up the gambling-dens and policy-shops, regulated the saloons, paved the streets, stamped out yellow fever, lit the wharves, greatly extended the sewer system, and more than trebled the shipping of the port. I believe I am right in saying that the Commissioners, with the exception of one who died, have been regularly re-elected since they first took office, and that at no election have the politicians and the other predatory elements in the community been able to rally more than 20 per cent. of the electorate against them.

A somewhat similar plan has been adopted by the city of Des Moines, with the sanction of the Iowa Legislature. Here, again, the old Council is swept away, and all executive, administrative, and legislative power is placed in the hands of a Mayor and four Commissioners, nominated and elected at large. Any Commissioner may be removed upon petition of 25 per cent. of the electors, demanding a new election for his office. The citizens are vested with the power of initiative, of protest and of the referendum; and no grant or concession to a public service corporation becomes valid until it has been ratified by a poll of the people. Half a dozen considerable cities have already followed the example of Galveston or Des Moines; and there is no part of the United States where the idea of government by commission is not being agitated with fruitful enthusiasm. Mr. S. S. McClure, the proprietor and editor of McClure's Magazine, one of the most powerful instruments for civic righteousness that has yet been forged in America, declares in the November issue of his periodical emphatically in favor of applying the plan to New York. "New York City," he says, "under such a system, could command the services of the ablest men in the United States; a position in its government would offer not only one of the greatest honors in the United States, but a salary as

large as those paid by the greatest corporations in America. The entire government of the city, excepting only the judiciary, would be given over to five men. The second greatest city in the world would not be governed, as now, by an association of criminals; it could, and naturally would expect to, secure the direction of a board of men of the calibre of the following ticket: Mayor, Theodore Roosevelt; Commissioner of Finance, J. Pierpont Morgan; Commissioner of Police, General Leonard Wood; Commissioner of Public Works, William G. McAdoo, the builder of the Hudson tunnels; Commissioner of Law, Senator Elihu Root. A board of men of this ability, according to the experience of other cities, could be elected by an overwhelming vote to take charge of New York City. Once elected, they would not only save it millions of dollars, but would entirely change the quality of its civilization." That is a very striking and important declaration. There can be no doubt that Americans are turning with a growing decisiveness towards government by commission as the only visible way out of their municipal confusion. I anticipate a prodigious fight between the people and the politicians before any city of the first rank wins the sanction of the State Legislature to experiment with the scheme; and it is easy also to foresee that, even if the fight is won, the "Galveston idea" will still leave unsolved the innumerable problems connected with the relations between municipalities and the chief public utilities-problems that have been artificially complicated in America to а degree that we in Europe can hardly conceive. But it will at least make efficient administration not merely possible but probable; it will endow the cities with real autonomy; it will make an irresistible appeal to the now indifferent and fog-bound citizen; and it will

Love and Satire beckoned to him from Parnassus, and to the last he persisted in declaring that they, and not politics were his true vocation"; yet "his heart stayed in the Assembly of the nation, and to the last, like Congreve, he slighted his theatrical triumphs"; his married life, which began with two duels on his wife's behalf, and ended in an agony of grief as she lay dying in his arms, would present a perfect example of devotion were it not that he had been unfaithful while she lived, and married again, a girl of twenty, three years after her death; finally, his political career is as incomprehensible as the rest, for, with gifts as orator and statesman that made him famous over Europe, he never held high office; with a character of singular independence he acted "equivocally," and with a record of devotion to his Prince he lost his favor completely, and died, without a seat, dishonored and in debt. Nothing tends to make us lose interest in a character so much as the suspicion that there is something monstrous about it, and the achievement of Mr. Sichel's biography is that it restores Sheridan to human size and brings him to life again.

The first gift that makes itself felt is the gift that is always present and at work, but is yet the hardest to recapture the gift of charm. "There has been nothing like it since the days of Orpheus," wrote Byron; it made the boys at Harrow love him; Sumner, the headmaster, overlooked his mischief because of it; it drew the bailiffs in later days to stand behind his chair; as for his sister, she confessed that she "admired-I almost adored him." In early days his face expressed only the finer part of him; "its half heaviness was lit up by the comedy of his smile, the audacity of his air," and the brilliance of those eyes that were to outshine the rest of him, and to "look up at the coffin lid as brightly as

A

ever" when the mouth and chin had grown coarse as a Satyr's. There are only two letters from Sheridan at Harrow; and they are both about dress. In one he complains that his clothes are so shabby that he "is almost ashamed to wear them on Sunday"; in the other he is anxious to have the proper mourning sent him on his mother's death. Most schoolboys are conventional, but in addition to conforming to its laws, Sheridan liked the world to know that he grieved. year or two later, when we come to Miss Linley and the famous elopement and the duels, the romance of Sheridan's nature blossoms out, with curious qualifications. He discovered that the beautiful Miss Linley, who sang like an angel, was tormented by a man called Mathews, who was married; she had flirted with him as a child and he now pressed her dishonorably. Sheridan became her knight; he snatched her away to France without her parents' knowledge, and placed her in a convent. It is probable that they went through "some form of marriage" near Calais. Mathews, meanwhile, proclaimed his rival a liar and a scoundrel in the Bath Chronicle, and Sheridan vowed that he "would never sleep in England till he had thanked him as he deserved." He left Miss Linley in her father's hands, fought with Mathews twice, and obliged him to fly the country. It is a tale no doubt that might be matched by others of that age, but in the romantic arrangement of the plot, in the delicate respect with which he treated his charge, and in the extravagance of the Vow which constrained him to spend the night out of bed at Canterbury and to reach his rival starved for want of sleep, there are signs of something out of the ordinary. Nor was his behavior ordinary in the months of separation that followed. In his letters and his lyrics he luxuriated-for the pas

sion that finds words has pleasure about it-in the shades of his emotion.

But love also started his brain into activity. Not only did he work at mathematics, make an abstract of the history of England, and comment upon Blackstone, but he thought about the principles upon which the world is run. It seemed to him that "all the nobler feelings of man," which he began to perceive in himself, were blunted by civilization, and he sighed for the early days when the ties of friendship and of love "could with some safety be formed at the first instigation of our hearts." Now and perhaps throughout his life he believed that one's emotions are supreme, and that one should rate the obstacles that thwart them as tokens of bondage. He was fond of dreaming about the enchanted world of the Arcadia and of the Faëry Queen, liking rather to dwell upon "the characters of life as I would wish that they were than as they are," and per suading himself that his wish was really a desire to pierce beneath the corruptions of society to the true face of man beneath. Perhaps he felt that a world so simplified would be easier to live in than ours-but can one believe in it? He wished to replace all Fielding and Smollett with knights and ladies, but he did not believe in them either. The true romantic makes his past out of an intense joy in the present; it is the best of what he sees, caught up and set beyond the reach of change; Sheridan's vague rapture with the glamor of life was only sufficient to make him discontented, sentimental and chivalrous. The strange admixture is shown in his behavior when he was asked to allow his wife-for they had married with the consent of her father, but to the rage of his-to sing publicly for money. He refused to agree, although they were very poor and large sums were offered. Isaid that the sight of George

It was III. og

ling her decided him, and Johnson declared, "He resolved wisely and nobly, to be sure." But later, when he was struggling for a position in London drawing rooms he allowed her to advertise concerts "to the Nobility and Gentry" at which she was to sing without taking money. He gained a reputation for chivalry, for it implied that he cared for his wife's honor more than for gold, and spurned a friendship that was bought; but then he valued the favor of the great very highly and if it is true that he never cared for money, he seldom paid his debts.

Sheridan would do anything to make the world think well of him; he would wear intense mourning; he would keep a fine establishment; he would faint if people wished it; he could anticipate the popular desires, and exaggerate them brilliantly. The actor's blood in him, which rises on applause like a ship on the waves, was responsible for the touch of melodrama; but the finer perceptions of artists were his too, and these, trained to discover emotions beneath small talk and domesticity, threw him off his balance in the uproar of the world. There is certainly a strange discrepancy between Sheridan in private and Sheridan in public-between his written words and his spoken. The three famous plays were written before he took to public life, and represent more of him than tradition or the imperfect reports of his speeches can now preserve. They show what Sheridan thought when there was no public to send the blood to his head. The way in which he takes the word "honor" in The Rivals and makes it the jewel of a frightened country bumpkin and the sport of his shrewd serving-man assures us that he fought his own duels with a full sense of their absurdity. "Odds blades! David," cries Acres, "no gentleman will ever risk the loss of his honor!" "I say, then," answers David, "it

would be but civil in honor never to risk the loss of a gentleman. Look'ee, master, this honor seems to me to be a marvellous false friend: ay truly, a very courtier-like servant," and so on, until honor and the valiant man of honor are laughed out of court together.

Then again we have some reason to believe that Sheridan was an unthinking sentimentalist, and so slipshod in his morality that he acted upon no reasoned view, but used the current conventions. If that were So, he would have been the last to see the humor of Charles Surface in The School for Scandal. The good qualities of this character are lovable only because we know them to be slightly ridiculous; we are meant to think it a weak but endearing trait in him that he refuses to sell his uncle's picture. "No, hang it; I'll not part with poor Noll; the old fellow has been very good to me, and, egad, I'll keep his picture while I've a room to put it in." And Sheridan satirizes his own system of generosity by adding to Charles's offer a hundred pounds to poor Stanley, "If you don't make haste, we shall have some one call that has a better right to the money." These are details, but they keep us in mind of the acutely sensible side of Sheridan's temperament. He laughs at the vapors of his age-at old women sending out for novels from the library, at bombastic Irishmen, picking quarrels for the glory of it, at romantic young ladies sighing for the joys of "sentimental elopements-ladders of ropes!-conscious moon--four horsesScotch parson

paragraphs in

the newspapers." The pity is that his Irish gift of hyperbole made it so easy for him to heap one absurdity on another, to accumulate superlatives and smother everything in laughter. Mrs. Malaprop would be more to the point if she could stay her tongue from deranging epitaphs; and the play scene in The Critic suffers from the same voluble

I know you have him in your pocketAn oyster may be cross'd in love!Who says

A whale's a bird?-"

His humor makes one remember that he liked practical jokes. It is absolutely free from coarseness. The most profound humor is not fit reading for a girls' school, because innocence is supposed to ignore half the facts of life, and, however we may define humor, it is the most honest of the gifts.

Among other reasons for the morality of the stage in Sheridan's day may be found the reason that it lacked vigor of every kind. Sheridan, the first of the playwrights, was prevented, partly by the fact that his audience would not like it, and partly by an innate prudery of his own-a touch of that sentimentality which led him to prefer unreal characters to real ones-from giving a candid account of life. He took some thought of appearances, even in the study. His own view of the stage may be gathered in the first act of The Critic. Having regard to the limitations of an audience which could not brook Vanbrugh and Congreve, one should not "dramatize the penal laws" or make the stage the school of morality, but find the proper sphere for the comic muse in "the follies and foibles of society." That was Sheridan's natural province, in spite of a fitful longing to write a romantic Italian tragedy. If we grant that he had not the power which moves us so keenly in Congreve of showing how witty people love, and lacked the