ove of humor, was looked upon in his
nonage as a dull, unpromising boy, chiefly remarkable for his idleness
and carelessness.

[Sidenote: 1751-80--The parents of Brinsley Sheridan]

The quality which we now call Bohemianism certainly ran in Sheridan's
blood. His grandfather, Dr. Thomas Sheridan, the friend of Swift, the
Dublin clergyman and schoolmaster, was a delightfully amiable, wholly
reckless, {217} slovenly, indigent, and cheerful personage. His
father, Thomas Sheridan, was a no less cheerful, no less careless man,
who turned play-actor, and taught elocution, and married a woman who
wrote novels and a life of Swift. At one time he could boast the
friendship of Dr. Johnson, who seems to have regarded him with an
ill-humored contempt, but Dr. Johnson's expression of this contempt
brought about a quarrel. The most remarkable thing about him is that
he was the father of his son. Neither he nor his wife appears to have
had any idea of their good fortune. Mrs. Sheridan once declared of her
two boys that she had never met with "two such impenetrable dunces."
None the less the father contrived with difficulty to scrape together
enough money to send his boys to Harrow, and there, luckily, Dr. Parr
discerned that Richard, with all his faults, was by no means an
impenetrable dunce. Both he and Sumner, the head-master of Harrow,
discovered in the schoolboy Sheridan great talents which neither of
them was capable of calling into action.

Richard Sheridan came from Harrow School and Harrow playgrounds to
London, and, later on, to Bath. London did not make him much more
industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It
was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with
its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian
seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was
vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of
Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a
cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over Cocker.
The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his
friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of
classical translations in Bohn's Library. It is one of the ironies of
literature that fate has preserved this translation while it has
permitted the two Begum speeches, that in the House of Commons and that
in Westminster Hall, practically to