But greatly as he loved his wife, Sheridan was now too much wedded to his ambition to listen to such tempting. He had conquered fame with his pen; now he aspired to subdue it with his tongue. In 1780, while he was still in the twenties, he was sent to Parliament by Stafford suffrages; and from his first appearance at Westminster captivated his fellow law-makers by the magic of his eloquence. A new star had arisen in the oratorical firmament, and soon began to pale all other luminaries. Within two years he was a Minister of the Crown; and in another year he had electrified the world by the most brilliant oratory that had ever been heard in our tongue--notably by his historic speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, to the preparation of which his wife had devoted herself body and soul. Fresh from listening to this latest sensational triumph of her husband in Westminster Hall, she wrote:-- "It is impossible to convey to you the delight, the astonishment, the admiration he has excited in the breasts of every class of people. Every party prejudice has been overcome by this display of genius, eloquence and goodness.... What my feelings must be, you can only imagine. To tell you the truth, it is with some difficulty that I can 'let down my mind,' as Mr Burke said afterwards, to talk or think on any other subject. But pleasure too exquisite becomes pain; and I am at this moment suffering from the delightful anxieties of last week." But Mrs Sheridan's day of happiness and triumph was soon to draw near to its close. She saw her husband climb to the dizziest pinnacle of fame, and she watched with pain his brilliance dimmed, and his marvellous intellect clouded by excessive drinking, before the fatal seeds of consumption, which had already carried off her dearly-loved sister, began to show themselves in her. Her illness was as swift as it was, happily, painless. She simply drooped and faded and died, tenderly watched over to the last by her husband with a silent anguish that was pitiful to see. "During her last days," says Mrs Canning, her devoted friend, "she read sometimes to herself, and after dinner sat down to the piano. She taught Betty (her little niece) a little while, and played several slow movements out of her own head, with her usual expression, but with a very trembling hand. It was so like the last efforts of an expiring genius, and brought such a train of tender and melancholy ideas to my imagination, that I thought my poor heart would have burst in the conflict."