Another dramatist, whose name seems to be inseparable from Congreve’s, was that mixture of bad and good taste—­Vanbrugh.  The author of ’The Relapse,’ the most licentious play ever acted;—­the builder of Blenheim, the ugliest house ever erected, was a man of good family, and Walpole counts him among those who ’wrote genteel comedy, because they lived in the best company.’  We doubt the logic of this; but if it hold, how is it that Van wrote plays which the best company, even at that age, condemned, and neither good nor bad company can read in the present day without being shocked?  If the conversation of the Kit-kat was anything like that in this member’s comedies, it must have been highly edifying.  However, I have no doubt Vanbrugh passed for a gentleman, whatever his conversation, and he was certainly a wit, and apparently somewhat less licentious in his morals than the rest.  Yet what Pope said of his literature may be said, too, of some acts of his life:—­

    ‘How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit.’

And his quarrel with ‘Queen Sarah’ of Marlborough, though the duchess was by no means the most agreeable woman in the world to deal with, is not much to Van’s honour.  When the nation voted half a million to build that hideous mass of stone, the irregular and unsightly piling of which caused Walpole to say that the architect ’had emptied quarries, rather than built houses,’ and Dr. Evans to write this epitaph for the builder—­

    ’Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
     Laid many a heavy load on thee,’

Sarah haggled over ‘seven-pence halfpenny a bushel;’ Van retorted by calling her ‘stupid and troublesome,’ and ’that wicked woman of Marlborough,’ and after the Duke’s death, wrote that the Duke had left her ‘twelve thousand pounds a-year to keep herself clean and go to law.’  Whether she employed any portion of it on the former object we do not pretend to say, but she certainly spent as much as a miser could on litigation, Van himself being one of the unfortunates she attacked in this way.

The events of Vanbrugh’s life were varied.  He began life in the army, but in 1697 gave the stage ‘The Relapse.’  It was sufficiently successful to induce him to follow it up with the ‘Provoked Wife,’ one of the wittiest pieces produced in those days.  Charles, Earl of Carlisle, Deputy Earl Marshal, for whom he built Castle Howard, made him Clarencieux King-at-arms in 1704, and he was knighted by George I., 9th of September, 1714.  In 1705 he joined Congreve in the management of the Haymarket, which he himself built.  George I. made him Comptroller-general of the royal works.  He had even an experience of the Bastille, where he was confined for sketching fortifications in France.  He died in 1726, with the reputation of a good wit, and a bad architect.  His conversation was, certainly, as light as his buildings were heavy.