A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But, of course, when young gentlemen of spirit are falling in love with beauteous maidens, and retiring to cure themselves by mingling with pastoral scenes reminiscent of the gentle melancholy of Mr. Alexander Pope's shepherds and shepherdesses (done in Dresden), every one of whom murmurs mournfully and melodiously of a rejected suit—when young gentlemen are running away with afflicted damsels and returning to fight their enemies, they cannot be expected to think of the incidental expenses of the business, which are to be defrayed by their father, any more than of the distraction which takes possession of their sisters.

The two young gentlemen were missing, and had left for their sisters no explanation of their absence—no hint as to the direction of their flight. And there were other people in the house talking about the high words that had been exchanged between the brothers at midnight. It is not surprising that the poor girls should be distressed and distracted.

Considering that Miss Linley was the first cause of the excitement in the midst of which the family had been living for some weeks, it was only natural that the elder of the girls should send for her with a view to have some light thrown on this new development of the heroic incident in which Miss Linley had assisted. But Miss Linley, on being applied to, affirmed that she knew nothing of the disappearance of the brothers, that she had heard of nothing that should cause them to leave Bath at a moment's notice. She was, unfortunately, a young woman of imagination. In a crisis such a one is either very helpful, or very helpless. Poor Miss Linley was the latter. She had just come through a great crisis in her own life, and she had not emerged from it without suffering. It was too much to ask her to face another in the family of her friends. She went off in a fainting fit on hearing the news of the disappearance of the young men, and her father left her in the hands of a medical man, and turned his attention to the condition of Miss Sheridan, who was unable to walk back to her home, and had to be put into a chair, Mr. Linley walking beside her with her young sister. It is more than possible that Mr. Linley was beginning to feel that he had had quite enough of the Sheridan family to last him for the remainder of his life.

For two days nothing whatever was heard of the missing brothers. We have no means of knowing if Miss Sheridan communicated to their father in Dublin the mysterious story she had to tell; the chances are that she was advised by Mr. Linley to refrain from doing so until she might have something definite to tell him. Mr. Linley never had any particular regard for the elder Sheridan, and he had no wish to have him summoned from his theatre at Dublin to make his remarks about the dangerous attractiveness of Elizabeth Linley, and the culpable carelessness of her father in allowing her to be carried off to France by a young man without a penny except what he got from his own father.

At any rate, Tom Sheridan did not leave his theatre or his pupils in elocution, and there was no need for him to do so, for on Tuesday evening—they had been missing on the Sunday morning—Dick and his brother returned. They were both greatly fatigued, and said that they had not been in bed since they had left Bath. This meant that Dick had actually not slept in Bath since he had originally left the city in the company of Miss Linley. Between the Friday and the Tuesday he had posted from London to Bath with the Linleys, and had forthwith returned to London with his brother and then back once more to Bath without a pause. He, at least, had very good reason for feeling fatigued.

His first act was to hand his sister an apology which had been made to him by Mathews. This document is worthy of being reprinted. It ran thus:

“Being convinced that the expressions I made use of to Mr. Sheridan's disadvantage, were the effects of passion and misrepresentation, I intreat what I have said to that gentleman's disadvantage, and particularly beg his pardon for my advertisement in the Bath Chronicle. Th. Mathews.”

He handed this document to his sister, and then it may be supposed that he went to bed. He had certainly good need of a sleep.

Such is the drift of the story up to this point, as told by Mrs. Lefanu (Elizabeth Sheridan), and it differs in some particulars from that told by her brother Charles in a letter to their uncle, and, in a lesser degree, from the account given of the whole transaction by Richard Sheridan himself, who was surely in the best position to know exactly what happened upon the occasion of his first visit to Mathews in London, as well as upon the occasion of his second, made so hurriedly in the company of his brother.

His second visit was, as might have been expected, the more exciting. It included the fighting of a duel with Mathews. The humours of duelling have been frequently dealt with in prose and comedy, and, assuredly the most amusing of all is to be found in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals. One must confess, however, that the serious account given by the same writer of his hostile meeting with Mathews, on his return from Bath, suggests a much more ludicrous series of situations than are to be found in his play.