veins in his legs gave him much pain and made walking difficult. He had always been a jovial companion, and few who enjoyed his society could have surmised that in private he was subject to fits of depression which made life a burden. In common with his contemporaries he frequently drank wine to excess, yet without drinking as much as many others, a small quantity affecting him more seriously. Sir Gilbert Elliot records that at a dinner in 1788 Sheridan drank much wine, but that Grey drank far more. Sheridan preferred claret till his later and darker years, and then brandy had a baneful fascination for him. Nevertheless, he weaned himself from the bad habit, and he became very temperate latterly, drinking nothing but water.

Mental worries about the health of his elder son Tom, who went to the Cape of Good Hope in 1813, without being cured there of consumption and about the means wherewith to satisfy the demands of inexorable creditors, to which an abscess in the throat added a physical torment, compelled him to take to his bed in the spring of 1816. He was then occupying the house at 17 Savile Row. A writ was served upon him when he could no longer leave the house, and the sheriff's officer consented to remain there, and, by so doing, hindered other creditors from giving further annoyance. It was incorrectly announced in the newspapers that Sheridan was in dire poverty, and offers of assistance were made; but these were declined because they were not required. Several years afterwards a story was circulated by Croker, on the authority of George IV, to the effect that Sheridan's last hours upon earth were those of a neglected pauper. The story is the reverse of the truth. Charles Brinsley, the son of Sheridan by his second marriage, wrote from Fulham Palace, on Sunday, 7 July 1816, where his mother and he were staying, to his half-brother at the Cape, eight days after their father's death, that 'you will be soothed by learning that our father's death was unaccompanied by suffering, that he almost slumbered into death, and that the reports which you may have seen in the newspapers of the privations and the want of comforts which he endured are unfounded; that he had every attention and comfort that could make a deathbed easy.' Mrs. Parkhurst, who was acquainted with the Sheridans, wrote to Dublin from London to Mrs. Lefanu, his elder sister, a fortnight after his

death: 'Mr. Sheridan wanted neither medical aid, the attention of true affection, the consolations of piety, nor the exertions of friendship. He had three of the first physicians of London every day; his wife, his son, and his brother-in-law were constantly with him; the bishop of London (Howley, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury) saw him many times, and (Lord) Lauderdale did all he could for the regulation of his affairs.'

The funeral was arranged by Lord Lauderdale and Peter Moore [q. v.], member for Coventry, both being Sheridan's old and attached friends, and the coffin was taken, for the sake of convenience, to Peter Moore's house in Great George Street. The remains were laid in Westminster Abbey, and the funeral was on a far grander scale than those of Pitt and Fox, the flower of the nobility uniting with the most notable men of letters and learning in paying the last homage to Sheridan. The Duke of Wellington and his brother, the Marquis Wellesley, who were absent, expressed in writing their regret that their absence was unavoidable.

As a dramatist Sheridan carried the comedy of manners in this country to its highest pitch, and his popularity as a writer for the stage is exceeded by that of Shakespeare alone. As an orator he impressed the House of Commons more deeply than almost any predecessor, and as a politician in a venal age he preserved his independence and purity. He left debts which were trifling compared with those of Pitt, and which, unlike those of Pitt, were defrayed by his family. He never received a pension, though he was as much entitled to one as Burke. The Prince of Wales induced him to accept the office of receiver of the duchy of Cornwall, with a salary of about 8ool., and this he enjoyed for the last few years of his life. His widow and his son by her inherited a property in 1:nd which he had bought, and which sufficed to maintain them during the remainder of their lives.

Throughout life Sheridan was the victim of misrepresentation. He declared to Sir Richard Phillips in his closing years that his life 'had been miserable by calumnies.' To these words, taken from a manuscript by Sir Richard supplied to Moore, but suppressed, may be added the following from a manuscript which Sheridan left behind him: 'It is a fact that I have scarcely ever in my life contradicted any one calumny against me . . . I have

since on reflection ceased to approve my own conduct in these respects. Were I to lead my life over again, I should act otherwise.' After his death many stories about him have been circulated and accepted as genuine, though they are counterfeit. They begin when he was seven years old, and end when he was in his coffin; the first being that his mother told Samuel Whyte he was an 'impenetrable dunce,' a statement for which not a shadow of proof has been given; and the last that he was arrested for debt when laid out for burial, a statement which is as ridiculous and unauthentic as the other. The story is often told of his hoaxing the House of Commons, and many correspondents of 'Notes and Queries' have exercised their ingenuity in describing the kind of spurious or imitation Greek which he is assumed to have used, the truth being that he once corrected Lord Belgrave, who misapplied a passage of Demosthenes, which he had quoted in the original. He is finely characterised in a few words written by Mrs. Parkhurst in the letter from which a quotation has been made above: 'He took away with him a thousand charitable actions, a heart in which there was no hard part, a spirit free from envy and malice, and he is gone in the undiminished brightness of his talent, gone before pity had withered admiration.' On the morning after his death the 'Times' eulogised him as a member of the legislature in terms which could not be justly applied to many of his colleagues and contemporaries: 'Throughout a period fruitful of able men and trying circumstances [he was regarded] as the most popular specimen in the British senate of political consistency, intrepidity, and honour.'

Sheridan's portrait was painted more than once by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The finest example belonged to H. N. Pym., esq., of Brasted; another portrait by Sir Joshua was engraved by W. Read. Both these are reproduced in Mr. Rae's 'Biography,' together with a pencil sketch attributed to the same artist. The portrait by John Russell, R.A., is at the National Portrait Gallery, and a drawing of Sheridan in old age was engraved by the artist George Clint. John Hoppner painted the second Mrs. Sheridan with her infant son Charles.

A collected edition of Sheridan's plays appeared at Dublin in 1792-3, and in London 1794. Of many later editions, one was

edited by Moore in two volumes (1821), and to another (1840) Leigh Hunt contributed a biographical notice. Sheridan's speeches were edited 'by a constitutional friend' in 1798 (5 vols.), and with a life in 1816 (5 vols.; 2nd edit. 1842, 3 vols.). His speeches in the trial of Warren Hastings, reprinted from the verbatim shorthand report of the proceedings, were edited by E. A. Bond, London, 1859-61.

Sheridan's only son, THOMAS SHERIDAN (1775-1817), usually called Tom, was born on 17 March 1775, and died, as colonial treasurer, at the Cape of Good Hope, on 12 Sept. 1817. He was very accomplished and a skilful versifier; a poem on the loss of the Saldanha was printed and praised. He entered the army and was for a time aide-de-camp to Lord Moira. In November 1805 he married, with his father's approval, Caroline Henrietta Callander, by whom he had four sons and three daughters. His wife is separately noticed. The eldest son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (d. 1888), married in 1835 Marcia Maria, only surviving child and heiress of Lieut.-general Sir Colquhoun Grant [q.v.] of Frampton Court, Dorset, and sat in parliament as member for Shaftesbury from 1845 to 1852, and for Dorchester from 1852 to 1868. His son, Algernon Thomas Brinsley Sheridan of Frampton Court, owns many of his great-grandfather's papers.

Tom Sheridan's three daughters were noted for their great beauty and talent. All were married: the eldest became Lady Dufferin, and afterwards Countess of Gifford [see SHERIDAN, HELEN SELINA]; the second became the Honourable Caroline Norton [q. v.], and afterwards Lady Stirling-Maxwell of Keir; and the youngest became Lady Seymour, and afterwards Duchess of Somerset [see SEYMOUR, EDWARD ADOLPHUS].

THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB
ALFRED AINGER

[From the Dictionary of National Biography.]

LAMB, CHARLES (1775-1834), essayist and humourist, was born on 10 Feb. 1775 in Crown Office Row in the Temple, London. His father, John Lamb, who is described under the name of Lovel

in Charles Lamb's essay 'The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,' was the son of poor parents in Lincolnshire, and had come up as a boy to London and entered domestic service. He ultimately became clerk and servant to Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, and continued to fill that position until Salt's death in 1792. He married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for more than fifty years housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, a few miles from Ware, a dower-house of the Plumers, a well-known county family. This Mary Field, Charles Lamb's grandmother, played an important part in the early development of his affections, and is a familiar presence in some of the most characteristic and pathetic of his writings.

To John and Elizabeth Lamb, in Crown Office Row, were born a family of seven children, of whom only three survived their infancy. The eldest of these three was John Lamb, born in 1763; the second Mary Ann, better known as Mary, born in 1764; and the third Charles, baptised 10 March 1775 'by the Rev. Mr. Jeffs.' The baptisms of the entire family duly appear in the registers of the Temple Church, and were first printed by Mr. Charles Kent in his 'Centenary Edition of Lamb's Works' in 1875.

The block of buildings in which Samuel Salt occupied one or more sets of chambers, and in which the Lamb family were born and reared, is at the eastern end of Crown Office Row, and though considerably modified since in its interior arrangements, still bears upon its outer wall the date 1737.

Charles Lamb received his earliest education at a humble day-school kept by a Mr. William Bird in a court leading out of Fetter Lane (see Lamb's paper, 'Captain Starkey,' in HONE'S Every-day Book, 21 July 1826). It was a school for both boys and girls, and Mary Lamb also attended it. At the age of seven Charles obtained a nomination to Christ's Hospital (the 'Blue Coat School'), through the influence of his father's employer, and within its venerable walls he passed the next seven years of his life, his holidays being spent with his parents in the Temple or with his grandmother, Mrs. Field, in Hertfordshire.

What Charles Lamb learned at Christ's Hospital, what friendships he formed, and what merits and demerits he detected in the