"A new wooden leg for Sir Charles Easy.
* * * * *
"An ornament which proud peers wear all the year round—chimneysweepers only on the first of May.
* * * * *
"In marriage if you possess any thing very good, it makes you eager to get every thing else good of the same sort.
* * * * *
"The critic when he gets out of his carriage should always recollect, that his footman behind is gone up to judge as well as himself.
* * * * *
"She might have escaped in her own clothes, but I suppose she thought it more romantic to put on her brother's regimentals."
The rough sketches and fragments of poems, which Mr. Sheridan left behind him, are numerous; but those among them that are sufficiently finished to be cited, bear the marks of having been written when he was very young, and would not much interest the reader—while of the rest it is difficult to find four consecutive lines, that have undergone enough of the toilette of composition to be presentable in print. It was his usual practice, when he undertook any subject in verse, to write down his thoughts first in a sort of poetical prose,—with, here and there, a rhyme or a metrical line, as they might occur—and then, afterwards to reduce with much labor, this anomalous compound to regular poetry. The birth of his prose being, as we have already seen, so difficult, it may be imagined how painful was the travail of his verse. Indeed, the number of tasks which he left unfinished are all so many proofs of that despair of perfection, which those best qualified to attain it are always most likely to feel.