This brilliant play, the earliest idea of which was derived from its author’s experience of the gossip of that kettle of scandal and backbiting, Bath, where, if no other commandment were ever broken, the constant breach of the ninth would suffice to put it on a level with certain condemned cities we have somewhere read of, won for Sheridan a reputation of which he at once felt the value, and made his purchase of a share in the property of Old Drury for the time being, a successful speculation.  It produced a result which his good heart perhaps valued even more than the guineas which now flowed in; it induced his father, who had long been at war with him, to seek a reconciliation, and the elder Sheridan actually became manager of the theatre of which his son was part proprietor.

Old Tom Sheridan had always been a proud man, and when once he was offended, was hard to bring round again.  His quarrel with Johnson was an instance of this.  In 1762 the Doctor, hearing they had given Sheridan a pension of two hundred a year, exclaimed, ’What have they given him a pension? then it is time for me to give up mine.’  A ‘kind friend’ took care to repeat the peevish exclamation, without adding what Johnson had said immediately afterwards, ’However, I am glad that they have given Mr. Sheridan a pension, for he is a very good man.’  The actor was disgusted; and though Boswell interfered, declined to be reconciled.  On one occasion he even rushed from a house at which he was to dine, when he heard that the great Samuel had been invited.  The Doctor had little opinion of Sheridan’s declamation.  ‘Besides, sir,’ said he, ’what influence can Mr. Sheridan have upon the language of this great country by his narrow exertions.  Sir, it is burning a farthing candle at Dover to show light at Calais.’  Still, when Garrick attacked his rival, Johnson nobly defended him.  ‘No sir,’ he said, ’there is to be sure, in Sheridan, something to reprehend, and everything to laugh at; but, sir, he is not a bad man.  No, sir, were mankind to be divided into good and bad, he would stand considerably within the ranks of the good.’

However, the greatest bully of his age (and the kindest-hearted man) thought very differently of the son.  Richard Brinsley had written a prologue to Savage’s play of ’Sir Thomas Overbury’—­

  ’Ill-fated Savage, at whose birth was giv’n
  No parent but the Muse, no friend but Heav’n;’

and in this had paid an elegant compliment to the great lexicographer, winding up with these lines:—­

  ’So pleads the tale that gives to future times
  The son’s misfortunes and the parent’s crimes;
  There shall his fame, if own’d to-night, survive,
  Fix’d by the hand that bids our language live—­

referring at once to Johnson’s life of his friend Savage and to his great Dictionary.  It was Savage, every one remembers, with whom Johnson in his days of starvation was wont to walk the streets all night, neither of them being able to pay for a lodging, and with whom, walking one night round and round St. James’s Square, he kept up his own and his companion’s spirits by inveighing against the minister and declaring that they would ‘stand by their country.’