The Linleys were soon intimate with the Sheridans, and the Maid of Bath added to her adorers both Richard and his elder brother Charles; only, just as at Harrow every one thought Richard a dunce and he disappointed them; so at Bath no one thought Richard would fall in love, and he did disappoint them—­none more so than Charles, his brother, and Halhed, his bosom friend.  As for the latter, he was almost mad in his devotion, and certainly extravagant in his expressions.  He described his passion by a clever, but rather disagreeable simile, which Sheridan, who was a most disgraceful plagiarist, though he had no need to be so, afterwards adopted as his own.  ‘Just as the Egyptian pharmacists,’ wrote Halhed, in a Latin letter, in which he described the power of Miss Linley’s voice over his spirit, ’were wont, in embalming a dead body to draw the brain out through the ears with a crooked hook, this nightingale has drawn out through mine ears not my brain only, but my heart also.’

Then among other of her devotees were Norris, the singer, and Mr. Watts, a rich gentleman-commoner, who had also met her at Oxford.  Surely with such and other rivals, the chances of the quiet, unpretending, undemonstrative boy of nineteen were small.  But no, Miss Linley was foolish enough to be captivated by genius, and charmed by such poems as the quiet boy wrote to her, of which this is, perhaps, one of the prettiest: 

  ’Dry that tear, my gentlest love;
    Be hush’d that struggling sigh,
  Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
    More fix’d, more true than I.
  Hush’d be that sigh, be dry that tear;
  Cease boding doubt, cease anxious fear: 
    Dry be that tear.

  ’Ask’st thou how long my love will stay,
    When all that’s new is past? 
  How long, ah Delia, can I say
    How long my life will last? 
  Dry be that tear, be hush’d that sigh,
  At least I’ll love thee till I die: 
    Hush’d be that sigh.

  ’And does that thought affect thee too,
    The thought of Sylvio’s death,
  That he who only breath’d for you,
    Must yield that faithful breath? 
  Hush’d be that sigh, be dry that tear,
  Nor let us lose our Heaven here: 
    Be dry that tear.’

The many adorers had not the remotest suspicion of this devotion, and ‘gave her’ to this, that, or the other eligible personage; but the villanous conduct of a scoundrel soon brought the matter to a crisis.  The whole story was as romantic as it could be.  In a three-volume novel, critics, always so just and acute in their judgment, would call it far-fetched, improbable, unnatural; in short, anything but what should be the plot of the pure ‘domestic English story.’  Yet, here it is with almost dramatic effect, the simple tale of what really befel one of our most celebrated men.