ill find
handsomer, and Miss Linley, to be the superlative degree. The king
admires the last, and ogles her as much as he dares to do in so holy a
place as an oratorio, and at so devout a service as 'Alexander's
Feast.'" Musical prominence and personal beauty in this maid of but
twenty made her an attractive flower in bloom to others than the king.
The wits and gallants of the gay city sought and courted her. The
family of Tom Sheridan, the Irish actor, and then a teacher of
elocution in Bath, was intimate with the Linley family. Richard, who
was born in Dublin in 1751, his elder brother Charles, and Nathaniel
Halhed, a companion and literary partner with Richard, all admired the
daughter Eliza. Halhed went to India,--afterwards becoming a judge
there,--and Charles Sheridan retired from the race, and left the
literary youth to win as pure a heart as ever cheered incipient genius
to works of worth. She was lauded in verse by her young Irish suitor,
and championed in deed. He asserts his constancy in a poem, of which
the first stanza is--

"Dry that tear, my gentlest love;
Be hushed that struggling sigh;
Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
More fixed, more true than I.
Hushed be that sigh, be dry that tear;
Cease boding doubt, cease anxious fear;
Dry be that tear."

He proves his devotion by his action when appealed to by his
divinity.

A certain Captain Matthews, one of a numerous breed in Bath in those
days,--that is, a fashionable scoundrel and a married man,--made
himself obnoxious to Miss Linley by improper addresses. He annoyed and
harassed her, threatening to destroy himself unless she gratified him,
and later attempted to sully her reputation by calumnies. This brought
about the culmination of her attachment to Sheridan. She fled her
father's house and sought the protection of her lover. Accompanied by
a chaperon, they left for France. After some romantic adventures, they
were married in March, 1772, at a little village near Calais; but it
was a wedding without the wherewithal to maintain a home, so the bride
entered a convent, and, later, the house of an English physician,
until literature should be remunerative. The eloping lady's father
sought the runaways; and, after some explanations, they returned with
him to England. It was shortly after this that Sheridan fought two
duels with Matthews, being wounded in the later one to such an extent
that his recovery was doubtful. "Sweet