None but the _brave_,
None _but_ the brave deserve the fair.

Whatever may have been the zeal or the proficiency of the sister,
naughty Richard, like Gallio, seemed to care naught for these things.

"In the later periods of his life Richard did not cast behind him
classical reading. He spoke copiously and powerfully about Cicero. He
had read, and he had understood, the four orations of Demosthenes, read
and taught in our public schools. He was at home in Virgil and in
Horace. I cannot speak positively about Homer,--but I am very sure that
he read the Iliad now and then; not as a professed scholar would do,
critically, but with all the strong sympathies of a poet reading a poet.
[Footnote: It was not one of the least of the triumphs of Sheridan's
talent to have been able to persuade so acute a scholar as Dr. Parr,
that the extent of his classical acquirements was so great as is here
represented, and to have thus impressed with the idea of his remembering
so much, the person who best knew how little he had learned.] Richard
did not, and could not forget what he once knew, but his path to
knowledge was his own,--his steps were noiseless,--his progress was
scarcely felt by himself,--his movements were rapid but irregular.

"Let me assure you that Richard, when a boy, was by no means vicious.
The sources of his infirmities were a scanty and precarious allowance
from the father, the want of a regular plan for some profession, and,
above all, the act of throwing him upon the town, when he ought to have
been pursuing his studies at the University. He would have done little
among mathematicians at Cambridge;--he would have been a rake, or an
idler, or a trifler, at Dublin;--but I am inclined to think that at
Oxford he would have become an excellent scholar.