prosperous fate. From the doing of Greek prose into English verse Sheridan and Halhed turned to another occupation, in which, as in the first, they were both of the same mind. They both fell in love, and both fell in love with the same woman. All contemporary accounts agree in regarding the daughter of Linley the musician as one of the most beautiful women of her age. Those who knew the portrait which the greatest painter of his time painted of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia will understand the extraordinary, the almost universal homage which society and art, wit and wealth, and genius and rank paid to Miss Linley. Unlike the girl in Sheridan's own poem, who is assured by her adorer that she will meet with friends in all the aged and lovers in the young. Miss Linley found old men as well as young men competing for her affection and for the honor of her hand. Sheridan and Halhed were little more than boys when they first beheld and at once adored Miss Linley. Charles Sheridan, Richard's elder brother, was still a very young man. But Miss Linley had old lovers too, men long past the middle pathway of their lives, who besought her to marry them with all the impetuosity of youth. One of them, whom she wisely rejected on the ground that wealth alone could not compensate for the disparity in years, carried off his disappointment gracefully enough by immediately settling a sum of three thousand pounds upon the young lady. There is an air of romance over the whole course of {219} Sheridan's attachment to Miss Linley. For a long time he contrived to keep his attachment a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from his friend Halhed, both of whom were madly in love with Miss Linley, and neither of whom appears to have had the faintest suspicion of finding a rival, the one in so close a kinsman, the other in his own familiar friend. It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his gallant, impetuous nature. Not merely did he keep his secret from his brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss Linley. Halhed reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical epistle, the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he discovered the real mind of his friend. Then, like a wise man if a sad one, Halhed went away. He sailed for India, the golden land of so many wrecked hopes and disappointed ambitions; he long outlived his first love and his successful rival; he became in the fulness of time a member of Parliament, and he died in 1830. He is dimly remembered as the author of a grammar of the Bengalee language and of a work on Gentoo laws translated from the Persian. [Sidenote: 1771--Marriage of Sheridan and Miss Linley]