he had received of her merits. Sir John could add nothing disparaging to the high encomiums which he had passed on Lady Harriott, and a fresh negociation was accordingly entered upon with the Duchess, who expressed herself delighted with the renewal of a treaty which she had considered as finally abandoned. Sir John, meantime, was very zealous, and the affair proceeded flourishingly, and ended, eventually, in the marriage of Lady Harriott and the Duke of Newcastle.[241] So far Vanburgh seems to have acted well his part of a friend and mediator; but he soon found that matchmaking was by no means the most desirable occupation in the world. Although he had, by successful arguments, brought the Duke of Newcastle “into the mind to marry Lady Harriott,” the Duchess appears to have acted towards him unhandsomely and ungratefully. It seems to have been her grace’s mode for avenging Sir John’s errors of taste and miscalculations at Blenheim, to remove her confidence from him in the nice affair which he had had her commands to bring about to another useful friend. Whilst the architect and his patroness were together at Bath and at Blenheim, she never mentioned a syllable of the projected marriage to him, but, by transferring the negociation to one Mr. Walter, implied that Vanburgh was no longer worthy of the trust she had reposed in him. It was not long before Vanburgh, indignant at her conduct, addressed to her grace a letter, explanatory but respectful, excepting when, in the conclusion, he declares that he should be surprised, but not sorry, to find that she had imposed her commands and entrusted her commission to some other person.[242] The Duchess, in her reply to Sir John Vanburgh, entered distinctly into the whole process by which the match had been revived and perfected. She acknowledged her obligations to Sir John Vanburgh; she explained her conduct, if not satisfactorily, at least graciously; and concluded by declaring, “that if any third person should say that she had behaved ill to Sir John, she should be very sorry for it, and should be very ready even to ask his pardon.”[243] Before this temperate letter reached him, Sir John Vanburgh, not to his credit, had sent a very abusive, coarse, and insolent epistle. It appears that he had discovered that the Duchess had devolved the completion of Blenheim into other hands. Under the excitement produced by this discovery, he gave vent to a torrent of invective, which seldom accompanies a good cause. The Duchess, as it happened, received this singular ebullition from her former confidante before her own letter was despatched; whereupon she took up her pen, and, in the excess of her wrath, added a postscript; concluding in these words:—“Upon the receiving of that very insolent letter, upon the eighth of the same month, ’tis easy to imagine that I wished to have had the civility I expressed in the letter back again, and was very sorry that I had fouled my fingers in writing to such a fellow.”[244]