The first night ‘The Rivals’ was brought out at Bath came Sheridan’s father, who, as we have seen, had refused to have anything to say to his son.  It is related as an instance of Richard’s filial affection, that during the representation he placed himself behind a side-scene opposite to the box in which his father and sisters sat, and gazed at them all the time.  When he returned to his house and wife, he burst into tears, and declared that he felt it too bitter that he alone should have been forbidden to speak to those on whom he had been gazing all the night.

During the following year this speculative man, who married on nothing but his brain, and had no capital, no wealthy friends, in short nothing whatever, suddenly appears in the most mysterious manner as a capitalist, and lays down his L10,000 in the coolest and quietest manner.  And for what?  For a share in the purchase of Garrick’s moiety of the patent of Drury Lane.  The whole property was worth L70,000; Garrick sold his half for L35,000, of which old Mr. Linley contributed L10,000, Dr. Ford L15,000, and penniless Sheridan the balance.  Where he got the money nobody knew, and apparently nobody asked.  It was paid, and he entered at once on the business of proprietor of that old house, where so many a Roscius has strutted and declaimed with more or less fame; so many a Walking gentleman done his five shillings’ worth of polite comedy, so many a tinsel king degraded the ‘legitimate drama,’ in the most illegitimate manner, and whose glories were extinguished with the reign of Macready, when we were boys, nous autres.

The first piece he contributed to this stage was ’A Trip to Scarborough,’ Which was only a species of ’family edition of Vanbrugh’s play, ‘The Relapse;’ but in 1777 he reached the acme of his fame, in ‘The School for Scandal.’

But alack and alas for these sensual days, when it is too much trouble to think, and people go to the play, if they go at all, to feast their eyes and ears, not their minds; can any sensible person believe that if ‘The School for Scandal,’ teeming as it does with wit, satire, and character, finer and truer than in any play produced since the days of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Marlowe, were set on the boards of the Haymarket at this day, as a new piece by an author of no very high celebrity, it would draw away a single admirer from the flummery in Oxford Street, the squeaking at Covent Garden, or the broad, exaggerated farce at the Adelphi or Olympic?  No:  it may still have its place on the London stage when well acted, but it owes that to its ancient celebrity, and it can never compete with the tinsel and tailoring which alone can make even Shakspeare go down with a modern audience.

In those days of Garrick, on the other hand, those glorious days of true histrionic art, high and low were not ashamed to throng Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and make the appearance of a new play the great event of the season.  Hundreds were turned away from the doors, when ’The School for Scandal’ was acted, and those who were fortunate enough to get in made the piece the subject of conversation in society for many a night, passing keen comment on every scene, every line, every word almost, and using their minds as we now use our eyes.