It was not that he wanted, at large, foresight for events to be rationally expected, or judgment to dictate how they should be met: but his foresight, his sense of right, were all for his neighbours! for himself—he had none. To all without he had a nearly microscopic vision; to all within he was blind; as the eye sees every thing—but itself.
“Experience,” Mr. Crisp was wont to say, “is rarely of any use collaterally; it does not become efficient till it has personally been bought. And it must be paid for, also,” he would energetically add, “to be well remembered!”
But so torpid was the infatuation of self-security in Mr. Greville, that pertinaciously he frequented the same seductive haunts, and mechanically adhered to the same dangerous society, till the knowledge of his errors and their mischief was forced upon him by his creditors.
Angered and disgusted, he then, in gloomy sullenness, retired from public view; and lived a rambling, unsettled sort of life, as ill at ease with his family as with the world, from the wounds he habitually inflicted, and occasionally suffered, through the irritability of his argumentative commerce.
MR. AND MRS. SHERIDAN.
Another of the Doctor’s brightest calls to high and animated society was now, also, utterly eclipsed; for She, the loveliest of the lovely, the first Mrs. Sheridan, was fading away—vanishing—from the list of his fair enchantresses.
This paragon of syrens, by almost universal and national consent, had been looked up to, when she sang at oratorios and at concerts, as the star of harmony in England: though so short was that eclât of supremacy, that, from the date of her marriage, her claim to such pre-eminence was known to the public only by remembrance or by rumour; Mr. Sheridan, her husband, inexorably renouncing all similar engagements, and only at his own house suffering her to sing.
Far happier had it been for that captivating and beautiful creature, far happier for her eminent and highly-talented husband, had the appropriate fame that belonged equally to the birth, education, and extraordinary abilities of both, been adequate to their pride of expectation: for then, glowing with rational and modest, not burning with inordinate and eccentric ambition, they would not disdainfully—almost madly—have cast away from their serious and real service the brilliant gifts of favouring nature, which, if seasonably brought forth, would have opened to them, without struggle or difficulty, the golden portals of that splendour to which their passion for grandeur and enjoyment throbbingly aspired.
But from these brilliant gifts, as instruments of advantage, they turned captiously aside; as if the exquisite powers, vocal and dramatic, which were severally intrusted to their charge, had been qualities that, in any view of utility, they ought to shrink from with secrecy and shame.