the Great; or let me take any of the lesser Napoleons in lesser grades in any nation, any age—­the men who have had no star but self and self-glory before them—­and let me ask if any one can be named who, if he has survived the attainment of his ambition, has not gone down the other side of the hill somewhat faster than he came up it?  Then let me select men whose guiding-star has been the good of their fellow-creatures, or the glory of God, and watch their peaceful useful end on that calm summit that they toiled so honestly to reach.  The difference comes home to us.  The moral is read only at the end of the story.  Remorse rings it for ever in the ears of the dying—­often too long a-dying—­man who has laboured for himself.  Peace reads it smilingly to him whose generous toil for others has brought its own reward.

Sheridan had climbed with the stride of a giant, laughing at rocks, at precipices, at slippery watercourses.  He had spread the wings of genius to poise himself withal, and gained one peak after another, while homelier worth was struggling midway, clutching the bramble and clinging to the ferns.  He had, as Byron said in Sheridan’s days of decay, done the best in all he undertook, written the best comedy, best opera, best farce; spoken the best parody, and made the best speech.  Sheridan, when those words of the young poet were told him, shed tears.

Perhaps the bitter thought struck him, that he had not led the best, but the worst life; that comedy, farce, opera, monody, and oration were nothing, nothing to a pure conscience and a peaceful old age; that they could not save him from shame and poverty—­from debt, disgrace, drunkenness—­from grasping, but long-cheated creditors, who dragged his bed from under the feeble, nervous, ruined old man.  Poor Sheridan! his end was too bitter for us to cast one stone more upon him.  Let it be noted that it was in the beginning of his decline, when, having reached the climax of all his ambition and completed his fame as a dramatist, orator, and wit, that the hand of Providence mercifully interposed to rescue this reckless man from his downfall.  It smote him with that common but powerful weapon—­death.  Those he best loved were torn from him, one after another, rapidly, and with little warning.  The Linleys, the ‘nest of nightingales,’ were all delicate as nightingales should be; and it seemed as if this very time was chosen for their deaths, that the one erring soul—­more precious, remember, than many just lives—­might be called back.  Almost within one year he lost his dear sister-in-law, the wife of his most intimate friend Tickell; Maria Linley, the last of the family; his own wife, and his little daughter.  One grief succeeded another so rapidly that Sheridan was utterly unnerved, utterly brought low by them; but it was his wife’s death that told most upon him.  With that wife he had always been the lover rather than the husband.  She had married him in the days of his poverty, when