"Oh that your brows my laurel had sustained; Well had I been depos'd, if you had reigned!"
In one respect, Dryden was no match at all for Shadwell; and, indeed, he has, inadvertently, confessed as much. When speaking of his incapacity for writing comedy, he says, "I want that gaiety of humour which is required in it; my conversation slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, and endeavour to make repartees; so that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." This is the picture of a dull man, of which Shadwell, whose comedies, to say the least of them, have as much merit as Dryden's, was the exact opposite. He was a most brilliant talker; and Rochester remarked of him that even had Shadwell burnt all he wrote, and only printed all he spoke, his wit and humour would be found to exceed that of any other poet.
We come, however, to a greater than Shadwell, in Sir John Vanbrugh, who belongs to two centuries, and who was a man of many occupations, but a dramatist by predilection. He was architect, poet, wit, herald; he stole some of his plots; and he sold his office of Clarencieux, to which he had been appointed, _because_ he was a successful playwright. He had humour, and was exceedingly coarse; but, says Schlegel, "under Queen Anne, manners became again more decorous; and this may be easily 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." This, however, is only partly true; and Schlegel himself remarks in the same page, "that after all we know of the licentiousness of manners under Charles II., we are still lost in astonishment at the audacious ribaldry of Wycherley and Congreve."
Of Vanbrugh's ten or eleven plays, that which has longest kept the stage is the "Relapse," still acted, in its altered form, by Sheridan, as the "Trip to Scarborough." This piece was produced at the Theatre de l'Odeon, in Paris, in the spring of 1862, as a posthumous comedy of Voltaire's! It was called the "Comte de Boursoufle," and had a "run." The story ran with it that Voltaire had composed it in his younger days for private representation, that it had been more than once played in the houses of his noble friends, under various titles, that he had then locked it up, and that the manuscript had only recently been discovered by the lucky individual who persuaded the manager of the Odeon to produce it on his stage! The bait took. All the French theatrical world in the capital flocked to the Faubourg St. Germain to witness a new play by Voltaire. Critics examined the plot, philosophised on its humour, applauded its absurdities, enjoyed its wit, and congratulated themselves on the circumstance that the Voltairean wit especially was as enjoyable then as in the preceding century! Of the authorship they had no doubt whatever; for, said they, if Voltaire did not write this piece, who _could_ have written it? The reply was given at once from this country; but when the mystification was exposed, the French critics gave no sign of awarding honour where honour was due, and probably this translation of the "Relapse" may figure in future French editions as an undoubted work by Voltaire!