When ‘Queen Sarah’ of Marlborough read the silly epitaph which Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, had written and had engraved on the monument she set up to Congreve, she said, with one of the true Blenheim sneers, ’I know not what happiness she might have in his company, but I am sure it was no honour,’ alluding to her daughter’s eulogistic phrases.

Queen Sarah was right, as she often was when condemnation was called for:  and however amusing a companion the dramatist may have been, he was not a man to respect, for he had not only the common vices of his age, but added to them a foppish vanity, toadyism, and fine gentlemanism (to coin a most necessary word), which we scarcely expect to meet with in a man who sets up for a satirist.

It is the fate of greatness to have falsehoods told of it, and of nothing in connection with it more so than of its origin.  If the converse be true, Congreve ought to have been a great man, for the place and time of his birth are both subjects of dispute.  Oh! happy Gifford! or happy Croker! why did you not—­perhaps you did—­go to work to set the world right on this matter—­you, to whom a date discovered is the highest palm (no pun intended, I assure you) of glory, and who would rather Shakespere had never written ‘Hamlet,’ or Homer the ‘Iliad,’ than that some miserable little forgotten scrap which decided a year or a place should have been consigned to flames before it fell into your hands?  Why did you not bring the thunder of your abuse and the pop-gunnery of your satire to bear upon the question, ’How, when, and where was William Congreve born?’

It was Lady Morgan, I think, who first ‘saw the light’ (that is, if she was born in the day-time) in the Irish Channel.  If it had been only some one more celebrated, we should have had by this time a series of philosophical, geographical, and ethnological pamphlets to prove that she was English or Irish, according to the fancies or prejudices of the writers.  It was certainly a very Irish thing to do, which is one argument for the Milesians, and again it was done in the Irish Channel, which is another and a stronger one; and altogether we are not inclined to go into forty-five pages of recondite facts and fine-drawn arguments, mingled with the most vehement abuse of anybody who ever before wrote on the subject, to prove that this country had the honour of producing her ladyship—­the Wild Irish Girl.  We freely give her up to the sister island.  But not so William Congreve, though we are equally indifferent to the honour in his case.

The one party, then, assert that he was born in this country, the other that he breathed his first air in the Emerald Isle.  Whichever be the true state of the case, we, as Englishmen, prefer to agree in the commonly received opinion that he came into this wicked world at the village of Bardsea, or Bardsey, not far from Leeds in the county of York.  Let the Bardseyans immediately erect a statue to his honour, if they have been remiss enough to neglect him heretofore.