THROUGHOUT his life, Sheridan had a fondness for turning a verse. In his youth he contemplated a Collection of Poetry by his own hand; but this project, like so many others, never came to maturity. As a writer of vers de Société, or, rather, vers du Théâtre, he had a pretty touch, and a little more. For, as Thomas Gent wrote in his Monody on Sheridan (1821): —
“In careless mood he sought the Muse’s bower,
His lyre, like that by great Pelides strung,
The softening solace of a vacant hour,
Its airy descant indolently rung.”
After his death Thomas Moore in his Sheridan printed some dozen of his fugitive poems recovered from the MSS. in possession of his son Charles; Fraser Rae recovered a few more from the same source; and from an album bequeathed by Sheridan’s first wife Elizabeth to her friend Mrs. Stratford Canning; while Mr. Walter Sichel surveyed the work of his two chief predecessors, Moore and Fraser Rae, and made further additions from MSS., so that a Sheridan Anthology could be compiled from his Sheridan (1909). To these three sources my debt is great; and above all to Mr. Sichel, for in this Collection I have included all the poems attributed by him to Sheridan, even the few which seem to me, for reasons given, to be spurious, or at least, doubtful. There are five of these: the three songs in The Carnival of Venice were, always accepted as Tickell’s; the “Stanzas on Fire” may be George Tierney’s; and the “Address to the Prince Regent” is an epigram of Rochester’s, slightly adapted. To each of the poems I have added a note on the source of the text, and the reason for attribution. There was a temptation to add two songs from the so-called Drama of Devils which is (in fact) an immature and unfinished adaptation of Suckling’s The Goblins. But as a third, accepted by Moore as Sheridan’s, is a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s, slightly adapted, I have resisted the temptation, since they have a curious familiarity. These, however, are printed in my account of The Foresters, an unfinished opera, which derived ultimately from The Goblins. Another song, supposedly his, from the pantomime of Robinson Crusoe, is printed in the discussion of that piece.