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