The Duenna was produced on the 21st of November, 1775, and its great success caused it to be acted seventy-five nights during the season. Sheridan, who had not much more than completed his twenty- third year when he achieved success with The Rivals, had so swiftly followed up his first advantage, that at the end of the year playgoers were flocking to Covent Garden, and the new dramatist was master of the hour. Garrick, at Drury Lane, followed the stream, and quickened the interest in Sheridan by reviving his mother’s comedy of The Discovery. Garrick, then sixty years old, was preparing to retire. At the end of this busy year of his life, 1775, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was in treaty with David Garrick for his share in Drury Lane. Sheridan was happy also in a son, Tom, of whom he wrote playfully to his wife’s father, “your grandson astonishes everybody by his vivacity, his talents for music and poetry, and the most perfect integrity of mind.”

In June, 1776, Sheridan had taken Garrick’s place at Drury Lane, finding means in some way to pay £10,000 for two-fourteenths, of the whole share, Thomas Linley paid a like sum for another two-fourteenths, and an unfortunate Dr. Ford invested £15,000 in an adventure that promised large profits with Sheridan’s wit to the fore. Happy the voyage when the ship has a fair wind in her sails, and there is a pilot with a firm hand on the rudder! It was unsafe to invest in a commercial undertaking of which Richard Brinsley Sheridan was manager.

But for the present all went quietly well. Of the little son Tom in his babyhood Sheridan wrote: “His progress is so rapid that one may plainly see the astonishment the sun is in of a morning at the improvement of the night. Our loves to all.” The young manager took rest as a writer, and produced in 1776 only a version of Vanbrugh’s first play, The Relapse, under the title of A Trip to Scarborough. This was first acted on the 24th of February, 1777. But meanwhile he had been working with care upon The School for Scandal. A first sketch of it indicated little more than a satire on the gossip of the Pump-Room at Bath. A second sketch developed Sir Peter and Lady Teazle as Mr. Solomon Teazle and Mrs. Teazle, the characters being Sir Rowland Harpur, Plausible, Captain Harry Plausible, Freeman, Old Teazle, Mrs. Teazle, and Maria, Charles Surface was named in different stages of the elaboration of Sheridan’s masterpiece, Clarimont, Florival, Captain Harry Plausible, Harry Pliant or Pliable, Young Harrier, and Frank; Joseph Surface has been in former stages of his development Plausible, Pliable, Young Pliant, and Tom. After much careful elaboration, and the welding of two separately contrived plots into one, with frequent transcribing of scenes and condensations of their wit, Sheridan wrote the last five scenes of his School for Scandal in a hurry, under pressure from the theatre, adding at the bottom of the last leaf, “Finished at last. Thank God!—R. B. Sheridan.” To which the prompter appended, on his own account, “Amen.—W. Hopkins.”

The School for Scandal was first acted on the 8th of May, 1777, and its success remained so great that, as the treasurer of the theatre noted two years afterwards, it “damped the new pieces.” It was worth £100 more to the house in 1778, upon an evening’s receipts, than Hamlet or Macbeth, though Shakespeare was well acted and in request. In 1778, Sheridan, then twenty-seven years old, joined with his father- in-law and Dr. Ford in buying the other half of the share in Drury Lane. Garrick had valued his half share at £35,000, but for the remaining moiety £45,000 had to be raised. In 1779 Garrick died. Sheridan followed him to the grave as chief mourner, and wrote a Monody to his memory. In the course of the same year Sheridan produced the last of his plays, The Critic; or, a Tragedy Rehearsed.

Next year there was a dissolution of Parliament. Sheridan stood successfully for Stafford at the General Election, and took his seat in the House of Commons in October, 1780. His life as a dramatist then ended. He did, indeed, once afterwards, as manager, furnish his stage with a piece—Pizarro; but that was only a play translated and adapted from Kotzebue. Thirty-six years of carelessly overburdened social and political life remained to Sheridan, who died in 1816, at the age of sixty-five; but the short life as a dramatist, on which his lasting reputation rests, ended in 1780, at the age of twenty-nine.

Congreve had ceased to produce plays at eight-and-twenty, and had then retired upon his reputation as a wit. Sheridan was incapable of merely passive life. He carried his energies into the great world on whose stage he hoped to play a brilliant part. What he attained does not concern us here. But he