The Scene is in a house situated on the ramparts of a garrison town. The theatre represents a room, with everything necessary for drawing and music. On the K side is a chim-

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ney with a fire in it—the furniture of the fireplace—poker, tongs, &c. Two girandoles with lighted candles. It is placed between two doors; the one nearest the orchestra leads to Laura’s apartment, the other to a closet. This last is behind a large screen that shades that side of the chimney. The two doors are answered by two others on the opposite side of the stage—one leads to the Governor’s apartment—the other is only for the symmetry of the room. Each of the doors has a round window above it to give light within, and opens inward. Towards the end of the stage is a window which looks out into the country, and near it, in the middle of the scene, a glass door. It has an iron grate without. Against the screen a great chair: a table with books; everything proper for writing, some music, a guitar, a pallet and paint brushes. Near is a stand, and a picture on it covered with a green baize. Near the front of the stage, on the P side, a harp. When the curtain draws up Laura is accompanying herself on it, or else drawing, and singing the following couplets. The stage has only the depth of this scene, the proper entrances of which are closed on each side by the chimney, the door leading to the

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Governor’s room, the window, and the glass door. Both sides of the stage should be lighted with girandole branches, and the actors go in and out only through the different doors.”

This drama is in two acts, and it opens with a song by the heroine, which, to those who are familiar with the corresponding compositions by Sheridan in The Duenna, The Stranger, Pizarro, &c., would stamp the piece as from his pen, even if there were no other evidence of the fact. Small as may be the poetical value attached in our own day to compositions so artificial as this, it was rarely that anything so tender in feeling and so graceful in thought and diction was met with, either on the stage or elsewhere, when (as at the probable date of this drama) the Della Cruscan School was rampant.

“SONG.—Laura.* “Melancholy, friend to grief, Ever o’er my bosom reign; To my sorrows bring relief, And thyself inspire my strain.

* This is the song given in fac-simile as a frontispiece to the present volume.

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“When thy sadness can impart All its healing, soft’ning powers, Then thy tears are to the heart Like the falling dew to flowers.

“Happy he whose peaceful day In retirement gently flows! From the busy world away, All thy balmy calm he knows;

“Then he hopes alone in thee Some relief from care to find, Seeking no society But his memory and mind.”

Perhaps this latter is the most characteristic feature of Sheridan’s style in all his known pieces, and is probably one reason why they have retained their place upon our stage after almost all other contemporary works of a similar kind have dropped away from it. There is probably not one among

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all the dramas of the latter half or quarter of the eighteenth century, that could be put upon the stage now, without being first very considerably modernised, except Sheridan’s; whereas The School for Scandal, The Rivals, The Duenna, and The Critic defy this process, and both read and act as if they had been written yesterday. And precisely the same may be said of the two musical dramas just described. With regard to the burlesque it is different, and the difference is perhaps inherent in the nature of that class of composition—a fact which may account for the absence of any indication on the face of the MS. of any intention of putting it on the stage; while on the other two MSS. there are ample proofs that at one period they were on the point of being produced before the public. As I cannot doubt that this will ultimately be their fate, I abstain from giving any further details of their plots respectively, merely adding that they display a degree of constructive skill that has not been surpassed in any existing dramas of a similar kind with which I am acquainted.

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In making my investigations into the authenticity of these dramas of R. B. Sheridan, and the question of whether or not they had ever been acted, I had, of course, examined (duly and carefully, as I thought) the work possessing the most authority on these points—“Moore’s Life of Sheridan.” But neither from that source nor from any other had I been able to trace either of the dramas—those of Richard Brinsiey or his son—to any more specific personal connection with their authors respectively than that indicated by the handwriting of each, as discovered by myself, and their former possession by Sheridan the father, as stated to me by my deceased friend. When, how-

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ever, only about two months before these Memorials were put to press, I had made up my mind that a description of these Sheridan Papers should form part of them, I determined once more (before I related the details of their discovery) to go through “Moore’s Life of Sheridan,” upon the chance of finding something that distinctly might apply to the question before me. I had at least twice during my former investigations read this work through (carefully, as I thought), and had at least half a dozen times turned over and glanced at all that portion of its pages which (as I supposed) related to the literary life of Sheridan. It so happened, however, that on all these occasions but the last I had, on account of its heading (“Sheridan’s Boyhood, &c.”), knowingly passed over with a mere glance the first chapter of Moore’s work. My researches on this matter being in every instance made as a matter of business, and under the pressure of other business of even more temporary importance, I did not care to learn anything about a time which, as I took for granted, did not connect itself with the object of my inquiry. But on the last occasion to which

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I have alluded,* I (without any special reason for so doing) began my search with the neglected chapter. The reader may judge of my mingled surprise and satisfaction at finding that Mr. Moore not merely alludes in this chapter to a “fragment” of a “farce or play” (so he calls it), entitled “Jupiter” written by Sheridan in conjunction with a schoolfellow! on leaving Harrow, at the age of eighteen, but gives two or three brief extracts from the rhymed portion of it, which extracts the reader will find embodied, verbatim et literatim, in the specimens I have given of the burlesque burletta entitled Ixion, and described in the foregoing pages.

Moore’s account of and extract from this “farce” of Jupiter show it to have been a sort of crude and indigested anticipation of “The Critic; or, a Tragedy Rehearsed,” and nine-tenths of it seem to have been in prose. The rhymed portions of it, as given by Moore, are mere scraps, brought in “by the head and shoulders,” as the phrase is, like

* Only a few weeks from the date at which I am writing, May, 1854. † Halhed, afterwards the celebrated Orientalist.

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those of the “Tragedy” in the Critic, and are confined to the lines beginning “’Fore George, at loggerheads,” &c, and ending with “Ixion flogs the world to tatters!” as given in the foregoing specimens; and the first three lines of Jupiter’s song in the subsequent scene, as given at p. 293, &c, beginning—

“Ye dogs, I’m Jupiter imperial,” &c.

It would be superfluous to say more here than that the facts I have now stated fix the avowed authorship of this piece on Sheridan. But the incomparable dramatic tact that produced The Rivals at the age of one or two and twenty, could not fail speedily to convince Sheridan that the subject his boyish taste had chosen for his ante-type of the Critic, was in no way adapted to that object, but admirably suited to that to which he afterwards applied it, in the expanded and homogeneous form of a burlesque burletta, of the Midas class, under the title of Ixion; a production which, there can be little doubt, will hereafter be regarded as possessing more freshness and originality of

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conception (in its details, I mean); more subtlety of wit, and more breadth of humour, than any of Sheridan’s subsequent productions.

It is important to remark, that Moore was evidently quite ignorant of the existence of Ixion, and he describes the burlesque portion of the piece he calls Jupiter as beginning at “’Fore George, at loggerheads,” &c., which is somewhere about the middle of Ixion. “Here,” says the extract in Moore, “the curtain rises.”

It appears that, in the sketch referred to by Moore, the mere mortals had ludicrous prefixes to their names,—such as Sir Richard Ixion, Major Amphitryon, &c.