"When Great Britain fell, the case would not be with her as with Rome in former times. When Rome fell, she fell by the weight of her own vices. The inhabitants were so corrupted and degraded, as to be unworthy of a continuance of prosperity, and incapable to enjoy the blessings of liberty; their minds were bent to the state in which a reverse of fortune placed them. But when Great Britain falls, she will fall with a people full of private worth and virtue; she will be ruined by the profligacy of the governors, and the security of her inhabitants,—the consequence of those pernicious doctrines which have taught her to place a false confidence in her strength and freedom, and not to look with distrust and apprehension to the misconduct and corruption of those to whom she has trusted the management of her resources."
To this might have been added, that when Great Britain falls, it will not be from either ignorance of her rights, or insensibility to their value, but from that want of energy to assert them which a high state of civilization produces. The love of ease that luxury brings along with it,—the selfish and compromising spirit, in which the members of a polished society countenance each other, and which reverses the principle of patriotism, by sacrificing public interests to private ones,—the substitution of intellectual for moral excitement, and the repression of enthusiasm by fastidiousness and ridicule,—these are among the causes that undermine a people,—that corrupt in the very act of enlightening them; till they become, what a French writer calls "esprits exigeans et caracteres complaisans," and the period in which their rights are best understood may be that in which they most easily surrender them. It is, indeed, with the advanced age of free States, as with that of individuals,—they improve in the theory of their existence as they grow unfit for the practice of it; till, at last, deceiving themselves with the semblance of rights gone by, and refining upon the forms of their institutions after they have lost the substance, they smoothly sink into slavery, with the lessons of liberty on their lips.
Besides the Treason and Sedition Bills, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was another of the momentous questions which, in this as well as the preceding Session, were chosen as points of assault by Mr. Sheridan, and contested with a vigor and reiteration of attack, which, though unavailing against the massy majorities of the Minister, yet told upon public opinion so as to turn even defeats to account.
The marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Princess Caroline of Brunswick having taken place in the spring of this year, it was proposed by His Majesty to Parliament, not only to provide an establishment for their Royal Highnesses, but to decide on the best manner of liquidating the debts of the Prince, which were calculated at 630,000_l_. On the secession of the leading Whigs, in 1792, His Royal Highness had also separated himself from Mr. Fox, and held no further intercourse either with him or any of his party,—except, occasionally, Mr. Sheridan,—till so late, I believe, as the year 1798. The effects of this estrangement are sufficiently observable in the tone of the Opposition throughout the debates on the Message of the King. Mr. Grey said, that he would not oppose the granting of an establishment to the Prince equal to that of his ancestors; but neither would he consent to the payment of his debts by Parliament. A refusal, he added, to liberate His Royal Highness from his embarrassments would certainly prove a mortification; but it would, at the same time, awaken a just sense of his imprudence. Mr. Fox asked, "Was the Prince well advised in applying to that House on the subject of his debts, after the promise made in 1787?"—and Mr. Sheridan, while he agreed with his friends that the application should not have been made to Parliament, still gave it as his "positive opinion that the debts ought to be paid immediately, for the dignity of the country and the situation of the Prince, who ought not to be seen rolling about the streets, in his state-coach, as an insolvent prodigal." With respect to the promise given in 1787, and now violated, that the Prince would not again apply to Parliament for the payment of his debts, Mr. Sheridan, with a communicativeness that seemed hardly prudent, put the House in possession of some details of the transaction, which, as giving an insight into Royal character, are worthy of being extracted.
"In 1787, a pledge was given to the House that no more debts should be contracted. By that pledge the Prince was bound as much as if he had given it knowingly and voluntarily. To attempt any explanation of it now would be unworthy of his honor,—as if he had suffered it to be wrung from him, with a view of afterwards pleading that it was against his better judgment, in order to get rid of it. He then advised the Prince not to make any such promise, because it was not to be expected that he could himself enforce the details of a system of economy; and, although he had men of honor and abilities about him, he was totally unprovided with men of business, adequate to such a task. The Prince said he could not give such a pledge, and agree at the same time to take back his establishment. He (Mr. Sheridan) drew up a plan of retrenchment, which was approved of by the Prince, and afterwards by His Majesty; and the Prince told him that the promise was not to be insisted upon. In the King's Message, however, the promise was inserted,—by whose advice he knew not. He heard it read with surprise, and, on being asked next day by the Prince to contradict it in his place, he inquired whether the Prince had seen the Message before it was brought down. Being told that it had been read to him, but that he did not understand it as containing a promise, he declined contradicting it, and told the Prince that he must abide by it in whatever way it might have been obtained. By the plan then settled, Ministers had a check upon the Prince's expenditure, which they never exerted, nor enforced adherence to the plan.
* * * * *
"While Ministers never interfered to check expenses, of which they could not pretend ignorance, the Prince had recourse to means for relieving himself from his embarrassments, which ultimately tended to increase them. It was attempted to raise a loan for him in foreign countries, a measure which he thought unconstitutional, and put a stop to; and, after a consultation with Lord Loughborough, all the bonds were burnt, although with a considerable loss to the Prince. After that, another plan of retrenchment was proposed, upon which he had frequent consultations with Lord Thurlow, who gave the Prince fair, open, and manly advice. That Noble Lord told the Prince, that, after the promise he had made, he must not think of applying to Parliament;—that he must avoid being of any party in politics, but, above all, exposing himself to the suspicion of being influenced in political opinion by his embarrassments;—that the only course he could pursue with honor, was to retire from public life for a time, and appropriate the greater part of his income to the liquidation of his debts. This plan was agreed upon in the autum of 1792. Why, it might be asked, was it not carried into effect? About that period his Royal Highness began to receive unsolicited advice from another quarter. He was told by Lord Loughborough, both in words and in writing, that the plan savored too much of the advice given to M. Egalité, and he could guess from what quarter it came. For his own part, he was then of opinion, that to have avoided meddling in the great political questions which were then coming to be discussed, and to have put his affairs in a train of adjustment, would have better become his high station, and tended more to secure public respect to it, than the pageantry of state-liveries."
The few occasions on which the name of Mr. Sheridan was again connected with literature, after the final investment of his genius in political speculations, were such as his fame might have easily dispensed with;—and one of them, the forgery of the Shakspeare papers, occurred in the course of the present year. Whether it was that he looked over these manuscripts with the eye more of a manager than of a critic, and considered rather to what account the belief in their authenticity might be turned, than how far it was founded upon internal evidence;—or whether, as Mr. Ireland asserts, the standard at which he rated the genius of Shakspeare was not so high as to inspire him with a very watchful fastidiousness of judgment; certain it is that he was, in some degree, the dupe of this remarkable imposture, which, as a lesson to the self-confidence of criticism, and an exposure of the fallibility of taste, ought never to be forgotten in literary history.
The immediate payment of 300_l_. and a moiety of the profits for the first sixty nights, were the terms upon which Mr. Sheridan purchased the play of Vortigern from the Irelands. The latter part of the conditions was voided the first night; and, though it is more than probable that a genuine tragedy of Shakspeare, if presented under similar circumstances, would have shared the same fate, the public enjoyed the credit of detecting and condemning a counterfeit, which had passed current through some of the most learned and tasteful hands of the day. It is but justice, however, to Mr. Sheridan to add, that, according to the account of Ireland himself, he was not altogether without misgivings during his perusal of the manuscripts, and that his name does not appear among the signatures to that attestation of their authenticity which his friend Dr. Parr drew up, and was himself the first to sign. The curious statement of Mr. Ireland, with respect to Sheridan's want of enthusiasm for Shakspeare, receives some confirmation from the testimony of Mr. Boaden, the biographer of Kemble, who tells us that "Kemble frequently expressed to him his wonder that Sheridan should trouble himself so little about Shakspeare." This peculiarity of taste,—if it really existed to the degree that these two authorities would lead us to infer,—affords a remarkable coincidence with the opinions of another illustrious genius, lately lost to the world, whose admiration of the great Demiurge of the Drama was leavened with the same sort of heresy.
In the January of this year, Mr. William Stone—the brother of the gentleman whose letter from Paris has been given in a preceding Chapter—was tried upon a charge of High Treason, and Mr. Sheridan was among the witnesses summoned for the prosecution. He had already in the year 1794, in consequence of a reference from Mr. Stone himself, been examined before the Privy Council, relative to a conversation which he had held with that gentleman, and, on the day after his examination, had, at the request of Mr. Dundas, transmited to that Minister in writing the particulars of his testimony before the Council. There is among his papers a rough draft of this Statement, in comparing which with his evidence upon the trial in the present year, I find rather a curious proof of the faithlessness of even the best memories. The object of the conversation which he had held with Mr. Stone in 1794—and which constituted the whole of their intercourse with each other—was a proposal on the part of the latter, submitted also to Lord Lauderdale and others, to exert his influence in France, through those channels which his brother's residence there opened to him, for the purpose of averting the threatened invasion of England, by representing to the French rulers the utter hopelessness of such an attempt. Mr. Sheridan, on the trial, after an ineffectual request to be allowed to refer to his written Statement, gave the following as part of his recollections of the conversation:—