As a specimen of Johnson’s pride in his own club, which always remained extremely exclusive, we have what he said of Garrick, who, before he was elected, carelessly told Reynolds he liked the club, and thought ’he would be of them.’

‘He’ll be of us!’ roared the Doctor indignantly, on hearing of this.  ’How does he know we will permit him?  The first duke in England has no right to hold such language!’

It can easily be imagined that when ‘His Majesty’ expressed his approval of Richard Brinsley, then a young man of eight-and-twenty, there was no one who ventured to blackball him, and so Sheridan was duly elected.

The fame of ‘The School for Scandal’ was a substantial one for Richard Brinsley, and in the following year he extended his speculation by buying the other moiety of Drury Lane.  This theatre, which took its name from the old Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane, where Killigrew acted in the days of Charles II. is famous for the number of times it has been rebuilt.  The first house had been destroyed in 1674; and the one in which Garrick acted was built by Sir Christopher Wren and opened with a prologue by Dryden.  In 1793 this was rebuilt.  In 1809 it was burnt to the ground; and on its re-opening the Committee advertised a prize for a prologue, which was supposed to be tried for by all the poets and poetasters then in England.[7] Sheridan adding afterwards a condition that he wanted an address without a Phoenix in it.  Horace Smith and his brother seized the opportunity to parody the style of the most celebrated in their delightful ‘Rejected Addresses.’  Drury Lane has always been grand in its prologue, for besides Dryden and Byron, it could boast of Sam.  Johnson, who wrote the address when Garrick opened the theatre in 1747.  No theatre ever had more great names connected with its history.

[7:  None of the addresses sent in having given satisfaction, Lord Byron was requested to write one, which he did.]

It was in 1778, after the purchase of the other moiety of this property, that Sheridan set on its boards ‘The Critic.’  Though this was denounced as itself as complete a plagiarism as any Sir Fretful Plagiary could make, and though undoubtedly the idea of it was borrowed, its wit, so truly Sheridanian, and its complete characters, enhanced its author’s fame, in spite of the disappointment of those who expected higher things from the writer of ‘The School for Scandal.’  Whether Sheridan would have gone on improving, had he remained true to the drama, ‘The Critic’ leaves us in doubt.  But he was a man of higher ambition.  Step by step, unexpectedly, and apparently unprepared, he had taken by storm the out-works of the citadel he was determined to capture, and he seems to have cared little to garrison these minor fortresses.  He had carried off from among a dozen suitors a wife of such beauty that Walpole thus writes of her in 1773:—­

’I was at the ball last night, and have only been at the opera, where I was infinitely struck with the Carrara, who is the prettiest creature upon earth.  Mrs. Hartley I find still handsomer, and Miss Linley is to be the superlative degree.  The king admires the last, and ogles her as much as he dares in so holy a place as an oratorio, and at so devout a service as Alexander’s Feast’