LESS CELEBRATED WITS.

107 wit than other people have in their best health.” He died at Bath in 1706.

Buckhurst does not complete the list of conspicuous members of this club, but the remainder were less celebrated for their wit. There was the Duke of Kingston, the father of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Granville, who imitated Waller, and attempted to make his "Myra" as celebrated as the court-poet's Saccharissa, who, by the way, was the mother of the Earl of Sunderland; the Duke of Devonshire, whom Walpole calls "a patriot among the men, a gallant among the ladies," and who founded Chatsworth; and other noblemen, chiefly belonging to the latter part of the seventeenth century, and all devoted to William III., though they had been bred at the courts of Charles and James.

With such an array of wits, poets, statesmen, and gallants, it can easily be believed that to be the toast of the Kit-kat was no slight honor; to be a member of it a still greater one; and to be one of its most distinguished, as Congreve was, the greatest. Let us now see what title this conceited beau and poet had to that position.

WILLIAM CONGREVE.

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 honor," 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 Shakspeare 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 daytime) 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

.

110

WHEN AND WHERE CONGREVE WAS BORN,

of any body who ever before wrote on the subject, to prove that this country had the honor of producing her ladyshipthe Wild Irish Girl. We freely give her up to the sister island. But not so William Congreve, though we are equally indifferent to the honor 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 honor, if they have been remiss enough to neglect him heretofore.

But our difficulties are not ended, for there is a similar doubt about the year of his birth. His earliest biographer assures us he was born in 1672, and others that he was baptized three years before, in 1669. Such a proceeding might well be taken as proof of his Hibernian extraction, and accordingly we find Malone supporting the earlier date, producing, of course, a certificate of baptism to support himself; and as we have a very great respect for his authority, we beg also to support Mr. Malone.

This being settled, we have to examine who were his parents; and this is satisfactorily answered by his earliest biographer, who informs us that he was of a very ancient family, being "the only surviving son of William Congreve, Esq. (who was second son to Richard Congreve, Esq., of Congreve and Stretton in that county)," to wit, Yorkshire. Congreve père held a military command, which took him to Ireland soon after the dramatist's birth, and thus young William had the incomparable advantage of being educated at Kilkenny, and afterward at Trinity, Dublin, the "silent sister," as it is commonly called at our universities.

At the age of nineteen, this youth sought the classic shades of the Middle Temple, of which he was entered a student, but by the honorable society of which he was never called to the bar; but whether this was from a disinclination to study "Coke upon Lyttelton," or from an incapacity to digest the requisite number of dinners, the devouring of which qualify a young gentleman to address an enlightened British jury, we have no authority for deciding. He was certainly not the first, nor the last, young Templar who has quitted special pleading on a crusade to the heights of Parnassus, and he began early to try the nib of his pen and the color of his ink in a novel. Eheu! how many a novel has issued from the dull, dirty chambers of that same Temple! The waters of the

CONGREVE FINDS HIS VOCATION.

111

Thames just there seem to have been augmented by a mingled flow of sewage and Helicon, though the former is undoubtedly in the greater proportion. This novel, called "Incognita; or Love and Duty Reconciled," seems to have been-for I confess that I have not read more than a chapter of it, and hope I never may be forced to do so great rubbish, with good store of villains and ruffians, love-sick maidens who tune their lutes-always conveniently at hand-and love-sick gallants who run their foes through the body with the greatest imaginable ease. It was, in fact, such a novel as James might have written, had he lived a century and a half ago. It brought its author but little fame, and accordingly he turned his attention to another branch of literature, and in 1693 produced "The Old Bachelor," a play of which Dryden, his friend, had so high an opinion that he called it the "best first-play he had ever read." However, before being put on the stage it was submitted to Dryden, and by him and others prepared for representation, so that it was well fathered. It was successful enough, and Congreve thus found his vocation. In his dedication-a regular piece of flummery of those days, for which authors were often well paid, either in cash or interest-he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Lord Halifax, who appears to have taken the young man by the hand.

The young Templar could do nothing better now than write another play. Play-making was as fashionnble an amusement in those days of Old Drury, the only patented theatre then, as novel-writing is in 1860; and when the young ensign, Vanbrugh, could write comedies and take the direction of a theatre, it was no derogation to the dignity of the Staffordshire squire's grandson to do as much. Accordingly, in the following year he brought out a better comedy, "The Double Dealer," with a prologue which was spoken by the famous Anne Bracegirdle. She must have been eighty years old when Horace Walpole wrote of her to that other Horace-Mann: "Tell Mr. Chute that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with me this morning. As she went out and wanted her clogs, she turned to me and said: 'I remember at the playhouse they used to call, Mrs. Oldfield's chair! Mrs. Barry's clogs! and Mrs. Bracegirdle's pattens!" These three ladies were all buried in Westminster Abbey, and, except Mrs. Cibber, the most beautiful and most sinful of them all-though they were none of them spotless-are the only actresses whose ashes and memories are hallowed by the place, for we can scarcely say that they do it much honor.

The success of "The Double Dealer" was at first moderate, although that highly respectable woman, Queen Mary, honor