the prelude to a duel.  Pitt and Fox, Tierney, Adam, Fullarton, Lord George Germain, Lord Shelburne, and Governor Johnstone, all ‘vindicated their honour,’ as the phrase went, by ’coffee and pistols for four.’  If Sheridan had not to repeat the Bob Acres scene with Captain Matthews, it was only because his wonderful good humour could put up with a great deal that others thought could only be expiated by a hole in the waistcoat.

In the administration of the Marquis of Rockingham the dramatist enjoyed the pleasures of office for less than a year as one of the Under Secretaries of State in 1782.  In the next year we find him making a happy retort on Pitt, who had somewhat vulgarly alluded to his being a dramatic author.  It was on the American question, perhaps the bitterest that ever called forth the acrimony of parties in the House.  Sheridan, from boyhood, had been taunted with being the son of an actor.  One can hardly credit this fact, just after Garrick had raised the profession of an actor to so great an eminence in the social scale.  He had been called ‘the player boy’ at school, and his election at Brookes’ had been opposed on the same grounds.  It was evidently his bitterest point, and Pitt probably knew this when, in replying to a speech of the ex-dramatist’s he said that ’no man admired more than he did the abilities of that right honourable gentleman, the elegant sallies of his thought, the gay effusions of his fancy, his dramatic turns, and his epigrammatic point; and if they were reserved for the proper stage, they would, no doubt, receive what the hon. gentleman’s abilities always did receive, the plaudits of the audience; and it would be his fortune sui plausu gaudere theatri.  But this was not the proper scene for the exhibition of those elegancies.’  This was vulgar in Pitt, and probably every one felt so.  But Sheridan rose, cool and collected, and quietly replied:—­

’On the particular sort of personality which the right hon. gentleman has thought proper to make use of, I need not make any comment.  The propriety, the taste, the gentlemanly point of it, must have been obvious to the House.  But let me assure the right hon. gentleman that I do now, and will at any time he chooses to repeat this sort of allusion, meet it with the most sincere good humour.  Nay, I will say more:  flattered and encouraged by the right hon. gentleman’s panegyric on my talents, if ever I again engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption—­to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson’s best characters, the character of the Angry Boy, in the “Alchemist."’

The fury of Pitt, contrasted with the coolness of the man he had so shamefully attacked, made this sally irresistible, and from that time neither ‘the angry boy’ himself, nor any of his colleagues, were anxious to twit Sheridan on his dramatic pursuits.

Pitt wanted to lay a tax on every horse that started in a race.  Lord Surry, a turfish individual of the day, proposed one of five pounds on the winner.  Sheridan, rising, told his lordship that the next time he visited Newmarket he would probably be greeted with the line:—­