Some Sheridan Stories.

Otago Witness, Issue 2086, 15 February 1894, Page 49

Some Sheridan Stories.

The revival on the stage of "The School for Scandal" has caused the name of its author to be once more in the mouths of men. Perhaps the most curious account of him, and in some respects the mo3t intimate, is to be found in a little volume privately printed by William Smyth, the tutor of his son. Never did impecuniosity and recklessness combine together to ruin a man as in Sheridan's case. " What can I do, or anyone else, for such a master P " complained his confidential servant, Edwards, " The other morning I went to settle his room after he had left it and gone out ; and when I came to open the windows found them stuffed up with papers of different kinds, and among them bank note?. There had a been high wind in the night. The windows had rattled, I suppose ; he had come in quite intoxicated, emptied his pocket upon the dressingtable, and, being disturbed, and fumbling in the dark for something with which to stop the noise, the bank notes had served his purpose ; and as he never knows what be has in his pockets or what he has not, they had never afterwards been missed." Sheridan never seams to have redeemed a promise, nor kept an appointment, nor answered a letter (however much it might have been to his own advantage), and, while delighting the world at large with his wit and good manners, to have driven all connected with or dependent on him to distraction. One day, while waiting for him in the library — and in vain, as was usually the case — the tutor meets another gentleman, also waiting, and has the imprudence to remark, " I think I had the pleasure of seeing you here yesterday." "Yesterday! and, you might say, the day before, and any day for these last six weeks. If I have walked one yard, I have walked 50 miles on this damned carpet ! " Yet the tutor (always unpaid), when he did meet his employer, could never resist his fascinations, but was, he confesses, as wax in his hands. " I wrote you an angry letter, Mr Sheridan, and I am so sorry for it," he said on one of these occasions ; " I was very much tried, as I told you in it, but be as good so to think no more about it. "I shall never think of what you said in it, be assured, my dear Smyth, and here it is." I was glad to get hold of it, but, looking at it before throwing it into the fire, I saw, alas! that it had never been opened. Though always in want of money, and owing it to everybody who would trust him, Sheridan seems never to have travelled with less than four horses to his chaise. — Illustrated London News.