t.
On this occasion Sheridan pursued his victim into the nursery, and
threw himself on his knees. It gave Lady Bessborough an opportunity
which even she could not fail to perceive--and she used it. "I
interrupted the most animated professions by showing him the child and
asking him if his grandchildren were as pretty as mine. He jump'd up,
but with such fury in his looks that I was really frighten'd..." And
that may very well be the end: _solvuntur tabulae risu_. Lord Granville
Gower married in 1809, and the confidential correspondence died the
death; but Sheridan lingered until 1816, and actually carried on his
desperate pursuit within three days of the end. She visited him, and
described what took place to Lord Broughton. He assured her, she said,
that he should visit her after his death. She asked, "Why, having
persecuted her all her life, would he now carry it into death?'
'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his
telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well
known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan all over.

[Footnote A: Mr. Sichel, in his monumental book on Sheridan, doubts
the lady's memory, one of his grounds of doubt being that Sheridan
"would not have been likely to have thus behaved before his wife." But
Mr. Sichel did not then know what Sheridan was capable of doing before
his wife.]

Curiosity rather than edification is served by the publication of such
frank revelations as Lady Bessborough's, but that is a matter for her
descendants, and was probably considered. What relates to Sheridan is
quite another thing. On his death Byron hailed him with eloquent if
extravagant praise; he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long
biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed
to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of
his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he
had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who
twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence
is to be believed--and how can it not--he was either a very bad rogue
or a madman. Sheridan, after all's said, made a great figure in
his day, and must stand the racket of it, so to speak. Gossip about
Harriet may be left to the idle; but Sheridan belongs to History.

A FOOTNOTE TO COLERIDGE

Coleridge is one of our great men who require many footnotes, for
there are cha