Collier— display an excellence and facility of prose composition that Wycherley—judging from his letters to Pope—failed to attain.
Lord Macaulay, in his essay on the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, has, from want of space, reluctantly omitted Vanbrugh and Farquhar. He says they are "not men to be hastily dismissed." At any rate, we will not here fall into the opposite error of Madame de Genlis, who in reprehending the licence of the English drama, gives a detailed outline of the plots of all the worst plays, Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee among the number.[1] We deprecate altogether this 'index-saving'[2] system.
I think Farquhar much on a par with Congreve and Wycherley; a little less witty perhaps than the former, and a little less obscene than the latter. But to Sir John Vanbrugh I must devote several pages. Most of you will have heard of his architectural talent; perhaps nearly the greatest in England at that time, but used, like his other talent, only in an amateur way. He was neither an architect by profession, nor an author by profession; but not the less was he excellent both in authorship and architecture.
He was born in London, in the Annus Mirabilis, 1666; he himself, perhaps, not one of its least wonders, and, at any rate, destined to excel their poet in his dramatic walk. For Dryden's comedies have no other resemblance to those of Vanbrugh but their lax morality. I have not deemed it worth while to devote here any especial notice to them, and I have so high an opinion of him as a poet (Milton himself confessed Dryden to be a good verse-writer), that I do not wish to drag his delinquencies before the public gaze. Let his loose plays, and his loose translation of Juvenal, rest in the happy oblivion to which they have long been consigned.
This, however, is a digression. To return to Vanbrugh. He was of Dutch extraction: his father, Giles Vanbrugh, a
