Perhaps if Sheridan had never left the cottage and the roses, his name
would never have been known to fame. His ambition needed some such
stimulus as this spasm of extravagance to wake it to activity. He must
now make money or be submerged by debts; and under this impulse of
necessity it was that he wooed fortune with _The Rivals_, and awoke to
find himself famous and potentially rich. Other comedies followed
swiftly from his eager and inspired pen--_The School for Scandal_, _The
Duenna_, and _The Critic_--each greeted with enthusiasm by a world to
which such dramatic triumphs were a revelation and a delight. Sheridan
was not only the "talk of the town"; he was hailed universally as the
brightest dramatic star of the age.

It is needless to say that Sheridan's fame was a delight to his wife.

"Not long ago," she wrote to a friend, "he was known as
'Mrs Sheridan's husband.' Now the tables are turned, and,
henceforth, I expect I shall be just Mr Sheridan's wife.
Nor could I wish any more exalted title. I am proud and
thankful to be the wife of the cleverest man in England,
and the best husband in the world!"

That Mrs Sheridan adored her husband is evident from every letter she
wrote to him. She addresses him as "my dearest Love" and "my darling
Dick," and vows that she cannot be happy apart from him. "I cannot love
you," she declares, "and be perfectly satisfied at such a distance from
you. I depended upon your coming to-night, and shall not recover my
spirits till we meet." But through her letters runs the same hankering
after the old simple, peaceful days--the days of love in a cottage. "I
could draw," she writes, "such a picture of happiness that it would
almost make me wish the overthrow of all our present schemes of future