah, those boyish dreams! so often our noblest—­so seldom realized.  So often, alas! the aspirations to which we can look back as our purest and best, and which make us bitterly regret that they were but dreams.  And now, when young Halhed went to Oxford, and young Sheridan to join his family at Bath, they continued these ambitious projects for a time, and laid out their fancy at full usury over many a work destined never to see the fingers of the printer’s devil.  Among these was a farce, or rather burlesque, which shows immense promise, and which, oddly enough, resembles in its cast the famous ‘Critic,’ which followed it later.  It was called ‘Jupiter,’ and turned chiefly on the story of Ixion—­