India: As a young man Sharp met Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, and dined regularly with Boswell. He was close friends with the dramatist Richard Cumberland, Mrs Siddons and John Henderson the actor. The latter once asked Sharp to report on the acting ability of an up-and-coming rival, John Kemble, which he did. Friends and acquaintances Sharp's reputation as a critic increased when his close friend Samuel Rogers began to emerge as the most eminent and popular poet of the period (his "To a Friend" being dedicated to Sharp) and both visited Wordsworth in the Lakes and gave him important "city" support before his naturalistic style of poetry became truly fashionable. The Rogers family in Newington Green was well known in Dissenting circles, and the names of Joseph Priestley, Samuel Parr, Richard Price, Rev. John Fell, Kippis and Towers were eminently familiar to both men. Apart from a common interest in Unitarianism, Sharp and Rogers became well known for their good taste, at a time when such taste was one of the most vital commodities that an aspiring young man could acquire. The Rogers home in St James's Place was visited by almost every notable person in London and he was a guest of royalty. Both men were habitués at the fashionable Whig salon, Holland House. Considerable correspondence between Sharp and Lord and Lady Holland has survived. When Sharp moved to Park Lane, he acquired portraits painted by Reynolds of Johnson, Burke and of Reynolds himself as symbols of the things he most cherished – language, oratory and art. At his cottage retreat in Mickleham, Surrey, he received politicians, artists, scientists and some of the cleverest minds of the day, including some from abroad, such as the intriguing but formidable Mme de Staël. Guests recorded include Henry Hallam, Thomas Colley Grattan, Sydney Smith, John Stuart Mill, James Mill, Basil Hall, Dugald Stewart, Horne Tooke, Lord Jeffrey, Archbishop Whately, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, George Crabbe, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Richard Porson, Maria Edgeworth, Francis Chantrey, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Politics By the late 1780s Sharp was at the hub of the Dissenter movement in London at a crucial time when Revolution was in the air and young Whig intellectuals such as he fell under suspicion. He belonged to the Society for Constitutional Information and helped other leading Whigs to establish the Society of the Friends of the People. About the same