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—_—_—_— aS 
JVEMOIRS of the Life of the Right 
Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By 
Tuomas Moore; 4to.—We have perused 
this yolume with considerable interest ; 
and it is no small degree of mortification, 
not to find ourselves at liberty to give such 
an account of it as might be interesting to 
our readers also. But to do any thing like 
justice to it—to point out wherein the 
biographer has accomplished well his task, 
and wherein he has been deficient—where 
he has with propriety amplified, and where 
he has partially veiled, would demand some- 
thing like the whole of the space our limits 
permit us to assign to the literature of the 
month. We have but a column, or so, to spare 
for it: it demandsa sheet. We ought to have 
had some pleasure, therefore, in the peru- 
-sal: for he who reads 720 full quarto 
pages, that he may write so small a com- 
mentary, should have some other than a 
mercenary motive, or he is a thriftless pro- 
digal of his time. Such pleasure we have 
had; though not unmixed with pain—for 
there are passages, especially at the close, 
which he who has a heart can scarcely 
peruse without indignant anguish. That 
Mr. Moore has not written without such 
mingled feeling, is sufficiently obvious ; and 
it is equally obvious, also, how high, in 
particular, his indignation aims. The last 
days of Sheridan (whatever were his faults 
—and they were great and manifold) are 
an indelible disgrace, not to ONE only, but 
to many of the high and mighty of the 
Tand; and his pompous funeral, instead of 
being an atonement, did but fix the names 
of those who indulged their ostentation 
around his pall, on the record, not of gra- 
titude, attachment and sympathy, but on 
that of conspicuous disgrace. To suffer 
the man who had been the companion, 
the delight, the glory of their public and 
their private hours, to languish out the last 
days, weeks, months, of his existence, in 
abject want and wretchedness; to suffer 
-him, almost in his dying hour, to be 
dragged by bailifs from his bed, in a 
wretched blanket, for a debt of £50 or 
£100,—after his house had been stripped 
of every article of furniture, and the very 
bed-chamber of his wife had been rifled by 
the rude myrmidons of the law; and then 
to parade his body to Westminster Abbey, 
in all the pomp of woe and affected vene- 
ration!—what was it but to deck out their 
own infamy in the eyes of the world—to 
make hypocrisy and ingratitude apparent, 
and to proclaim the inconsistency and un- 
worthiness of their own conduct? Well 
may his biographer exclaim— 
«« Where were they all, these royal and noble per- 
sons, who now crowded to ‘partake the gale” of 
Sheridan’s glory—where were they all, while any 
life remained in him? Where were they all, but a 
few weeks before, when their interposition might 
have saved his heart from breaking,—or when the 
zeal, now wasted on the grave, might have soothed 
and comforted the death-bed? This is a subject on 
which it is difficult to speak with patience. If the 
man was unworthy of the commonest offices of 
humanity, while he lived, why all this parade of 
regret and homage over his tomb?” 
We are not ashamed to declare, that 
we have not been able to peruse these 
pages without tears; nor, in the midst 
of the anguish they have given us, can we 
restrain those recollections which a crowd 
of instances press upon us, of the miserable 
lot. of those, not only, who seek their 
sunshine in the smiles of princes, but who, 
from the pride of talent, or whatever mo- 
tive, seek for the patronage, or link them-= 
selves in the associations of the high and 
mighty; and enliven with their wit, or 
irradiate with their genius, the selfish, sor- 
did circles of the great !—recollections that 
compel us to exclaira, that, amidst all the 
trappings with which they are adorned, and 
all the adulation with which they are in- 
censed, there are points of view in which 
there is nothing in human nature so mean, 
so selfish, and so vile, as gorgeous wealth 
and proud nobility! Their friendships, to 
those whom, insolently, they regard as their 
inferiors, because they came into the world 
beneath less stately canopies than their 
own, and their patronage, as it is called, 
are but too frequently a species of osten- 
tatious swindling, by which, under the 
false pretences of countenancing and en- 
couraging those whom they are defraud- 
ing of their time, they filch the highest 
pleasures of their lives, that they may have 
the more to waste npon porapous follies, 
and mere animal gratifications.* 
Poor Sheridan! he had indeed his faults 
and his prodigalities (never excused or for- 
gotten inaman of genius)!—nay, we may say 
his vices, to which the distresses and suf- 
ferings of his closing life may be, in part, at- 
tributed. But let it be remembered, he had 
his misfortunes also : it was not any of his ir- 
regularities that kindled the conflagration at 
Drury-lane Theatre ; nor the spirit from his 
intoxieating cup that was poured upon the 
sy 
“ If we were disposed to deal. in. per 
sonalities, we could write, ourselves, . “a 
History of Patronage,” which would place 
some of these noble patrons almost on acom- 
mon level with pickpockets and swindlers. 
