If her grace condescended to criticise its parts with the frank roughness she is known to have done to the architect himself, his own defence and explanations might serve to let us into the bewildering fancies of his magical architecture. Of that self-creation for which he was so much abused in his own day as to have lost his real avocation as an architect, and stands condemned for posterity in the volatile bitterness of Lord Orford, nothing is left for us but our own convictions -to behold, and to be for ever astonished!-But "this voluminous correspondence ?" Alas! the historian of war and politics overlooks with contempt the little secret histories of art and of human nature-and "a voluminous correspondence" which indicates so much, and on which not a solitary idea is bestowed, has only served to petrify our curiosity!

Of this quarrel between the famous duchess and Vanbrugh I have only recovered several vivacious extracts from confidential letters of Vanbrugh's to Jacob Tonson. There was an equality of the genius of invention, as well as rancour, in her grace and the wit: whether Atossa, like Vanbrugh, could have had the patience to have composed a comedy of five acts I will not determine; but unquestionably she could have dictated many scenes with equal spirit. We have seen Vanbrugh attempting to turn the debts incurred by the building of Blenheim on the duke; we now learn, for the first time, that the duchess, with equal aptitude, contrived a counterplot to turn the debts on Vanbrugh!

"I have the misfortune of losing, for I now see little hopes of ever getting it, near 20007. due to me for many years' service, plague, and trouble, at Blenheim, which that wicked woman of Marlborough' is so far from paying me, that the duke being sued by some of the workmen for work done there, she has tried to turn the debt due to them upon me, for which I think she ought to be hanged."

In 1722, on occasion of the duke's death, Vanbrugh gives an account to Tonson of the great wealth of the Marlboroughs, with a caustic touch at his illustrious victims.

"The Duke of Marlborough's treasure exceeds the most extravagant guess. The grand settlement, which it was suspected her grace had broken to pieces, stands good, and hands an immense wealth to Lord Godolphin and his successors. A round million has been moving about in loans on the landtax, &c. This the Treasury knew before he died, and this

was exclusive of his 'land;' his 5000l. a year upon the postoffice; his mortgages upon a distressed estate; his South-Sea stock; his annuities, and which were not subscribed in, and besides what is in foreign banks; and yet this man could neither pay his workmen their bills, nor his architect his salary.

"He has given his widow (may a Scottish ensign get her!) 10,000l. a year to spoil Blenheim her own way; 12,000l. a year to keep herself clean and go to law; 20007. a year to Lord Rialton for present maintenance; and Lord Godolphin only 5000l. a year jointure, if he outlives my lady: this last is a wretched article. The rest of the heap, for these are but snippings, goes to Lord Godolphin, and so on. She will have 40,000l. a year in present."

Atossa, as the quarrel heated and the plot thickened, with the maliciousness of Puck, and the haughtiness of an empress of Blenheim, invented the most cruel insult that ever architect endured!—one perfectly characteristic of that extraordinary woman. Vanbrugh went to Blenheim with his lady, in a company from Castle Howard, another magnificent monument of his singular genius.

"We staid two nights in Woodstock; but there was an order to the servants, under her grace's own hand, not to let me enter Blenheim! and lest that should not mortify me enough, she having somehow learned that my wife was of the company, sent an express the night before we came there, with orders that if she came with the Castle Howard ladies, the servants should not suffer her to see either house, gardens, or even to enter the park: so she was forced to sit all day long and keep me company at the inn!"

This was a coup-de-théâtre in this joint comedy of Atossa and Vanbrugh! The architect of Blenheim, lifting his eyes towards his own massive grandeur, exiled to a dull inn, and imprisoned with one who required rather to be consoled, than capable of consoling the enraged architect!

In 1725, Atossa still pursuing her hunted prey, had driven it to a spot which she flattered herself would enclose it with the security of a preserve. This produced the following explosion!

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"I have been forced into chancery by that B. B. B. the Duchess of Marlborough, where she has got an injunction upon me by her friend the late good chancellor (Earl of Macclesfield), who declared that I was never employed by the

duke, and therefore had no demand upon his estate for my services at Blenheim. Since my hands were thus tied up from trying by law to recover my arrear, I have prevailed with Sir Robert Walpole to help me in a scheme which I proposed to him, by which I got my money in spite of the hussy's teeth. My carrying this point enrages her much, and the more because it is of considerable weight in my small fortune, which she has heartily endeavoured so to destroy as to throw me into an English Bastile, there to finish my days, as I began them, in a French one."

Plot for plot! and the superior claims of one of practised invention are vindicated! The writer, long accustomed to comedy-writing, has excelled the self-taught genius of Atossa. The "scheme" by which Vanbrugh's fertile invention, aided by Sir Robert Walpole, finally circumvented the avaricious, the haughty, and the capricious Atossa, remains untold, unless it is alluded to by the passage in Lord Orford's "Anecdotes of Painting," where he informs us that the "duchess quarrelled with Sir John, and went to law with him; but though he proved to be in the right, or rather because he proved to be in the right, she employed Sir Christopher Wren to build the house in St. James's Park."

I have to add a curious discovery respecting Vanbrugh himself, which explains a circumstance in his life not hitherto understood.

In all the biographies of Vanbrugh, from the time of Cibber's Lives of the Poets, the early part of the life of this man of genius remains unknown. It is said he descended from an ancient family in Cheshire, which came originally from France, though by the name, which properly written would be Van Brugh, he would appear to be of Dutch extraction A tale is universally repeated that Sir John once visiting France in the prosecution of his architectural studies, while taking a survey of some fortifications, excited alarm, and was carried to the Bastile: where, to deepen the interest of the story, he sketched a variety of comedies, which he must have communicated to the governor, who, whispering it doubtless as an affair of state to several of the noblesse, these admirers of" sketches of comedies"-English ones no doubt -procured the release of this English Molière. This tale is further confirmed by a very odd circumstance. Sir John built at Greenwich, on a spot still called "Van Brugh's Fields," two whimsical houses; one on the side of Greenwich

Park is still called "the Bastile-House," built on its model, to commemorate this imprisonment.

Not a word of this detailed story is probably true! that the Bastile was an object which sometimes occupied the imagination of our architect, is probable; for by the letter we have just quoted, we discover from himself the singular incident of Vanbrugh's having been born in the Bastile.*

Desirous, probably, of concealing his alien origin, this circumstance cast his early days into obscurity. He felt that he was a Briton in all respects but that of his singular birth. The father of Vanbrugh married Sir Dudley Carleton's daughter. We are told he had "political connexions;" and one of his ". 'political" tours had probably occasioned his confinement in that state-dungeon, where his lady was delivered of her burden of love. This odd fancy of building a "Bastile-House" at Greenwich, a fortified prison! suggested to his first life-writer the fine romance; which must now be thrown aside among those literary fictions the French distinguish by the softening and yet impudent term of " Anecdotes hasardées !" with which formerly Varillas and his imitators furnished their pages; lies which looked like facts!

SECRET HISTORY OF SIR WALTER RAWLEIGH.+ RAWLEIGH exercised in perfection incompatible talents, and his character connects the opposite extremes of our nature!

* Cunningham, in his "Lives of the British Architects," does not incline to the conclusions above drawn. He says, "I suspect that Vanbrugh, in saying he began his days in the Bastile, meant only that he was its tenant in early life-at the commencement of his manhood." The same author tells us that Vanbrugh's grandfather fled from Ghent, his native city, to avoid the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, and established himself as a merchant in Walbrook, where his son lived after him, and where John Vanbrugh (afterwards the great architect) was born in the year 1666. His father was at this time Comptroller of the Treasury Chamber. Cunningham thinks the Cheshire part of the genealogy " unlikely to be true."

+ Rawleigh, as was much practised to a much later period, wrote his name various ways. I have discovered at least how it was pronounced in his time-thus, Rawly. This may be additionally confirmed by the Scottish poet Drummond, who spells it (in his conversations with Ben Jonson) Raughley. The translation of Ortelius' "'Epitome of the Worlde," 1603, is dedicated to Sir Walter Rawleigh. See vol. ii. p. 261, art. "Orthography of Proper Names." It was also written Rawly by his contemporaries. He sometimes wrote it Ralegh, the last syllable probably pronounced ly, or lay. Ralegh appears on his official seal.

His "Book of Life," with its incidents of prosperity and adversity, of glory and humiliation, was as chequered as the novelist would desire for a tale of fiction. Yet in this mighty genius there lies an unsuspected disposition, which requires to be demonstrated, before it is possible to conceive its reality. From his earliest days, probably by his early reading of the romantic incidents of the first Spanish adventurers in the New World, he himself betrayed the genius of an adventurer, which prevailed in his character to the latest; and it often involved him in the practice of mean artifices and petty deceptions; which appear like folly in the wisdom of a sage; like ineptitude in the profound views of a politician; like cowardice in the magnanimity of a hero; and degrade by their littleness the grandeur of a character which was closed by a splendid death, worthy the life of the wisest and the greatest of mankind!

The sunshine of his days was in the reign of Elizabeth. From a boy, always dreaming of romantic conquests (for he was born in an age of heroism), and formed by nature for the chivalric gallantry of the court of a maiden queen, from the moment he with such infinite art cast his rich mantle over the miry spot, his life was a progress of glory. All about Rawleigh was as splendid as the dress he wore: his female sovereign, whose eyes loved to dwell on men who might have been fit subjects for "the Faerie Queene" of Spenser, penurious of reward, only recompensed her favourites by suffering them to make their own fortunes on sea and land; and Elizabeth listened to the glowing projects of her hero, indulging that spirit which could have conquered the world, to have laid the toy at the feet of the sovereign!

an office

This man, this extraordinary being, who was prodigal of his life and fortune on the Spanish Main, in the idleness of peace could equally direct his invention to supply the domestic wants of every-day life, in his project of " for address." Nothing was too high for his ambition, nor too humble for his genius. Pre-eminent as a military and a naval commander, as a statesman and a student, Rawleigh was as intent on forming the character of Prince Henry, as that prince was studious of moulding his own aspiring qualities by the genius of the friend whom he contemplated. Yet the active life of Rawleigh is not more remarkable than his contemplative one. He may well rank among the founders of our literature; for composing on a subject exciting little