Into this eligible club Richard Sheridan, who ten years before had been agreeing with Halhed on the bliss of making a couple of hundred pounds by their literary exertions, now essayed to enter as a member; but in vain. One black-ball sufficed to nullify his election, and that one was dropped in by George Selwyn, who, with degrading littleness, would not have the son of an actor among them. Again and again he made the attempt; again and again Selwyn foiled him; and it was not till 1780 that he succeeded. The Prince of Wales was then his devoted friend, and was determined he should be admitted into the club. The elections at that time took place between eleven at night and one o'clock in the morning, and the 'greatest gentleman in Europe' took care to be in the hall when the ballot began. Selwyn came down as usual, bent on triumph. The prince called him to him. There was nothing for it; Selwyn was forced to obey. The prince walked him up and down the hall, engaging him in an apparently most important conversation. George Selwyn answered him question after question, and made desperate attempts to slip away. The other George had always something more to say to him. The long finger of the clock went round, and Selwyn's long white fingers were itching for the black ball. The prince was only more and more interested, the wit only more and more abstracted. Never was the young George more lively, or the other more silent. But it was all in vain. The finger of the clock went round and round, and at last the members came out noisily from the balloting-room, and the smiling faces of the prince's friends showed to the unhappy Selwyn that his enemy had been elected.
So, at least, runs one story. The other, told by Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, is perhaps more probable. It appears that the Earl of Besborough was no less opposed to his election than George Selwyn, and these two individuals agreed at any cost of comfort to be always at the club at the time of the ballot to throw in their black balls. On the night of his success, Lord Besborough was there as usual, and Selwyn was at his rooms in Cleveland Row, preparing to come to the club. Suddenly a chairman rushed into Brookes' with an important note for my lord, who, on tearing it open, found to his horror that it was from his daughter-in-law, Lady Duncannon, announcing that his house in Cavendish Square was on fire, and imploring him to come immediately. Feeling confident that his fellow conspirator would be true to his post, the earl set off at once. But almost the same moment Selwyn received a message informing him that his adopted daughter, of whom he was very fond, was seized with an alarming illness. The ground was cleared; and by the time the earl returned, having, it is needless to say, found his house in a perfect state of security, and was joined by Selwyn, whose daughter had never been better in her life, the actor's son was elected, and the conspirators found they had been duped.
But it is far easier in this country to get into that House, where one has to represent the interests of thousands, and take a share in the government of a nation, than to be admitted to a club where one has but to lounge, to gamble, and to eat dinner; and Sheridan was elected for the town of Stafford with probably little more artifice than the old and stale one of putting five-pound notes under voters' glasses, or paying thirty pounds for a home-cured ham. Whether he bribed or not, a petition was presented against his election, almost as a matter of course in those days, and his maiden speech was made in defence of the good burgesses of that quiet little county-town. After making this speech, which was listened to in silence on account of his reputation as a dramatic author, but which does not appear to have been very wonderful, he rushed up to the gallery, and eagerly asked his friend Woodfall what he thought of it. That candid man shook his head, and told him oratory was not his forte, Sheridan leaned his head on his hand a moment, and then exclaimed with vehement emphasis, 'It is in me, however, and, by Heaven! it shall come out.'
He spoke prophetically, yet not as the great man who determines to conquer difficulties, but rather as one who feels conscious of his own powers, and knows that they must show themselves sooner or later. Sheridan found himself labouring under the same natural obstacles as Demosthenes—though in a less degree—a thick and disagreeable tone of voice; but we do not find in the indolent but gifted Englishman that admirable perseverance, that conquering zeal, which enabled the Athenian to turn these very impediments to his own advantage. He did, indeed, prepare his speeches, and at times had fits of that same diligence which he had displayed in the preparation of 'The School for Scandal;' but his indolent, self-indulgent mode of life left him no time for such steady devotion to oratory as might have made him the finest speaker of his age, for perhaps his natural abilities were greater than those of Pitt, Fox, or even Burke, though his education was inferior to that of those two statesmen.
From this time Sheridan's life had two phases—that of a politician, and that of a man of the world. With the former, we have nothing to do in such a memoir as this, and indeed it is difficult to say whether it was in oratory, the drama, or wit that he gained the greatest celebrity. There is, however, some difference between the three capacities. On the mimic stage, and on the stage of the country, his fame rested on a very few grand outbursts—some matured, prepared, deliberated—others spontaneous. He left only three great comedies, and perhaps we may say only one really grand. In the same way he made only two great speeches, or perhaps we may say only one. His wit on the other hand—though that too is said to have been studied—was the constant accompaniment of his daily life, and Sheridan has not left two or three celebrated bon-mots, but a hundred.
But even in his political career his wit, which must then have been spontaneous, won him almost as much fame as his eloquence, which he seems to have reserved for great occasions. He was the wit of the House. Wit, ridicule, satire, quiet, cool, and easy sneers, always made in good temper, and always therefore the more bitter, were his weapons, and they struck with unerring accuracy. At that time—nor at that time only—the 'Den of Thieves,' as Cobbett called our senate, was a cockpit as vulgar and personal as the present Congress of the United States. Party-spirit meant more than it has ever done since, and scarcely less than it had meant when the throne itself was the stake for which parties played some forty years before. There was, in fact a substantial personal centre for each side. The one party rallied round a respectable but maniac monarch, whose mental afflictions took the most distressing form, the other round his gay, handsome, dissolute—nay disgusting—son, at once his rival and his heir. The spirit of each party was therefore personal, and their attacks on one another were more personal than anything we can imagine in the present day in so respectably ridiculous a conclave as the House of Commons. It was little for one honourable gentleman to give another honourable gentleman the lie direct before the eyes of the country. The honourable gentlemen descended—or, as they thought, ascended—to the most vehement invective, and such was at times the torrent of personal abuse which parties heaped on one another, while good-natured John Bull looked on and smiled at his rulers, that, as in the United States of to-day, a debate was often the prelude to a duel. Pitt and Fox, Tierney, Adam, Fullarton, Lord George Germain, Lord Shelburne, and Governor Johnstone, all 'vindicated their honour,' as the phrase went, by 'coffee and pistols for four.' If Sheridan had not to repeat the Bob Acres scene with Captain Matthews, it was only because his wonderful good humour could put up with a great deal that others thought could only be expiated by a hole in the waistcoat.
In the administration of the Marquis of Rockingham the dramatist enjoyed the pleasures of office for less than a year as one of the Under Secretaries of State in 1782. In the next year we find him making a happy retort on Pitt, who had somewhat vulgarly alluded to his being a dramatic author. It was on the American question, perhaps the bitterest that ever called forth the acrimony of parties in the House. Sheridan, from boyhood, had been taunted with being the son of an actor. One can hardly credit this fact, just after Garrick had raised the profession of an actor to so great an eminence in the social scale. He had been called 'the player boy' at school, and his election at Brookes' had been opposed on the same grounds. It was evidently his bitterest point, and Pitt probably knew this when, in replying to a speech of the ex-dramatist's he said that 'no man admired more than he did the abilities of that right honourable gentleman, the elegant sallies of his thought, the gay effusions of his fancy, his dramatic turns, and his epigrammatic point; and if they were reserved for the proper stage, they would, no doubt, receive what the hon. gentleman's abilities always did receive, the plaudits of the audience; and it would be his fortune sui plausu gaudere theatri. But this was not the proper scene for the exhibition of those elegancies.' This was vulgar in Pitt, and probably every one felt so. But Sheridan rose, cool and collected, and quietly replied:—
'On the particular sort of personality which the right hon. gentleman has thought proper to make use of, I need not make any comment. The propriety, the taste, the gentlemanly point of it, must have been obvious to the House. But let me assure the right hon. gentleman that I do now, and will at any time he chooses to repeat this sort of allusion, meet it with the most sincere good humour. Nay, I will say more: flattered and encouraged by the right hon. gentleman's panegyric on my talents, if ever I again engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption—to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character of the Angry Boy, in the "Alchemist."'
The fury of Pitt, contrasted with the coolness of the man he had so shamefully attacked, made this sally irresistible, and from that time neither 'the angry boy' himself, nor any of his colleagues, were anxious to twit Sheridan on his dramatic pursuits.
Pitt wanted to lay a tax on every horse that started in a race. Lord Surry, a turfish individual of the day, proposed one of five pounds on the winner. Sheridan, rising, told his lordship that the next time he visited Newmarket he would probably be greeted with the line:—