is not a pleasant topic to dwell upon, and I leave Sheridan's misery for
Mr. J. B. Gough to whine and roar over when he wants a shocking example.
Sheridan might have earned many a crown in that capacity, if
temperance-oratory had been the passion of the day. Debt, disease,
depravity--these words describe enough the downward career of his old
age. To eat, still more to drink, was now the troublesome enigma of the
quondam genius. I say quondam, for all the marks of that genius were now
gone. One after another his choicest properties made their way to 'my
uncle's.' The books went first, as if they could be most easily
dispensed with; the remnants of his plate followed; then his pictures
were sold; and at last even the portrait of his first wife, by Reynolds,
was left in pledge for a 'further remittance.'

The last humiliation arrived in time, and the associate of a prince, the
eloquent organ of a party, the man who had enjoyed £15,000, a year, was
carried off to a low sponging-house. His pride forsook him in that
dismal and disgusting imprisonment, and he wrote to Whitbread a letter
which his defenders ought not to have published. He had his
friends--stanch ones too--and they aided him. Peter Moore, ironmonger,
and even Canning, lent him money and released him from time to time. For
six years after the burning of the old theatre, he continued to go down
and down. Disease now attacked him fiercely. In the spring of 1816 he
was fast waning towards extinction. His day was past; he had outlived
his fame as a wit and social light; he was forgotten by many, if not by
most, of his old associates. He wrote to Rogers, 'I am absolutely undone
and broken-hearted.' Poor Sheridan! in spite of all thy faults, who is
he whose morality is so stern that he cannot shed one tear over thy
latter days! God forgive us, we are all sinners; and if we weep not for
this man's deficiency, how shall we ask tears when our day comes? Even
as I write, I feel my hand tremble and my eyes moisten over the sad end