sleep happily with a hundred little
cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your
goodness. Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity." It is to be
feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff. A very little
more will do for us: "And yet, and yet--Beware! Milton will tell
you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of
slumbering innocence. Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful
guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows.... And Adam, I
suppose--was at Brooks's ... I shall be gone before your hazel eyes
are open to-morrow...."

Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square. Sheridan's
leaguer of the house is thus betrayed. He never again left either her
or it alone for long, but beset them until his death. Bitterly enough
she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever
begotten in Ireland or fostered in England. His wife, as lovely as
a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore,
pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and
the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the
mire as any woman could go without suffocation. Such experiences may
be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they
are in this lady's letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion
that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more
active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.

Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady
Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the
attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make
scenes about it. In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin,
Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at
Sheridan's. "It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me,
as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me. Sheridan
says, when he found I did not come to town, he imagined that you
had interdicted my coming till your return, and is always asking me
whether what I am doing is allowed." That was March 12th; between that
and the 17th she seems to have met Sheridan every day and nearly every
night. "I must tell you, by the by ... that I am in great request this
year.... I have had three _violent_ declarations of love--one from
an old man, another from a very young one, and the third between the
other two.... Pray come