Little Elizabeth Ann Linley, the composer's eldest daughter, used to stand at the Pump-room door, in Bath, with a basket, selling tickets, when only a girl of nine. She was very lovely, gentle, and good, and came to be known as the "Maid of Bath." After she sang before the king and queen at Buckingham House in 1773, George III. told her father that he never in his life heard so fine a voice as his daughter's, nor one so well instructed. Her beauty was praised in high terms by John Wilkes, Horace Walpole, and Miss Burney, and the Bishop of Meath styled her "the connecting link between woman and angel." Of course she had many admirers. The Duke of Clarence persecuted her with his attentions, and her parents wished her to marry Mr. Long, an old gentleman of considerable fortune. The latter, when Elizabeth told him she could not love him, had the magnanimity to take upon himself the burden of breaking the engagement, and settled 3,000 pounds on her as an indemnity for his supposed breach of covenant.
A certain rascally Captain Mathews, a married rake, and a so-called friend of her father, had the effrontery to follow her with his solicitations, from which she was rescued by the young Sheridan, who fell in love with Elizabeth and persuaded her to fly with him to France. There, at Calais, they went through a formal ceremony of marriage, separating immediately afterward, the lady entering a convent, and Sheridan returning to England. Here he fought two duels with Captain Mathews, in the second of which he was quite seriously wounded. Mr. Linley went to France and brought his daughter home, and finally, about a year from the time of the Calais episode, the young couple were married again, this time in full sight of the world.
The future author of "The Rivals" and "The School for Scandal," addressed to his Eliza, among other early productions, this pretty snatch of song:
"Dry be that tear, my gentlest love,
Be hush'd that struggling sigh;
Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
More fix'd, more true than I.
Hush'd be that sigh, be dry that tear;
Cease boding doubt, cease anxious fear;
Dry be that tear.
"Ask'st thou how long my love will stay,
When all that's new is past?
How long, ah! Delia, can I say
How long my life will last?
Dry be that tear, be hush'd that sigh;
At least I'll love thee till I die.
Hush'd be that sigh.
"And does that thought affect thee too,
The thought of Sylvio's death,
That he who only breath'd for you
Must yield his faithful breath?
Hush'd be that sigh, be dry that tear,
Nor let us lose our heaven here.
Dry be that tear."
For some eighteen years the Sheridans lived together,—Elizabeth never sang in public again after her marriage,—and then their union was broken by death. The devoted wife to this brilliant, but selfish, unreliable, and extravagant genius died in 1792, of consumption.
"Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,"
and surely during the years of life left to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he must often have recalled the happy days when he listened in delight to the music of his loved one's voice.