successful, and Congreve, though not quite thirty years of age, withdrew in disgust from public life, after bringing out his opera of The Judgment of Paris in 1701. After this date his publications were rare, and of trifling importance. Congreve had begun, as quite a young man, to suffer from the gout, and his health now continued to decline. In 1705 he joined Vanbrugh in the management of the Haymarket Theatre, and his financial position was improved in the same year by his appointment as Commissioner of Wine Licences.

In 1710 Congreve collected his "works," and although he was now but forty years of age he posed as an old man, representative of a bygone generation. He formed an intimacy with Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, which lasted on to the close of his life. In 1726 he was visited by Voltaire, who found him entirely indifferent to literature: "he spoke of his works as trifles that were beneath him, and hinted that [Voltaire] should visit him upon no other foot than that of a gentleman who led a life of plainness and simplicity." In 1728 he had a last flash of inventive power, and wrote his graceful Epistle to Lord Cobham. In the early spring of that year he went down to Bath with the Duchess and Gay; returning to London in the autumn, Congreve's coach was upset, and he sustained internal injuries. He gradually Street, Strand, on the 19th

sank, and passed away, in his house in Surrey of January 1729. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. He left £10,000 to the Duchess of Marlborough, who wasted it in all kinds of pranks and folly, among other things, on a life-sized statue of Congreve in wax, which was made to nod when she spoke to it, and the feet of which were daily treated for gout by a physician. Congreve, in his prime, was a handsome plump man, very easy-going and friendly. Gay called him "unreproachful," and Pope and Tonson agreed that Garth, Vanbrugh, and Congreve were "the three most honest-hearted real good men" in the Kit-Kat Club. Although his health broke up so completely before middle life, Congreve was nimble and athletic in his early youth. His friendship with Mrs. Bracegirdle, "the Diana of the stage," was lifelong, and was continued with an elegant discretion that silenced scandal; in one of his letters Congreve says, "You know me enough to know that I feel very sensibly and silently for those whom I love."

Boy- of Grace direction, on" Pruddern hey don one the honour to read his tragedy to me. I leand fuel thish that it has been a corony to the bonn, as well as an injury to the fpelhor, that such a work has been to long arthald from the Butlich. this. I lay will res poil to it as a Blay. Whatever may have been heypoid or sugges peppord or hegyol against it on the floor of Colchicly as in On y Opinia absolatey gmadless from had no Shades of an Absendent it upon that account., the I have attended to it very precisely aven in regard to that parhauler in Justice to at fouthern and in Sherence to yt Gracey Commandy. I am thas place in my thoughts on this Joccasion. Jan allways will the grabs negail any Lone

mod

of Imay park flow
antle fervent
Men Ongrur

Autograph Letter from Congreve to the Duke of Newcastle

Almeria. No! all is hush'd, and still as death! 'Tis dreadful !
How reverend is the face of this tall pile,

Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads
To bear aloft its arch'd and ponderous roof,
By its own weight made steadfast and immovable,
Looking tranquillity. It strikes an awe
And terror on my aching sight; the tombs
And monumental caves of death look cold,
And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.

Give me thy hand, and speak to me, nay! speak,
And let us hear thy voice,-

My own affrights me with its echoes!

Leonora. Let us return! the horror of this place

And silence will increase your melancholy.

Sir JOHN VANBRUGH has none of Congreve's pre-eminence in style. He

Sir John Vanbrugh

After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Bayfordbury

has no style at all; he simply throws his characters at one another's heads, and leaves them to fight it out as they will. But he has great fire and vigour of redundant fancy. After him came FARQUHAR, with his mess-room tone, and what Pope called his "pert, low dialogue," but also with a manly tenderness that excused his faults. Steele followed, with his lachrymose comedies of sentiment; and in Susannah Centlivre the music that Etheredge had begun to so sprightly a tune came to an ignominious finale. Of all the brilliant body of literature so produced in some forty years, not one piece has held the stage. There were moral reasons for this inevitable exclusion. If merit of a purely literary or even theatrical

kind were alone to be considered, revivals of Wycherley and Congreve ought

to be frequent. But the fact is that Restoration comedy is of a universal profligate coarseness which enters into the very essence of the plot and is ineradicable. It is only by dint of the most delicate pilotage that one or other of these admirably written comedies is now and again, in an extremely modified form, safely steered across the footlights. In 1698 the nonjuror Jeremy Collier made an attack on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage. The public was on Collier's side, and his blows were so efficient that they practically killed, not indecency only, but the practice of comedy itself.

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was the son of Giles Vanbrugh or Van Brugg, a sugar-baker of Flemish descent, settled in London; the future dramatist and architect was christened there, in the parish of St. Nicholas Acons, on the 24th of January 1664. The family left London in 1665, and are found settled at Chester in 1667, where Giles Vanbrugh continued to be a leading citizen until his death in 1689. His son John is thought to have been sent to France in 1683 to study architecture, and in 1692 was clapped up in the

66

November the 10th 712. Mom?. this day, the Duke of Marlborough(upon his Delign, to travol,) made a how Will; which lie sescuted at Jr Jameir. Mir Cardonel, Mr Gaggi and my Folf, caw heim Sign, coal, se laws and publish it And afterwards ligud it as Minister in his Presence, with a Codicil. The D at the same thine, bund line free Will, cancelled a former Feed, and Executed a new one. The Will conside of fourteen Theets, every one of which the Dute agud. Mantraghe

Bastille under sus-
picion of being a spy.
He was imprisoned
there for some time,
and during this en-
forced idleness he be-
thought himself that
he might try his hand.
at a comedy, and he
sketched what after-
wards became The
Provok'd Wife. Later
in the year 1692 we
find him released,
styled Captain Van-
brugh, and fighting
a duel with a colonel
of the Scotch Guards,
whom he killed. We know little of Vanbrugh's mode of life until 1696, when he produced
his first play, The Relapse, which was quickly succeeded, in 1697, by Esop and The
Provok'd Wife. The success of those dramas was extraordinary, and Vanburgh took his
place at once as one of the two or three leading dramatists of the day. He was in-
volved, in 1698, in the acrimonious controversy between the Church and the Stage, which

MS. Note of Vanbrugh's in reference to the Duke
of Marlborough's Will

was started by Jeremy Collier. Vanbrugh wrote several other plays before, in 1702, he was appointed by Lord Carlisle the architect of Castle Howard. His success with this building led to his being nominated by Queen Anne Comptroller of the Public Works, and in the summer of 1705 he began the long and trying business of building Blenheim. In spite of his total ignorance of heraldry, which he had ridiculed in one of his plays, Vanbrugh was created Clarenceux King-at-Arms. He was now extremely prosperous, but he was so unwise as to waste his money in building "a stately theatre in the Haymarket," which was a failure and a drain upon his resources for many years. His peace of mind was also embittered by the ingratitude and folly of the Duchess of Marlborough, who at last dragged him into the Court of Chancery. Towards the end of his life, however, Vanbrugh seems to have recovered his prosperity and peace, and to have been engaged in a great deal of profitable architectural business. He died of quinsy, in the house he had built for himself at Whitehall-that "thing resembling a goose-pie" at which Swift had mocked-on the 26th of March 1726. Vanbrugh was good-natured, very easy and witty in conversation, "an honest-hearted real good man," Pope said. Although his own architecture is extremely heavy and pseudoPalladian, Vanbrugh had a sympathy before his time with medieval work. He strove vehemently, though in vain, to save Woodstock from the vandal Duchess, and his "inclination to ruins" was laughed at by his prosaic contemporaries.

George Farquhar (1678-1707) was son of a dean of Armagh, and was born at Londonderry in 1678. He went up to Dublin as a sizar of Trinity College in July 1694, but "his gay and volatile disposition could not long relish the grave and regular course of a collegiate life." He paid more attention to the players' company than to his professors, and soon appeared on the stage itself. Farquhar was a fair actor, and might have taken up his profession, but he was so unfortunate as to inflict a very serious wound with a sword on a fellowtragedian as they were acting The Indian Emperor together, and he lost his nerve entirely. He proceeded to London, in 1696, and began to write for the stage. He was only twenty, when his first comedy, Love and a Bottle, was very well received at Drury Lane. Farquhar composed seven comedies, several of which were among the most successful compositions of the age. He introduced Mrs. Anne Oldfield to the boards, and that illustrious actress appeared in all Farquhar's pieces. In 1700 he spent some time in Holland. In 1703 a penniless girl, who had fallen madly in love with Farquhar, contrived, by representing herself as a great heiress, to entrap him into marriage; "to his immortal honour be it recorded that he never once was known to upbraid his wife for an imposition which love for him alone had urged her to." This unlucky marriage, however, is supposed to have shortened his life, for his eminently sensitive nature suffered so much distress

George Farquhar