'Yours is a hard case,' said a friend. It is so, indeed,' said Collins; for I came into the world a day after the fair?

'At Chichester,' says Mr. Disraeli, 'tradition has preserved some striking and affecting occurrences of the last days of the unhappy Collins. He would haunt the aisles and cloisters of the cathedral, roving nights and days together, loving their

"Dim, religious light;"

of his comedy of She Stoops to Conquer, he walked all the time in St. James' Park in great uneasiness; and when he thought it must be over, he hastened to the theatre. His ears were assailed with hisses as he entered the green-room. When he eagerly inquired of Mr. Colman the cause, 'Pshaw! pshaw!' said Colman, 'don't be afraid of squibs, when we have been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder these two hours.' The fact was, that the comedy had been completely successful, and that it was the farce which had excited those sounds so terrific to Goldsmith.

and when the choristers chanted their anthem, the listening and bewildered poet, carried out of himself by the solemn strains and his own too susceptible imagination, moaned and shrieked, and awoke a sadness and terror most affecting in so solemn a place their friend, their kins-ject of this comedy, which, notman, and their poet was before them, an awful image of human misery and ruined genius!'

:

GOLDSMITH.

Goldsmith's first attempt at dramatic writing was The Goodnatured Man. It had not much success. Three years after, he appeared again as writer for the stage, and with quite a different result. The piece was She Stoops to Conquer, and of it Dr. Johnson said that he knew of no comedy for many years that had so much exhilarated an audience, and had answered so well the great end of comedy-making an audience laugh.

It is related of Goldsmith, that during the first performance

In the Posthumous Letters of Mr. Colman there is a letter from Goldsmith on the sub

withstanding its merits and his own reputation, he had some difficulty in getting on the stage. The letter is addressed to George Colman the elder, who was then manager of Covent Garden Theatre, and is as follows :—

'DEAR SIR,-I entreat you'll relieve me from that state of suspense in which I have been kept for a long time. Whatever objections you have made, or shall make, to my play, I will endeavour to remove, and not argue about them. To bring in any new judges, either of its merits or faults, I can never submit to. Upon a former occasion, when my other play was before Mr. Garrick, he offered to bring me before Mr. Whitehead's tribunal, but I refused

'If there is a good man on earth,' Lord Thurlow was wont The world-renowned poem of to say, 'it is William Cowper.' John Gilpin was composed From his childhood he possessed by Cowper-'the most popua heart of the most exquisite lar poet of the generation' tenderness and sensibility. His Southey calls him-under the life was ennobled by many following circumstances: It was private acts of beneficence; and founded on a story told his exemplary virtue was such, him by Lady Austin, to rethat the opulent sometimes de-lieve the poet's depressed melan

choly, from which he greatly suffered. Lady Austin had remembered the tale from her childhood, and its effects on the fancy of Cowper had an air of enchantment. He told her the next morning, that convulsions of laughter brought on by his recollection of her story had kept | him waking during the greater part of the night, and that he had turned it into a ballad.

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.

twenty-two years of age. On the first night's performance it met with considerable disapprobation, on account of the imperfect conception of the character of Sir Lucius O'Trigger by Mr. Lee Lewis, who was, however, an excellent actor. It was soon after brought forward with great success, and is one of the few modern comedies that still keep possession of the stage. Mr. Lynch, who succeeded to the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger, played it so much to the satisfaction of the author, that he wrote a farce for his benefit, entitled St. Patrick's Day.

The opera of The Duenna was Mr. Sheridan's third dramatic effort, an opera which, though less general and comprehensive in its satire than The Beggar's Opera, is superior to it in brilliant wit, in distinctiveness and discrimination of character, and in appositeness of sentiment and language.

In no country has comedy had so ample a field as in Great Britain, owing to the freedom of its government, and the extent and variety of its intercourse with foreign nations. Humour, as Dr. Blair observes, is, in a great measure, the peculiar province of the English theatre; hence no comedy has presented such a strength and variety of character as the English. Though England can boast of a host of comic writers, excellent in the Mr. Sheridan afterwards conrespective lines they have adopt-verted Sir John Vanbrugh's ed, yet to combine the strongest Relapse into a pleasing comedy, and most brilliant wit with the called the Trip to Scarborough; chastest propriety, to display and in 1777 produced the masthe justest and most charac-terpiece of the age-The School terizing humour, without de- for Scandal, which of all comedies scending into grossness of idea is the most popular. The copy or expression, to give the comic of this play was lost after the force of the English character, first night's representation, and and steer clear of its incidental all the performers in it were improprieties, was reserved for summoned together early the Richard Brinsley Sheridan. next day, in order, by the assistance of their parts, to prepare another prompter's book.

The first dramatic effort of Mr. Sheridan was the comedy of The Rivals, which was produced when the author was only

"The School for Scandal, says Leigh Hunt, 'with the exception