attained no happiness equal to that of his earlier years, when wit, good humour, and energy were at their freshest, home was happiest, and his first successes gladdened him with sense of power. In a letter written at the time when he produced The Rivals, Sheridan said he had been reading Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters.” They were first published in 1774. He comments shrewdly upon his Lordship’s system of training, which is, he says, “in no one article calculated to make a great man.…His frequent directions for constant employment are entirely ill-founded—a wise man is formed more by the action of his own thought than by continually feeding it. ‘Hurry,’ he says, ‘from play to study; never be doing nothing.’ I say, ‘Frequently be unemployed; sit and think.’ ” Sheridan read so little that he never felt safe in his spelling; he was capable of writing “wich” for “which,” “nothink” for “nothing.” But he acquired full mastery over one form of the subtle play of thought, and added to the number of our masterpieces of prose comedy. Sheridan’s plays were written when the reaction against insincerity and formalism was developing new forces in Europe. In The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic, the dramatist attacks what Fielding declared to be the only fit object of ridicule—affectation; false sentiment, hollow forms, and empty words in life and literature; the “shams” against which real life was rebelling actively through Europe, and the “windy sentimentalities” that had become associated with one part of the rebellion. These Sheridan warred against with a healthy sincerity which set up against them not a remote ideal, but the honest side of such life as he knew.

Henry Morley

May, 1883.