Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind, although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it _had_ so. And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth, viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings. As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language) '_always_ paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses. By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell, more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence, which call out in _my_ mind a reaction of indignation at the stories current against him.