perish. What little interest does
now cling to the early work belongs to the fact of its being a
collaboration. Halhed, who worked {218} with Sheridan at the useless
task, was a clever young Oxford student, who was as poor as he was
clever, and who seemed to entertain the eccentric idea that large sums
of money were to be readily obtained from the reading public for a
rendering in flippant verse of the prose of an obscure author whose
very identity is involved in doubt. Aristaenetus did not become the
talk of the town even in spite of an ingeniously promulgated rumor
assigning the authorship of the verses to Dr. Johnson. Neither did the
plays and essays in which the friends collaborated meet with any
prosperous fate.

From the doing of Greek prose into English verse Sheridan and Halhed
turned to another occupation, in which, as in the first, they were both
of the same mind. They both fell in love, and both fell in love with
the same woman. All contemporary accounts agree in regarding the
daughter of Linley the musician as one of the most beautiful women of
her age. Those who knew the portrait which the greatest painter of his
time painted of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia will understand the
extraordinary, the almost universal homage which society and art, wit
and wealth, and genius and rank paid to Miss Linley. Unlike the girl
in Sheridan's own poem, who is assured by her adorer that she will meet
with friends in all the aged and lovers in the young. Miss Linley
found old men as well as young men competing for her affection and for
the honor of her hand.

Sheridan and Halhed were little more than boys when they first beheld
and at once adored Miss Linley. Charles Sheridan, Richard's elder
brother, was still a very young man. But Miss Linley had old lovers
too, men long past the middle pathway of their lives, who besought her
to marry them with all the impetuosity of youth. One of them, whom she
wisely rejected on the ground that wealth alone could not compensate
for the disparity in years, carried off his disappointment gracefully
enough by immediately settling a sum of three thousand pounds upon the
young lady.

There is an air of romance over the whole course of {219} Sheridan's
attachment to Miss Linley. For a long time he contrived to keep his
attachment a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from his
friend Halhed, both of whom were madly in love with Miss Linley, and
neither of whom appear