1751–1816 · Anglo-Irish playwright, poet and Whig MP
Born in Dublin in 1751, Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote The Rivals and The School for Scandal before he was thirty, bought a controlling share of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and then spent three decades in the House of Commons as one of its most feared orators. “Clio’s Protest” is early, minor, anonymous work — a young man’s hatchet job on a rival versifier — and it is the least famous thing he wrote that everybody quotes. He died in 1816; the poem did not carry his name in print until an 1819 edition, three years after his death.