"I have now told you all that I know, and it amounts to very little. I
am very solicitous for justice to be done to Robert Sumner. He is one of
the six or seven persons among my own acquaintance whose taste I am
accustomed to consider perfect, and, were he living, his admiration...."
[Footnote: The remainder of the letter relates to other subjects.]

During the greater part of Richard's stay at Harrow his father had been
compelled, by the embarrassment of his affairs, to reside with the
remainder of the family in France, and it was at Blois, in the September
of 1766, that Mrs. Sheridan died--leaving behind her that best kind of
fame, which results from a life of usefulness and purity, and which it
requires not the aid of art or eloquence to blazon. She appears to have
been one of those rare women, who, united to men of more pretensions,
but less real intellect than themselves, meekly conceal this superiority
even from their own hearts, and pass their lives without remonstrance or
murmur, in gently endeavoring to repair those evils which the
indiscretion or vanity of their partners has brought upon them.

As a supplement to the interesting communication of Dr. Parr, I shall
here subjoin an extract from a letter which the eldest sister of
Sheridan, Mrs. E. Lefanu, wrote a few months after his death to Mrs.
Sheridan, in consequence of a wish expressed by the latter that Mrs.
Lefanu would communicate such particulars as she remembered of his early
days. It will show, too, the feeling which his natural good qualities,
in spite of the errors by which they were obscured and weakened, kept
alive to the last, in the hearts of those connected with him, that sort
of retrospective affection, which, when those whom we have loved become
altered, whether in mind or person, brings the recollection of what they
once were, to mingle with and soften our impression of what they are.