149 
These two lovers were very young, he being barely twenty, she 
seventeen. As the youth had nothing, was without either 
profession, business, or means, and was trifling away his life in 
sheer idleness, Prudence, wrote one, might have dictated another 
choice as if Prudence dictated under such circumstances. 
When the engagement with Mr. Long was off, one Nathaniel 
Halhed, a schoolfellow of Richard Sheridan, and now a student at 
Oxford, hoped to obtain the notice and favour of the damsel, and 
some correspondence was carried on with her, Richard being the 
go-between ; but it happened that expected letters failed from time 
to time to reach Halhed, and presently just when he received an 
appointment under the East India Company, he was made to see 
that he had no chance. So he was quietly choked off. Then 
Charles Sheridan, the elder brother, tried and hoped also, until 
presently he too surprised found himself superseded when he 
retired to the country some seven or eight miles from Bath. 
So in turn he was got rid of. The position of the youngsters 
towards each other becoming known and the prospect being so 
opposite to the first possibility for his daughter, the passion 
of papa Linley, who had ambitious views, was not the 
passion of the lovers, and curiously the objection of 
the youth’s papa was equally determined. Both parents 
protesting strongly all meetings were forbidden and _ every 
means used to prevent them. Still as usual meetings did occur. 
Among the earliest of the family acquaintances at Bath was Mr. 
Thomas Mathews, who, having been in the army, is sometimes 
called Captain Mathews, who was at this time a rather new 
resident. Richard Sheridan early became the genial and insepar- 
able companion of Mathews, and from the close intimacy between 
the three families, visits being constantly exchanged at their 
respective houses, young Sheridan often met his inamorata at 
Mathew’s house.* So commenced the first act in a strange 
* London Magazine, 1772, Vol. 41. 
