his reproaches to 'A Lady more Cruel than Fair', lines which may, but probably do not, record a defeat, for there are some failures to which no man likes to draw attention. But Vanbrugh's poetic sterility was no matter to Tonson, for he had found a lifelong friend. When he quarrelled with Congreve-the only quarrel Congreve is known to have had-Rowe reported him as saying:

I'm in with Captain Vanbrugh at the present,
A most sweet-natured gentleman, and pleasant
For him, so much I dote on him that I
(If I was sure to go to heaven) would die,1

and in with Captain Vanbrugh he remained until the poet's death.

6

Indeed, they had one important trait in common; 'honest Van' as little as ' genial Jacob' was overawed by the company he frequented, and always kept his commonsense acumen about him. Kneller to him was that fool', and even Halifax failed to dazzle. One day, after dining with Maecenas and Congreve he wrote to Tonson in Holland, "My Lord Hallifax desires you will bespeak him a set of all kinds of mathematical instruments, of the largest sort, in ivory, but adorned as curiously as you please, they being more for furniture than for any use he's like to put 'em too; he designs to hang 'em up in his library". A man who could pierce through pretences in that manner appealed to Tonson, who saw in his friend's acuteness, honesty, disdain of toadyism, and frank good nature, just those very qualities he himself aimed at possessing.

But if Tonson chuckled over such remarks, one may be sure he kept them to himself, for though he got much gain from the poets, he knew that they in their turn

1 Reconcilement.

* Letters to Tonson, 13th and 15th July 1703; Athenaeum, July 1836.

expected much from the patrons. And not in vain. Congreve got his hackney coaches, his Pipe Office and his Secretaryship of Jamaica; Rowe collected a number of posts; including an under-secretaryship; Addison obtained a Countess and a portfolio; while Steele got stamps, a Scottish commissionership, a post in the Royal stables, a lord-lieutenancy, and a knighthood. Prior, it is true, obtained his advancement from the other side, but lived to regret his impatience, while D'Urfey had to be content with a disproportionately large gratuity from the Queen for some doggerel verses on the senile Electress of Hanover. And it was not, we may be sure, out of a fatuous love of social glamour that Vanbrugh welcomed his introduction into the Parnassus of the Strand; and indeed, after Congreve, he was the first to reap a substantial benefit from his ability to consort agreeably with great Whig lords.

4

New Openings

VANBRUGH, in truth, was more than a little in need of some profitable employment, for his heart was still above his income, which for the matter of that was not dazzling. He seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of the two professions he had so far adopted. Playwriting was an uncertain, and in any case a meagrely paid activity, for even Halifax, who was no longer Chancellor, had reduced his rewards of genius to a dinner or two. And now that William had made peace, the army held no prospects. In fact the reverse, for in 1702, Vanbrugh's first regiment, on the lists of which he figured as a captain on half pay, being broke', he asked for his arrears, to be met with the statement that he must "apply to ye Collonel ".

But he had not forgotten that he was by choice, and to some extent by training, an architect, or surveyor in the term of those days. He thought it worth while to mention this to the Kit-Cats, who no doubt discussed architecture with the knowledge and taste they brought to bear upon most subjects of that nature. Probably, in fact, they were better informed upon that point than upon others, for it was the day of the enthusiastic and successful amateur in building-lords had been known to design their houses themselves, and make no mean show in the art. After all even Inigo Jones had been but a dilettante. Vanbrugh evidently had many interesting and even exhilarating things to say on the subject, for in 1701 the Earl of Carlisle, bowled over by the 1 Athenaeum, 1st September 1894.

magnificence and imaginative quality of Vanbrugh's drawings, employed him to build a gigantic country house in Yorkshire.

And, from having been a target for the moralists, Vanbrugh now became a butt for the wits, for it seemed absurd to them that a man who wrote light comedies should turn his hand to building houses. They forgot that Sir John Denham had been famed as a poet long before he preceded Wren as surveyor-general, and that Wren himself had only in middle age deserted mathematics to build St. Paul's. But the Kit-Cat rallied around him; while Kneller commissioned him to see to Whitton Hall at Hounslow, 'to receive nobody in' as Vanbrugh gaily remarked.

If no argument could bring the outside world to believe that a comic dramatist might be as good an architect as another man, if the proof of the pudding was really to be in the eating, here was Vanbrugh's chance to display all his powers, and he determined to make the most of it. As a consequence, since his views on architecture were vigorous and original, the copy of Palladio in French, 'with the plans of houses in it', he asked Tonson to send him,1 did more than any other book has done to transform the countryside of England. With a sheet of paper before him he was a very different person to the genial wit of the playhouse. He became titanic ; ; took huge masses of masonry and kneaded them into form, abandoning himself to an orgy in true Palladian style, wherein it was the abstract qualities of architecture that counted. Utility was a base matter to be thrown to the winds; a house had to be conceived as an aesthetic unit in a landscape, and the laying out of the garden was at least as important as the housing of the future inhabi1 13th July 1703; Gent. Mag. July 1836.

he

tants. He aimed at sublimity, and as he designed the fury grew a sort of megalomania possessed him, and he really felt that Garth was not exaggerating when he compared him with an Apollo at the touch of whose lyre "stones mount in columns, palaces aspire ".

Certainly the vastness of his conceptions is visible in the massive pile of Castle Howard, as thought and design are to be seen in every stone. It was the first house Vanbrugh built, and it remains among the most famous of England's noble homes. From 1701 to 1714 it continued to rise up full of picturesque splendour, as solid as it was grand, the structural simplicity enhanced by the striking boldness of the ornament. In the centre was a tremendous portico, two stories high, flanked by long galleries ending in symmetrical advancing wings provided with pavilions. A dome a hundred feet high, yet perfectly in proportion, attracted the gaze of wanderers from a distance of many miles, while the façade toward the garden possessed unexpected grace by reason of its fluted columns.1 At all events the wooden model sent to Kensington so much pleased the king,' himself a distinguished amateur of the art, that he shortly made Vanbrugh a Comptroller of the Board of Works, his readiness to do so being perhaps increased by the Dutch sound of the architect's name.

As early as 1703 the Earl of Carlisle could get a very clear idea of how his house was going to look. He was delighted, and felt that it behoved him to reward the architect beyond the usual measure. Casting about for some suitable, and inexpensive, manner of doing this, it occurred to him that the post of Clarenceux King at

Description largely from Cunningham. Pictures may be seen in Vitruvius Britannicus, or more conveniently in Gotch, Statham, and Barman. Macaulay, Hist. IV. 611.

2