which make us bitterly regret that they were but dreams. And now,
when young Halhed went to Oxford, and young Sheridan to join his family
at Bath, they continued these ambitious projects for a time, and laid
out their fancy at full usury over many a work destined never to see the
fingers of the printer's devil. Among these was a farce, or rather
burlesque, which shows immense promise, and which, oddly enough,
resembles in its cast the famous 'Critic,' which followed it later. It
was called 'Jupiter,' and turned chiefly on the story of Ixion--

'Embracing cloud, Ixion like,'

the lover of Juno, who caught a cold instead of the Queen of Heaven; and
who, according to the classical legend, tortured for ever on a wheel,
was in this production to be condemned for ever to trundle the machine
of a 'needy knife-grinder,' amid a grand musical chorus of 'razors,
scissors, and penknives to grind!' This piece was amusing enough, and
clever enough, though it betrayed repeatedly the youthfulness of its
authors; but less so their next attempt, a weekly periodical, to be
called 'Hernan's Miscellany,' of which Sheridan wrote, or was to write,
pretty nearly the whole. None but the first number was ever completed,
and perhaps we need not regret that no more followed it; but it is
touching to see these two young men, both feeling their powers,
confident in them, and sunning their halcyon's wings in the happy belief
that they were those of the eagle, longing eagerly, earnestly, for the
few poor guineas that they hoped from their work. Halhed, indeed, wrote
diligently, but his colleague was not true to the contract, and though
the hope of gold stimulated him--for he was poor enough--from time to
time to a great effort, he was always 'beginning,' and never completing.

The only real product of these united labours was a volume of Epistles
in verse from the Greek of a poor writer of late age, Aristaenetus. This
volume, which does little credit to either of its parents, was
positively printed and published in 1770, but the rich harvest of fame
and shillings which they expected from it was never gathered in. Yet the
book excited some little notice. The incognito of its authors induced
some critics to palm it even on such a man as Dr. Johnson; others
praised; others sneered at it. In the young men it raised hopes, only to
dash them; but its failure was not so utter as to put the idea of
literary success entirely out of their heads, nor its succ