1. Thomas Sheridan, D.D. (1684-1738), grandfather of the dramatist, was the first to connect the family with literature. He is chiefly known as the favourite companion and confidant of Swift during his later residence in Ireland. But enough is left of his writing to enable us to understand the secret of his attraction for a man not easily pleased. His correspondence with Swift and his whimsical treatise on the Art of Punning make perfectly clear from whom his grandson derived his high spirits and delight in practical joking. The Art of Punning might have been written by the author of The Critic. Swift had a high opinion of his scholarship, and that it was not contemptible is attested by an edition of the Satires of Persius, printed at Dublin in 1728. When Swift came to Dublin as dean of St Patrick's, Sheridan was established there as a schoolmaster of very high repute,—a fashionable schoolmaster, with a small landed patrimony in Cavan, and a bishop in the family two generations back. He so won upon the dean with his mirthfulness, wit, scholarship, good-nature, and honesty that in a short time no party made for the dean’s entertainment was considered complete without Sheridan. Sheridan was his confidant in the affair of Drapier's Letters ; it was at Quilca, Sheridan’s country cottage in Cavan, that Gulliver’s Travels was prepared for the press; and this favoured friend was from an early period in their acquaintance one of his most confidential correspondents when at a distance. Through Swift’s influence he obtained a living near Cork, but damaged his prospects of further preferment by a feat of unlucky absence of mind. Having to preach at Cork on the anniversary of Queen Anne’s death he hurriedly chose a sermon with the text, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” and was at once struck off the list of chaplains to the lord-lieutenant and forbidden the castle. In spite of this mishap, for which the archdeacon of Cork made amends by the present of a lease worth £250 per annum, he “still remained,” according to Lord Orrery, “a punster, a quibbler, a fiddler, and a wit,” the only person in whose genial presence Swift relaxed his habitual gloom. His latter days were not prosperous, probably owing to his having “a better knowledge of books than of men or of the value of money,” and he died in poverty and ill-health in 1738. The biographers of Brinsley Sheridan are disposed to dwell chiefly on the eccentricities of his ancestors, but both his grandfather and his father gave ample proof of more solid qualities than improvidence and wit. The original source of information about the schoolmaster grandfather is the father’s Life of Swift (pp. 369-395), where his scholarship is dwelt upon as much as his improvident conviviality and simple kindliness of nature.

2. Thomas Sheridan (1721-1788), son of the above, born at Quilca in 1721, had a more conspicuous career than his father. This ambitious father sent him to an English school, Westminster; but he was forced by stress of circumstances to return to Dublin and complete his education at Trinity College. Then he went on the stage, and at once made a local reputation. There is a tradition that on his first appearance in London he was set up as a rival to Garrick, and Moore countenances the idea that Garrick remained jealous of him to the end. For this tradition there is little foundation. Sheridan’s first appearance in London was at Covent Garden in March 1744, when, heralded in advance as the brilliant Irish comedian, he acted for three weeks in a succession of leading parts, Hamlet being the first. He did not appear in London again till ten years afterwards, when he was the leading actor for a season at the same theatre. In the interval he had been manager of a theatre in Dublin, had married a highly accomplished and well-born lady (see next notice), and had been driven from Dublin as a result of taking the unpopular side in politics. After his season in London he tried Dublin again, but after two years more of unremunerative management, he left for England finally in 1758. By this time he had conceived his scheme of British education, and it was to push this rather than his connexion with the stage that he crossed St George’s Channel. He lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, and received honorary degrees from both universities in 1758 and 1759. But the scheme did not make way, and we find him in 1760 acting under Garrick at Drury Lane. His merits as an actor may be judged from the description of him in the Rosciad (1. 987) at this period. He is placed in the second rank, next to Garrick, but there is no hint of possible rivalry. Churchill describes him as an actor whose conceptions were superior to his powers of execution, whose action was always forcible but too mechanically calculated, and who in spite of all his defects rose to greatness in occasional scenes. Churchill never erred on the side of praising too much, and his description may be accepted as correct, supported as it is by the fact that the actor eked out his income by giving lessons in elocution. Boswell has some amusing remarks on his success with a distinguished Scotch pupil, who used his influence to get a pension for him from Lord Bute. Sheridan, however, attracted attention chiefly by his enthusiastic advocacy, in public lectures and books, of his scheme of education, in which oratory was to play a principal part. It is generally said that he traced all the evils and perils of the Commonwealth to the neglect of oratory. But this is a caricature. There was more serious substance in his indictment of the established system of education. His main count was that it did not fit the higher classes for their duties in life, that it was uniform for all and profitable for none; and he urged as a matter of vital national concern that special training should be given for the various professions. Oratory came in as part of the special training of men intended for public affairs, but his main contention was one very familiar now,—that more time should be given in schools to the study of the English language. He rode his hobby with great enthusiasm, published an elaborate and eloquent treatise on education, and lectured on the subject in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and other towns. In 1769, after a residence of some years in France, partly for economy, partly for his wife’s health, partly to study the system of education there, he published a matured Plan of Education, with a letter to the king, in which he offered to devote the rest of his life to the execution of his theories on condition of receiving a pension equivalent to the sacrifice of his professional income. His offer was not accepted; but Sheridan, still enthusiastic, retired to Bath, and prepared a pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, with a prosodial grammar. After his son’s brilliant success he assisted in the management of Drury Lane, and occasionally acted. His Life of Swift, a very entertaining book in spite of its incompleteness as a biography, was published in 1784. He died at Margate in 1788. The year before his death he had a prospect of realizing his scheme of education in Ireland, but the high official who had sought his advice died just as the old man eagerly reached Dublin, and his hopes were disappointed.

3. Frances Sheridan (1724-1766), wife of the above, and mother of the dramatist, wrote two novels of high repute in their day, Sidney Biddulph and Nourjahad, and two plays, The Discovery and The Dupe. We have it on the authority of Moore that, when The Rivals and The Duenna were running at Covent Garden, Garrick revived The Discovery at Drury Lane, as a counter-attraction, “to play the mother off against the son, taking on himself to act the principal part in it.” But the statement, intrinsically absurd, is inaccurate. The Discovery was not an old play at the time, but one of Garrick’s stock pieces, and Anthony Bromville was one of his favourite characters. It was first produced in 1763. So far from being jealous of the elder Sheridan, Garrick seems to have been a most useful friend to the family, accepting his wife’s play— which he declared to be “one of the best comedies he ever read ”—and giving the husband several engagements. Mrs Sheridan’s novels and plays were all written in the last six years of her life. She died at Blois in 1766. Her maiden name was Chamberlaine. Her father was a dignitary in the Irish Church, her grandfather an English baronet. Her marriage with the actor was the result of romantic circumstances, fully detailed in the Memoirs of Mrs Frances Sheridan, mentioned below.

4. Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751— 1816), second son of Thomas and Frances Sheridan, was born in Dublin in September 1751. Moore records for the encouragement of slow boys that the future dramatist was "by common consent of parent and preceptor pronounced an impenetrable dunce.” The plain fact is that the expression occurs in a smart letter about him and his sister, written by his mother to a schoolmaster. Mrs Sheridan wrote that she had been the only instructor of her children hitherto, and that they would exercise the schoolmaster in the quality of patience, “for two such impenetrable dunces she had never met with.” One of the children thus humorously described was Richard Brinsley, and the age of the “impenetrable dunce” at the time was seven. At the age of eleven he was sent to Harrow. There, to please orthodox biographers, he gave no such sign of future eminence as is implied in taking a high place in school. Dr Parr, who was one of his masters, “saw in him vestiges of a superior intellect,” but, though he “did not fail to probe and tease him,” by no harassing or tormenting process could he incite the indolent boy to greater industry than was “just sufficient to save him from disgrace.” But these facts about young Sheridan’s determined indolence in the study of Latin and Greek should be taken in connexion with his father’s peculiar theories on the subject of English education. The father’s theories possibly did not encourage the son to learn Latin and Greek. Why, with his views on the unprofitableness of those studies, he sent his younger son to Harrow, is not obvious; but it was probably as much for social as for educational reasons. If so, the purpose was answered, for Sheridan was extremely popular at school, winning somehow, Dr Parr confesses, “the esteem and even admiration of all his schoolfellows,” and giving a foretaste of his mysterious powers of getting things done for him by making the younger boys steal apples for his own private store and good-humouredly defying the masters to trace the theft home to him.

Sheridan left Harrow at the age of seventeen, having impressed his schoolfellows at least, who are sometimes better judges than their masters, with a vivid sense of his powers. It was probably his father’s design to send him afterwards to Oxford, but the family circumstances were too straitened to permit of it, and the educationist, who had just then returned from France, and was about to launch his appeal to the king on behalf of his new plan of education, took his son home and himself directed and superintended his studies. What his plans were for his brilliant son’s future we have no means of knowing, but the probability is that, if the projected academy had become an accomplished fact, he would have tried to make Richard Brinsley an upper master in some one of its numerous departments. There are traces of method in the superficially harum-scarum Irishman’s courses, and it looks as if he had intended both of his sons to help him in the magnificent project from which his sanguine temperament expected such great things,—the elder, who had been with him in France, in what would now be called the modern side, and the classically educated younger in the ancient side. Meantime, pending His Majesty’s resolution on the projector’s offer, Brinsley, besides being trained by his father daily in elocution, and put through a course of English reading in accordance with the system, received the accomplishments of a young man of fashion, had fencing and riding lessons at Angelo’s, and began to eat terms at the Middle Temple. His destination apparently was the bar, if fortune should deny him the more glorious career of lieutenant in the new academy through which young England was to be regenerated.

As to how young Sheridan, with a cooler head to regulate his hot Irish blood, looked at his father’s grand schemes, we have no record. But it is of importance to remember those schemes, and the exact stage they had now reached, in connexion with the accepted view of Sheridan’s behaviour at this time, which represents him as a mere idler, hanging on at home like an ordinary ne’er-do-well, too indolent to work for any profession, simply enjoying himself and trusting recklessly to chance for some means of livelihood. The fact would seem to be that over and above whatever he did in the way of qualifying himself for a regular career—which possibly was little enough —he began from this time with fundamentally steady purpose to follow the bent of his genius. After leaving Harrow he kept up a correspondence with a school friend who had gone to Oxford. With this youth, whose name was Halhed, he had not competed for school honours; but both had dreams of higher things; and now they concocted together various literary plans, and between them actually executed and published metrical translations of Aristøenetus —an obscure Greek or pseudo-Greek author brought to light or invented at the Renaissance, a writer of imaginary amorous epistles. The two literary partners translated his prose into verse which has the qualities of lightness, neatness, and wit, and is in no respect unworthy of being the apprentice-work of Sheridan.

In conjunction with the same young friend he began a farce entitled Jupiter. It was not completed, but the fragment is of interest as containing the same device of a rehearsal which was afterwards worked out with such brilliant effect in The Critic. Some of the dialogue is very much in Sheridan’s mature manner. It would seem indeed that at this time, idle as he appeared, Sheridan was deliberately exercising his powers and preparing himself for future triumphs. Moore’s theory is that his seeming indolence was but a mask; and extracts given from papers written in the seven years between his leaving Harrow and the appearance of The Rivals— sketches of unfinished plays, poems, political letters, and pamphlets—show that he was far from idle. He was never much of a reader; he preferred, as he said, to sit and think—a process more favourable to originality than always having a book in his hand; but we may well believe that he kept his eyes open, and his father’s connexion with fashionable society gave him abundant opportunities. The removal of the family to Bath in 1771 extended his field of observation. Anstey’s New Bath Guide had just been published and had greatly stimulated interest in the comedy of life at this fashionable watering-place.

Presently, too, already a favourite in Bath society from his charming manners and his skill as a writer of graceful and witty verses, the youth played a part in the living comedy which at once made him a marked man. There was in Bath a celebrated musical family—“a nest of nightingales,”—the daughters of the composer Linley, the head of his profession in the fashionable town. The eldest daughter, a girl of sixteen, the prima donna of her father’s concerts, was exceedingly beautiful, and very much run after by suitors, young and old, honourable and dishonourable. In the latter class was a Captain Mathews, a married man; in the former, young Sheridan. Mathews had artfully won the girl’s affections, and persecuted her with his importunities, threatening to destroy himself if she refused him. To protect her from this scoundrel’s designs the younger lover, who seems to have acted at first only as a confidential friend, conceived the romantic plan of escorting Miss Linley to a nunnery in France. After performing this chivalrous duty he returned and fought two duels with Mathews, which made a considerable sensation at the time. The youthful pair had gone through the ceremony of marriage in the course of their flight, but Sheridan chivalrously did not claim his wife, kept the marriage secret, and was sternly denied access to Miss Linley by her father, who did not consider the professionless young man an eligible suitor. Ultimately, after a courtship romantic enough to have satisfied Lydia Languish, they were openly married in April 1773.

Sheridan’s daring start in life after this happy marriage showed a confidence in his genius which was justified by' its success. Although he had no income, and no capital beyond a few thousand pounds brought by his wife, he took a house in Orchard Street, Portman Square, furnished it “in the most costly style,” and proceeded to return on something like an equal footing the hospitalities of the fashionable world. His wife—“the celebrated Miss Linley ”—was a most popular singer, but he would not allow her to appear in public. She was to be heard only at private concerts in their own house, and her beauty and accomplishments combined with her husband’s wit to draw crowds of fashionable people to their entertainments. Sheridan’s conduct may have been youthful pride and recklessness, the thoughtless magnificence of a strong and confident nature; all the same, it answered the purpose of deep-laid and daring policy. When remonstrated with by a friend, and asked how he found the means of supporting such a costly establishment, he is said to have answered— “My dear friend, it is my means.” And so it proved, for his social standing and popularity helped to get a favourable start for his first comedy, The Rivals, produced at Covent Garden on the 17th January 1775.

The Rivals is said to have been not so favourably received on its first night, owing to its length and to the bad playing of the part of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. But the defects were remedied before the second performance, and the piece at once took that place on the stage which it has never lost. It was the last season but one of Garrick’s long career, and the current story preserved by Moore is that the run upon Covent Garden was such as to alarm the veteran of Drury Lane and drive him to extraordinary exertions to counterbalance the attractions of the new play. This seems to be a myth, natural enough in the circumstances, but unfounded in fact, for we have contemporary testimony that Drury Lane was never more crowded than during the last years of Garrick’s management, when it was known that he intended to retire from the stage. There were crowded houses at both theatres. Sheridan, though bearing his brilliant success lightly, proceeded at once to take the tide at the flood. St Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant, a lively farce, written it is said at the request of Clinch, in gratitude for his coming to the rescue of Sir Lucius, was produced in May. In the course of the year, with the assistance of his musical father-in-law, he wrote the comic opera of The Duenna ; and by the end of the year, with an eye to the profits of theatrical management, he was in negotiation with Garrick for the purchase of his share of Drury Lane. The Duenna was the great theatrical success of the winter of 1775-76; it ran even longer than The Beggar's Opera had done—up to that time the longest run on record. The bargain with Garrick was completed in June 1776. The sum paid for the half-share was £35,000; of this Sheridan contributed £10,000.

None of his letters show where the money came from, and much wonder has been expressed on the subject; but after all it is not so very mysterious that the most brilliant dramatist of his time, in all the credit of unparalleled success, should have been able to borrow such a sum as this with the best theatrical property to offer as security. There is a tradition that Garrick advanced the money or let it lie at interest; anyhow, the loan could not have appeared at the time a very risky speculation. Two years afterwards Sheridan and...