e. There was, in fact a substantial personal centre for
each side. The one party rallied round a respectable but maniac monarch,
whose mental afflictions took the most distressing form, the other round
his gay, handsome, dissolute--nay disgusting--son, at once his rival and
his heir. The spirit of each party was therefore personal, and their
attacks on one another were more personal than anything we can imagine
in the present day in so respectably ridiculous a conclave as the House
of Commons. It was little for one honourable gentleman to give another
honourable gentleman the lie direct before the eyes of the country. The
honourable gentlemen descended--or, as they thought, ascended--to the
most vehement invective, and such was at times the torrent of personal
abuse which parties heaped on one another, while good-natured John Bull
looked on and smiled at his rulers, that, as in the United States of
to-day, a debate was often the prelude to a duel. Pitt and Fox, Tierney,
Adam, Fullarton, Lord George Germain, Lord Shelburne, and Governor
Johnstone, all 'vindicated their honour,' as the phrase went, by 'coffee
and pistols for four.' If Sheridan had not to repeat the Bob Acres scene
with Captain Matthews, it was only because his wonderful good humour
could put up with a great deal that others thought could only be
expiated by a hole in the waistcoat.

In the administration of the Marquis of Rockingham the dramatist enjoyed
the pleasures of office for less than a year as one of the Under
Secretaries of State in 1782. In the next year we find him making a
happy retort on Pitt, who had somewhat vulgarly alluded to his being a
dramatic author. It was on the American question, perhaps the bitterest
that ever called forth the acrimony of parties in the House. Sheridan,
from boyhood, had been taunted with being the son of an actor. One can
hardly credit this fact, just after Garrick had raised the profession of
an actor to so great an eminence in the social scale. He had been called
'the player boy' at school, and his election at Brookes' had been
opposed on the same grounds. It was evidently his bitterest point, and
Pitt probably knew this when, in replying to a speech of the
ex-dramatist's he said that 'no man admired more than he did the
abilities of that right honourable gentleman, the elegant sallies of his
thought, the gay effusions of his fancy, his _dramatic_ turns, and his
epigrammatic point; and if they were reserved for