n 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 Moliere. 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