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She stood patient model! her fingers stiffening over the rich drapery, her eyes weariedly fixed on the one corner of the room, in the direction of which she was obliged to turn her head. The monotonous attitude contributed to plunge her mind into that dull despair which produces immobility Michael Vanbrugh had never had so steady a model.
The lesson was impressed more deeply by a little incident that chanced about this time. Miss Vanbrugh sometimes took Olive with her on those little errands of charity which were not unfrequent with the gentle Meliora. "I wish you would come with me to-day," she said once, "because, to tell the truth, I hardly like to go alone."
It was a subject she could not bear to talk upon; perhaps because it rested often on Mrs. Rothesay's mind: and she herself had an instinctive apprehension that there was, after all, some truth in these fears concerning her mother's sight. She began quickly to talk of other matters. "Hark, mamma, there is Mr. Vanbrugh walking in his painting-room overhead.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL and THOMAS COBB, of the comedy of needless complications entitled Mrs. Pomeroy's Reputation. The occasion was chiefly notable for the return of Miss VIOLET VANBRUGH to active service and the welcome she was given by her splendidly loyal following.
In that ramble I stayed three or four days at Nimes, where there are more remains of antiquity, I believe, than in any town in Europe, Italy excepted. What is falsely called 'la maison quarree', is, in my mind, the finest piece of architecture that I ever saw; and the amphitheater the clumsiest and the ugliest: if it were in England, everybody would swear it had been built by Sir John Vanbrugh.
When Michael commanded anything, it must be done, if within human possibility; and there never was any one to do it but Meliora. She did it, always; how, he never asked or thought. He was so accustomed to her ministrations that he no more noticed them than he did the daylight. Had the light suddenly gone then Michael Vanbrugh would have known what it once had been.
Beechleigh was really a fine place, built by Vanbrugh in his best days. Three tiers of fifteen tall windows looked to the north in a front and two short wings, while colonnades led down to splendid wrought-iron gates, and blocks of buildings constructed in the same stately style.
At last I discovered in Galignani's library a copy of Leigh Hunt's edition of the old dramatists, and after a month's study of Congreve Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, I completed a comedy in three acts, which I entitled "Worldliness." It was, of course, very bad; but, if my memory serves me well, I do not think it was nearly so bad as might be imagined.
Under Queen Anne manners became again more decorous; and this may easily be traced in the comedies: in the series of English comic poets, Wycherley, Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Steele, Cibber, &c., we may perceive something like a gradation from the most unblushing indecency to a tolerable degree of modesty.
"Why," asked Collier, "should the man laugh at the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his nonage his own, by an after approbation?" Congreve was not Collier's only opponent. Vanbrugh, Dennis, and Settle took the field. And from a passage in a contemporary satire, we are inclined to think that among the answers to the Short View was one written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley.
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