s to have had the faintest suspicion of finding a
rival, the one in so close a kinsman, the other in his own familiar
friend. It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have
behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his
gallant, impetuous nature. Not merely did he keep his secret from his
brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look
upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss
Linley. Halhed reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical
epistle, the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he
discovered the real mind of his friend. Then, like a wise man if a sad
one, Halhed went away. He sailed for India, the golden land of so many
wrecked hopes and disappointed ambitions; he long outlived his first
love and his successful rival; he became in the fulness of time a
member of Parliament, and he died in 1830. He is dimly remembered as
the author of a grammar of the Bengalee language and of a work on
Gentoo laws translated from the Persian.

[Sidenote: 1771--Marriage of Sheridan and Miss Linley]

Sheridan's courtship progressed more and more romantically. The
persecutions of a married rake named Matthews drove Miss Linley to fly
to France with Sheridan, to whom she was secretly married at Calais.
The revengeful and disappointed Matthews inserted a libellous attack
upon Sheridan in the _Bath Chronicle_. Sheridan extorted at his
sword's point a public apology from Matthews. Further and baser
mendacity on the part of Matthews provoked a second duel, in which the
combatants seem to have fought with desperate ferocity, and in which
Sheridan, badly wounded, refused to ask his life at the hands of his
antagonist and was only rescued by the seconds. A long period of
separation followed, full of dark hours for Sheridan, hours only
brightened by occasional meetings of the most eccentric kind, as when
the wild young poet, quaintly {220} disguised in the complicated capes
of a hackney coachman, had the tormenting privilege of driving his
beloved from Covent Garden Theatre, where her voice and beauty were
nightly charming all London. At last the opposition of Linley was
overcome, and on April 13, 1773, the most brilliant man and most
beautiful woman of their day were for the second time and more formally
married, and a series of adventures more romantic than fiction came to
an end.

The romance, it is agreeable to think, did n