Harlequin Schoolboy

Abstract

With the aid of a scribe I sit down to fulfil my promise about Mr Sheridan. There was little in his boyhood worth communication. He was inferior to many of his school-fellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by Latin or English composition, in prose or verse.¹ Nathaniel Halhed, one of his school-fellows, wrote well in Latin and Greek.² Richard Archdall, another school-fellow, excelled in English verse. Richard Sheridan aspired to no rivalry with either of them. He was at the uppermost part of the fifth form, but he never reached the sixth, and, if I mistake not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficult and the most honorable of school business.

From Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 5th edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Brown, Orme and Green, 1827) i, 12–14.