distance from
you. I depended upon your coming to-night, and shall not recover my
spirits till we meet." But through her letters runs the same hankering
after the old simple, peaceful days--the days of love in a cottage. "I
could draw," she writes, "such a picture of happiness that it would
almost make me wish the overthrow of all our present schemes of future
affluence and grandeur."

But greatly as he loved his wife, Sheridan was now too much wedded to
his ambition to listen to such tempting. He had conquered fame with his
pen; now he aspired to subdue it with his tongue. In 1780, while he was
still in the twenties, he was sent to Parliament by Stafford suffrages;
and from his first appearance at Westminster captivated his fellow
law-makers by the magic of his eloquence. A new star had arisen in the
oratorical firmament, and soon began to pale all other luminaries.
Within two years he was a Minister of the Crown; and in another year he
had electrified the world by the most brilliant oratory that had ever
been heard in our tongue--notably by his historic speech in the trial of
Warren Hastings, to the preparation of which his wife had devoted
herself body and soul.

Fresh from listening to this latest sensational triumph of her husband
in Westminster Hall, she wrote:--

"It is impossible to convey to you the delight, the
astonishment, the admiration he has excited in the
breasts of every class of people. Every party prejudice
has been overcome by this display of genius, eloquence
and goodness.... What my feelings must be, you can only
imagine. To tell you the truth, it is with some
difficulty that I can 'let down my mind,' as Mr Burke
said afterwards, to talk or think on any other subject.
But pleasure too exquisite becomes pain; and I am at this
moment suffering from the delightful anxieties of last
week."

But Mrs Sheridan's day of happiness and triumph was soon to draw near
to its close. She saw her husband climb to the dizziest pinnacle of
fame, and she watched with pain his brilliance dimmed, and his
marvellous intellect clouded by excessive drinking, before the fatal
seeds of consumption, which had already carried off her dearly-loved
sister, began to show themselves in her. Her illness was as swift as it
was, happily, painless. She simply drooped and faded and died, tenderly
watched over to the last by her husband with a silent anguish that was
pitifu