CHAPTER I.

BIRTH AND EDUCATION OF MR. SHERIDAN.--HIS FIRST ATTEMPTS IN LITERATURE.


Richard Brinsley [Footnote: He was christened also by the name of
Butler, after the Earl of Lanesborough.] Sheridan was born in the month
of September, 1751, at No. 12, Dorset Street, Dublin, and baptized in
St. Mary's Church, as appears by the register of the parish, on the
fourth of the following month. His grandfather, Dr. Sheridan, and his
father, Mr. Thomas Sheridan, have attained a celebrity, independent of
that which he has conferred on them, by the friendship and
correspondence with which the former was honored by Swift, and the
competition and even rivalry which the latter so long maintained with
Garrick. His mother, too, was a woman of considerable talents, and
affords one of the few instances that have occurred, of a female
indebted for a husband to her literature; as it was a pamphlet she wrote
concerning the Dublin theatre that first attracted to her the notice of
Mr. Thomas Sheridan. Her affecting novel, Sidney Biddulph, could boast
among its warm panegyrists Mr. Fox and Lord North; and in the Tale of
Nourjahad she has employed the graces of Eastern fiction to inculcate a
grave and important moral,--putting on a fairy disguise, like her own
Mandane, to deceive her readers into a taste for happiness and virtue.
Besides her two plays, The Discovery and The Dupe,--the former of which
Garrick pronounced to be "one of the best comedies he ever read,"--she
wrote a comedy also, called The Trip to Bath, which was never either
acted or published, but which has been supposed by some of those
sagacious persons, who love to look for flaws in the titles of fame, to
have passed, with her other papers, into the possession of her son, and,
after a transforming sleep, like that of the chrysalis, in his hands, to