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It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his gallant, impetuous nature. Not merely did he keep his secret from his brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss Linley.

The few rare and venerable copies have now a peculiar bibliographic interest; the type and the paper alike are coarse and blurred. Sir Charles Wilkins, the Caxton of India, had with his own hands cut the punches and cast the types from which Halhed's Bengali grammar was printed at Hoogli in 1778.

How strongly the young translators of Aristaenetus were under the influence of this sort of inspiration appears from every paragraph of Halhed's letters, and might easily, indeed, be concluded of Sheridan, from the very limited circumstances of his father, who had nothing besides the pension of L200 a year, conferred upon him in consideration of his literary merits, and the little profits he derived from his lectures in Bath, to support with decency himself and his family.

They do not seem to have even thought of such questions, and, for evidence of these astounding assertions, they refer us to what they call "the laws of Manu," and to Halhed's "Gentoo Hindoo Code."

But Halhed's was not the only heart that sighed deeply and hopelessly for the young Maid of Bath, who appears, indeed, to have spread her gentle conquests to an extent almost unparalleled in the annals of beauty.

But when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not discover more than forty separate works, all in manuscript, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but Halhed's grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed book.

Halhed, too, who at that period corresponded constantly with Sheridan, and confided to him the love with which he also had been inspired by this enchantress, was for a length of time left in the same darkness upon the subject, and without the slightest suspicion that the epidemic had reached his friend, whose only mode of evading the many tender inquiries and messages with which Halhed's letters abounded, was by referring to answers which had by some strange fatality miscarried, and which, we may conclude, without much uncharitableness, had never been written.

Even the translation of Aristaenetus, though a task more suited, from its amatory nature, to the existing temperature of his heart, was proceeded in but slowly; and it appears from one of Halhed's letters, that this impatient ally was already counting upon the spolia opima of the campaign, before Sheridan had fairly brought his Greek grammar into the field.

Their hopes and fears in this theatrical speculation are very naturally and livelily expressed throughout Halhed's letters, sometimes with a degree of humorous pathos, which is interesting as characteristic of both the writers: "the thoughts," he says, "of 200l. shared between us are enough to bring the tears into one's eyes."