London merchant, was descended from a long line of merchants at Antwerp. The family came to England in the time of Good Queen Bess; they had become Protestants, and not receiving toleration in their native country, sought and found shelter here, as so many others have done.
When his son attained the age of nineteen, Mr. Giles Vanbrugh sent him to France, where he passed several years and probably obtained that knowledge of the French drama which he afterwards put to such good use. His comedies (not including Æsop[1] which is only a translation from Boursart, and to my mind a dull performance) are six in number. 1. The Relapse, acted at Drury Lane, in 1696; 2. The Provoked Wife, written before The Relapse, but not brought out till 1697, when it was performed in Lincoln's Inn Fields. 3. The False Friend, 1702; to which succeeded 4. The Confederacy, an adaptation of the Bourgeoises à la mode of D'Ancourt. The last acted in his life-time was 5. The Mistake, the original of which was Le Depit Amoureux of Molière. After his death appeared 6. The Provoked Husband which he had left incomplete under the title of "A Journey to London," and to which Cibber gave the last touches and the title. By the bye, this joint composition has done more to hand down Colley Cibber's name to posterity than any of the performances in which he stands entirely on his own legs. But he has told us that, perched on the eagle's soaring wing the lowly linnet loves to sing.
Vanbrugh died on the 26th of March, 1726, sixty years old. He was buried in the family vault under the church of St. Stephen, Walbrook.
- ↑ Poor Æsop! One can't help shedding a tear over that delight of one's youth, now a pleasant vision departed. The age that has assigned to ten—twenty—fifty different ballad-writers the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey; that has asked 'Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's Plays?' (the old "Garth did not write his own Dispensary") has discovered that there was no such person as Æsop after all, and that the fables which have so long gone under his name were written by one Babrius.
