Life of Sheridan, vol 1 | Page 4

removed from school too soon by his father, who
was the intimate friend of Sumner, and whom I often met at his house.

Sumner had a fine voice, fine ear, fine taste, and, therefore,
pronunciation was frequently the favorite subject between him and
Tom Sheridan. I was present at many of their discussions and disputes,
and sometimes took a very active part in them,--but Richard was not
present. The father, you know, was a wrong-headed, whimsical man,
and, perhaps, his scanty circumstances were one of the reasons which
prevented him from sending Richard to the University. He must have
been aware, as Sumner and I were, that Richard's mind was not cast in
any ordinary mould. I ought to have told you that Richard, when a boy,
was a great reader of English poetry; but his exercises afforded no
proof of his proficiency. In truth, he, as a boy, was quite careless about
literary fame. I should suppose that his father, without any regular
system, polished his taste, and supplied his memory with anecdotes
about our best writers in our Augustan age. The grandfather, you know,
lived familiarly with Swift. I have heard of him, as an excellent scholar.
His boys in Ireland once performed a Greek play, and when Sir
William Jones and I were talking over this event, I determined to make
the experiment in England. I selected some of my best boys, and they
performed the Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Trachinians of Sophocles. I
wrote some Greek Iambics to vindicate myself from the imputation of
singularity, and grieved I am that I did not keep a copy of them. Milton,
you may remember, recommends what I attempted.
"I saw much of Sheridan's father after the death of Sumner, and after
my own removal from Harrow to Stanmer. I respected him,--he really
liked me, and did me some important services,--but I never met him
and Richard together. I often inquired about Richard, and, from the
father's answers, found they were not upon good terms,--but neither he
nor I ever spoke of his son's talents but in terms of the highest praise."
In a subsequent letter Dr. Parr says: "I referred you to a passage in the
Gentleman's Magazine, where I am represented as discovering and
encouraging in Richard Sheridan those intellectual powers which had
not been discovered and encouraged by Sumner. But the statement is
incorrect. We both of us discovered talents, which neither of us could
bring into action while Sheridan was a school-boy. He gave us few
opportunities of praise in the course of his school business, and yet he
was well aware that we thought highly of him, and anxiously wished
more to be done by him than he was disposed to do.

"I once or twice met his mother,--she was quite celestial. Both her
virtues and her genius were highly esteemed by Robert Sumner. I know
not whether Tom Sheridan found Richard tractable in the art of
speaking,-- and, upon such a subject, indolence or indifference would
have been resented by the father as crimes quite inexpiable. One of
Richard's sisters now and then visited Harrow, and well do I remember
that, in the house where I lodged, she triumphantly repeated Dryden's
Ode upon St. Cecilia's Day, according to the instruction given to her by
her father. Take a sample:
None but the brave, 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