’Sheridan, how came you to be so ready with that passage?  It is certainly as you say, but I was not aware of it before you quoted it.’  Sheridan was wise enough to keep his own counsel for the time, but must have felt delightfully tickled at the ignorance of the would-be savants with whom he was politically associated.  Probably Sheridan could not at any time have quoted a whole passage of Greek on the spur of the moment; but it is certain that he had not kept up his classics, and at the time in question must have forgotten the little he ever knew of them.

This facility of imitating exactly the sound of a language without introducing a single word of it is not so very rare, but is generally possessed in greater readiness by those who know no tongue but their own, and are therefore more struck by the strangeness of a foreign one, when hearing it.  Many of us have heard Italian songs in which there was not a word of actual Italian sung in London burlesques, and some of us have laughed at Levassor’s capital imitation of English; but perhaps the cleverest mimic of the kind I ever heard was M. Laffitte, brother of that famous banker who made his fortune by picking up a pin.  This gentleman could speak nothing but French, but had been brought by his business into contact with foreigners of every race at Paris, and when he once began his little trick, it was impossible to believe that he was not possessed of a gift of tongues.  His German and Italian were good enough, but his English was so splendidly counterfeited, that after listening to him for a short time, I suddenly heard a roar of laughter from all present, for I had actually unconsciously answered him, ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Exactly so,’ and ‘I quite agree with you!’

Undoubtedly much of Sheridan’s depravity must be attributed to his intimacy with a man whom it was a great honour to a youngster then to know, but who would probably be scouted even from a London club in the present day—­the Prince of Wales.  The part of a courtier is always degrading enough to play; but to be courtier to a prince whose favour was to be won by proficiency in vice, and audacity in follies, to truckle to his tastes, to win his smiles by the invention of a new pleasure and his approbation by the plotting of a new villany, what an office for the author of ‘The School for Scandal,’ and the orator renowned for denouncing the wickednesses of Warren Hastings!  What a life for the young poet who had wooed and won the Maid of Bath—­for the man of strong domestic affections, who wept over his father’s sternness, and loved his son only too well!  It was bad enough for such mere worldlings as Captain Hanger or Beau Brummell, but for a man of higher and purer feelings, like Sheridan, who, with all his faults, had some poetry in his soul, such a career was doubly disgraceful.