Tony. By my guess we should be upon Crack-skull Common, about forty miles from home. Mrs. Hard. O lud! O lud! the most notorious spot in all the country. We only want a robbery to make a complete night on't. Tony. Don't be afraid, mamma, don't be afraid. Two of the five that kept here are hanged, and the other three may not find us. Don't be afraid. Is that a man that's galloping behind us? No; it's only a tree. Don't be afraid. Hard. I tell you I will not be detained. I insist on seeing. It's in vain to expect I'll believe you. Mrs. Hard. [Running forward from behind]. O lud, he'll murder my poor boy, my darling. Here, good gentleman, whet your rage upon me. Take my money, my life, but spare that Mrs. Hard. The fright will certainly kill young gentleman, spare my child, if you have Tony [aside]. Father-in-law, by all that's unlucky, come to take one of his night walks. [To her.] Ah, it's a highwayman, with pistols as long as my arm. A damned ill-looking fellow. Mrs. Hard. Good heaven defend us! He approaches. any mercy. Hard. My wife! as I'm a Christian. From whence can she come, or what does she mean? Mrs. Hard. [Kneeling]. Take compassion on us, good Mr. Highwayman. Take our money, our watches, all we have, but spare our lives. We will never bring you to justice, indeed we won't, good Mr. Highwayman. Hard. I believe the woman's out of her senses. What, Dorothy, don't you know me? Mrs. Hard. Mr. Hardcastle, as I'm alive! My fears blinded me. But who, my dear, could have expected to meet you here, in this frightful place, so far from home? What has brought you to follow us? Hard. Sure, Dorothy, you have not lost your wits! So far from home, when you are within forty yards of your own door! [To him.] This is one of your old tricks, you Tony. Do you hide yourself in that thicket, and leave me to manage him. If there be any danger I'll cough and cry hem. When I cough be sure to keep close. [MRS. HARDCASTLE hides behind a tree in graceless rogue, you! [To her.] Don't you the back scene. Enter HARDCASTLE. Hard. I'm mistaken, or I heard voices of people in want of help. Oh, Tony, is that you? I did not expect you so soon back. Are your mother and her charge in safety? Tony. Very safe, sir, at my aunt Pedigree's. Hem. know the gate, and the mulberry-tree; and don't you remember the horsepond, my dear? Mrs. Hard. Yes, I shall remember the horsepond as long as I live; I have caught my death in it. [To TONY.] And is it to you, you graceless varlet, I owe all this? I'll teach you to abuse your mother, I will. Tony. Ecod, mother, all the parish says you have spoiled me, and so you may take Mrs. Hard. [From behind]. Ah! I find the fruits on't. there's danger. Hard. Forty miles in three hours; sure, that's too much, my youngster. Tony. Stout horses and willing minds make short journeys, as they say. Hem. Mrs. Hard. [From behind]. Sure he'll do the dear boy no harm. Hard. But I heard a voice here; I should be glad to know from whence it came? Tony. It was I, sir, talking to myself, sir. I was saying that forty miles in four hours was very good going. Hem. As to be sure Hem. I have got a sort of cold by being out in the air. We'll go in if you please. Hem. it was. Hard. But if you talked to yourself, you did not answer yourself. I am certain I heard two voices, and am resolved [Raising his voice.] to find the other out. Mrs. Hard. I'll spoil you, I will. [Follows him off the stage. Exit. Hard. There's morality, however, in his reply. [Exit. Enter HASTINGS and MISS NEVILLE. Hastings. My dear Constance, why will you deliberate thus? If we delay a moment, all is lost for ever. Pluck up a little resolution, and we shall soon be out of the reach of her malignity. My Miss Neville. I find it impossible. spirits are so sunk with the agitations I have suffered, that I am unable to face any new danger. Two or three years' patience will at last crown us with happiness. Hastings. Such a tedious delay is worse than inconstancy. Let us fly, my charmer. Let us date our happiness from this very mo ment. Perish fortune. Love and content will Enter HARDCASTLE and SIR CHARLES from increase what we possess beyond a mon arch's revenue. Let me prevail. Miss Neville. No, Mr. Hastings, no. Prudence once more comes to my relief, and I will obey its dictates. In the moment of passion, fortune may be despised, but it ever produces a lasting repentance. I'm resolved to apply to Mr. Hardcastle's compassion and justice for redress. Hastings. But though he had the will, he has not the power to relieve you. behind. Sir Charles. Here, behind this screen. Hard. Ay, ay, make no noise. I'll engage my Kate covers him with confusion at last. Marlow. By heavens, madam, fortune was ever my smallest consideration. Your beauty at first caught my eye; for who could see that without emotion? But every moment that I converse with you, steals in some new grace, heightens the picture, and gives it Miss Neville. But he has influence, and stronger expression. What at first seemed upon that I am resolved to rely. rustic plainness, now appears refined simHastings. I have no hopes. But since you plicity. What seemed forward assurance, persist, I must reluctantly obey you. now strikes me as the result of courageous innocence, and conscious virtue. SCENE III [Exeunt. CHANGES [TO A ROOM AT MR. HARDCastle's]. Enter SIR CHARLES and MISS HARDCASTLE. Sir Charles. What a situation am I in! If what you say appears, I shall then find a guilty son. If what he says be true, I shall then lose one that, of all others, I most wished for a daughter. Miss Hard. I am proud of your approbation; and, to show I merit it, if you place yourselves as I directed, you shall hear his explicit declaration. But he comes. Sir Charles. I'll to your father, and keep him to the appointment. [Exit SIR CHARLES. Enter MARLOW. Marlow. Though prepare for setting out, I come once more to take leave, nor did I, till this moment, know the pain I feel in the separation. Sir Charles. What can it mean? He amazes me! Hard. I told you how it would be. Hush! Marlow. I am now determined to stay, madam, and I have too good an opinion of my father's discernment, when he sees you, to doubt his approbation. Miss Hard. No, Mr. Marlow, I will not, cannot detain you. Do you think I could suffer a connexion, in which there is the smallest room for repentance? Do you think I would take the mean advantage of a transient passion, to load you with confusion? Do you think I could ever relish that happiness, which was acquired by lessening yours! Marlow. By all that's good, I can have no happiness but what's in your power to grant me. Nor shall I ever feel repentance, but in not having seen your merits before. I will stay, even contrary to your wishes; and though you should persist to shun me, I will make my respectful assiduities atone for the levity of my past conduct. Miss Hard. [In her own natural manner]. Miss Hard. Sir, I must entreat you'll deI believe these sufferings cannot be very sist. As our acquaintance began, so let it great, sir, which you can so easily remove. end, in indifference. I might have given an A day or two longer, perhaps, might lessen hour or two to levity; but, seriously, Mr. your uneasiness, by showing the little value | Marlow, do you think I could ever submit to of what you think proper to regret. a connection, where I must appear mercen could ever catch at the confident addresses of a secure admirer? Marlow [Kneeling]. Does this look like security? Does this look like confidence? No, madam, every moment that shows me your merit, only serves to increase my diffidence and confusion. Here let me continue Marlow [aside]. This girl every momentary, and you imprudent? Do you think I improves upon me. [To her.] It must not be, madam. I have already trifled too long with my heart. My very pride begins to submit to my passion. The disparity of education and fortune, the anger of a parent, and the contempt of my equals, begin to lose their weight; and nothing can restore me to myself but this painful effort of resolution. Miss Hard. Then go, sir. I'll urge nothing more. to detain you. Though my family be as good as hers you came down to visit, and my education, I hope, not inferior, what are these advantages without equal affluence? I must remain contented with the slight approbation of imputed merit; I must have only. the mockery of your addresses, while all your can it mean? serious aims are fixed on fortune. Sir Charles. I can hold it no longer. Charles, Charles, how hast thou deceived me! Is this your indifference, your uninteresting conversation! Hard. Your cold contempt! your formal interview! What have you to say now? Marlow. That I'm all amazement! What Hard. It means that you can say and unsay things at pleasure. That you can address a lady in private, and deny it in public; that you have one story for us, and another for my daughter! Marlow. Daughter!—this lady your daughter! Hard. Yes, sir, my only daughter. My Kate, whose else should she be? Marlow. Oh, the devil! Miss Hard. Yes, sir, that very identical tall squinting lady you were pleased to take me for. [Curtseying.] She that you addressed as the mild, modest, sentimental man of gravity, and the bold, forward, agreeable Rattle of the Ladies' Club: ha, ha, ha! Enter HASTINGS and MISS NEVILLE. Mrs. Hard. [aside]. What! returned So soon? I begin not to like it. Hastings [to HARDCASTLE]. For my late attempt to fly off with your niece, let my present confusion be my punishment. We are now come back, to appeal from your justice to your humanity. By her father's consent, I first paid her my addresses, and our passions were first founded in duty. Miss Neville. Since his death, I have been obliged to stoop to dissimulation to avoid oppression. In an hour of levity, I was ready even to give up my fortune to secure my Marlow. Zounds, there's no bearing this; choice. But I'm now recovered from the it's worse than death! Marlow. 0, curse on my noisy head. never attempted to be impudent yet, that I was not taken down. I must be gone. Hard. By the hand of my body, but you shall not. I see it was all a mistake, and I am rejoiced to find it. You shall not, sir, delusion, and hope from your tenderness what is denied me from a nearer connection. Mrs. Hard. Pshaw, pshaw! this is all but the whining end of a modern novel. Hard. Be it what it will, I'm glad they're come back to reclaim their due. Come hither, Tony, boy. Do you refuse this lady's hand whom I now offer you? Tony. What signifies my refusing? You know I can't refuse her till I'm of age, father. Hard. While I thought concealing your age, boy, was likely to conduce to your improvement, I concurred with your mother's desire to keep it secret. But since I I tell you. I know she'll forgive you. Won't find she turns it to a wrong use, I must now you forgive him, Kate? We'll all forgive | declare, you have been of age these three Mrs. Hard. So, so, they're gone off. Let that I, Anthony Lumpkin, Esquire, of BLANK them go, I care not. Hard. Who gone? place, refuse you, Constantia Neville, spinster, of no place at all, for my true and lawful wife. So Constance Neville may marry whom she pleases, and Tony Lumpkin is his own man again! Sir Charles. O brave 'Squire! Hard. Then, by the hand of my body, I'm joy, sincerely. And could I prevail upon my proud of the connection. Mrs. Hard. Well, if he has taken away the lady, he has not taken her fortune, that remains in this family to console us for her loss. Hard. Sure, Dorothy, you would not be so mercenary? Mrs. Hard. Ay, that's my affair, not yours. But you know, if your son, when of age, refuses to marry his cousin, her whole fortune is then at her own disposal. Hard. Ah, but he's not of age, and she has not thought proper to wait for his refusal, little tyrant here to be less arbitrary, I should be the happiest man alive, if you would return me the favor. Hastings [to Miss HARDCASTLE]. Come, madam, you are now driven to the very last scene of all your contrivances. I know you like him, I'm sure he loves you, and you must and shall have him. Hard. [Joining their hands]. And I say so, too. And Mr. Marlow, if she makes as good a wife as she has a daughter, I don't believe you'll ever repent your bargain. So now to supper, to-morrow we shall gather all the poor of the parish about us, and the Mis takes of the Night shall be crowned with a merry morning; so boy, take her; and as you have been mistaken in the mistress, my wish is, that you may never be mistaken in the wife. EPILOGUE BY DR. GOLDSMITH. Well, having stooped to conquer with success, I hopes as how to give you satisfaction. Ogles and leers with artificial skill, Such, through our lives, the eventful his- The fifth and last act still remains for me. EPILOGUE To be spoken in the character of Tony Lumpkin. Well-now all's ended-and my comrades Pray what becomes of mother's nonly son? Talks loud, coquets the guests, and scolds the No matter what a man may here inherit, waiters. Next the scene shifts to town, and there she soars, The chop-house toast of og":ng connoisseurs. On 'Squires and Cits she there displays her arts, In London-'gad, they've some regard for I see the horses prancing up the streets, And on the gridiron broils her lovers' Not to the plays-they say it a'n't polite, hearts And as she smiles, her triumphs to complete, And madam now begins to hold it higher; To Sadler's-Wells perhaps, or Operas go, Zounds, we shall make these London gentry say, We know what's damned genteel, as well as they. RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN THE RIVALS AND THE SCHOOL FOR SHERIDAN'S great years may be divided naturally into two periods, one from 1774 to 1779, when he wrote his plays, the other from 1780 to 1812, when he sat in the House of Commons. In each period he delighted and astonished his contemporaries, in one by his comedies, which were a brilliant departure from the dull moralizing of the sentimental drama, in the other by his orations, which in their immediate effect upon his highly cultivated audiences are unequalled in the history of modern eloquence. The pity of his life is that his latter years should furnish a miserable anticlimax of domestic unhappiness, business misfortune, and public neglect. Sheridan's ancestry does in some measure account for his genius. His grandfather, Rev. Thomas Sheridan, eccentric, learned, witty, the friend of Swift, and his father, the actor Thomas Sheridan, who as teacher of elocution had fashionable London at his feet, were men of very considerable intellectual ability. His mother was even more remarkable; she was the author of a novel that was commended by Dr. Johnson and Charles Fox, as well as of three comedies, one of which furnished her son with ideas for his own plays. This son, Richard Brinsley, was born in Dublin in 1751, and at the age of eleven entered the great public school of Harrow, where he remained for seven years. Then instead of going to the university he studied oratory with his father in London for two years till the family moved to Bath. Bath was then at the height of its glory as the pleasure city of England, and it became the youthful Sheridan's training school more effectually than either Oxford or Cambridge could have been. Here he observed life in all its cosmopolitan frivolity, studied those varied types of humanity that gather in fashionable resorts, and stored up in his mind the raw material out of which he later made his wonderful comedies. Here, too, he came into public prominence as the protector and suitor of the gifted and beautiful singer, Elizabeth Linley, who, as Frances Burney said, had engrossed "all eyes, ears, hearts." To escape the persistent and distasteful addresses of a married man named Matthews she determined to flee to a convent in |