was cut short by drowning, in 1778.

But it was his beautiful daughter Eliza, born in 1754, who made the
sensation of the time, when she sang with her sister, afterwards Mrs.
Tickell. "A nest of nightingales," the family was termed. Walpole
writes, in 1773: "I was not at the ball last night, and have only been
to the opera, where I was infinitely struck with the Carrara, who is
the prettiest creature upon earth. Mrs. Hartley I own to still find
handsomer, and Miss Linley, to be the superlative degree. The king
admires the last, and ogles her as much as he dares to do in so holy a
place as an oratorio, and at so devout a service as 'Alexander's
Feast.'" Musical prominence and personal beauty in this maid of but
twenty made her an attractive flower in bloom to others than the king.
The wits and gallants of the gay city sought and courted her. The
family of Tom Sheridan, the Irish actor, and then a teacher of
elocution in Bath, was intimate with the Linley family. Richard, who
was born in Dublin in 1751, his elder brother Charles, and Nathaniel
Halhed, a companion and literary partner with Richard, all admired the
daughter Eliza. Halhed went to India,--afterwards becoming a judge
there,--and Charles Sheridan retired from the race, and left the
literary youth to win as pure a heart as ever cheered incipient genius
to works of worth. She was lauded in verse by her young Irish suitor,
and championed in deed. He asserts his constancy in a poem, of which
the first stanza is--

"Dry that tear, my gentlest love;
Be hushed that struggling sigh;
Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
More fixed, more true than I.
Hushed be that sigh, be dry that tear;