Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/107

 of a coarse quality.’ His Overreach was said to be pitched in too low a key, but to display judgment. His Coriolanus and Rolla were praised highly; but he was declared to be an imitator of Kemble. The ‘Literary Gazette’ ‘damns with faint praise’ his Richard III. Westland Marston credits him with great dignity, and with thinking out happily his characters, praising highly his Coriolanus and Creon, but speaking of his Othello and Macbeth as deficient in pathos and passion. His Iago is said to have had a mask of impulsive light-heartedness and bonhomie, and a ‘sort of detestable gaiety in his soliloquies and asides.’ The portraits in theatrical papers of the first half of the century convey no idea of Vandenhoff's appearance. His face is said to have been fair and somewhat expressionless.

Vandenhoff left several children, most of whom appeared sooner or later upon the stage. A son George, born on 18 Feb. 1820, acted at Covent Garden (1839–40), and in 1853 he appeared for a short while as Hamlet at the Haymarket; but he soon migrated to America, and obtained a reputation in New York as an actor and teacher of elocution, and as the writer of a volume of theatrical anecdotes, ‘Dramatic Reminiscences’ (London, 1860; New York, 1860, with the title ‘Leaves from an Actor's Note Book’).

The only one of Vandenhoff's children to obtain celebrity upon the English stage was his daughter, (1818–1860), who made her first appearance at Drury Lane as Juliet on 11 April 1836. She went thence to Covent Garden and the Haymarket, and succeeded in establishing herself as a capable actress in parts in which delicacy and feeling rather than strength or passion were required. She won acceptance as Imogen, Cordelia, Pauline in the ‘Lady of Lyons,’ Julia in the ‘Hunchback,’ and Margaret Elmar in ‘Love's Sacrifice;’ was in 1837 at the Haymarket the first Lydia in Knowles's ‘Love Chase,’ had an original part in Henry Spicer's ‘Honesty,’ and was in 1851 the original Parthenia in Mrs. Lovell's ‘Ingomar.’ Her chief triumph was as Antigone in a translation from Sophocles at Covent Garden on 2 Jan. 1845, in which her father played Creon. She was taxed with being stilted in the early scenes, but in the later made a creditable display of pathos. On 15 Jan. 1855 she was at the St. James's Alcestis in a translation by Spicer from Euripides. She was fair in hair and complexion, symmetrical, with gentle mobile features, and was taxed, perhaps unjustly, with imitating Helen Faucit. Miss Vandenhoff retained her maiden name to the last, though she married, on 7 July 1856 by license at St. Mary's Church, Hull, Thomas Swinbourne, an actor well known in the country, and not unknown in London. This marriage she sought within a month to repudiate. She was taken ill in Birmingham, and died on 26 July 1860. She was the author of ‘Woman's Heart,’ produced in 1852 at the Haymarket, a comedy in which she herself played the heroine.

[Tallis's Dramatic Mag.; Vandenhoff's Dramatic Reminiscences: Scott and Howard's Blanchard; Macready's Reminiscences; Mrs. Baron Wilson's Our Actresses; Actors by Daylight; Archer's Macready; Westland Marston's Our Recent Actors; Stirling's Old Drury Lane; Era Newspaper, 13 Oct. 1861, 5 Aug. 1860; Dramatical and Musical Review, various years; Era Almanack, various years; Clark Russell's Representative Actors; Forster and Lewis's Dramatic Essays; New Monthly Mag. 1820; Men of the Reign; Dibdin's Edinburgh Stage; The Players, 1860; Gent. Mag. 1861, pt. ii. p. 376; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. xii. 147, 210, 270.] 

VANDENPUT, GEORGE (d. 1800), admiral, was illegitimate son of Sir George Vandeput, bart. (d. 1784) (, Extinct Baronetcies). While serving as a midshipman of the Neptune, flagship of Sir Charles Saunders in the St. Lawrence, he was on 24 Sept. 1759 promoted to be lieutenant of the Shrewsbury, commanded by Captain (afterwards Sir) Hugh Palliser [q. v.] With Palliser in the Shrewsbury he continued till the peace in 1763. On 17 April 1764 he was promoted to the command of the Goree sloop, and on 20 June 1765 was posted to the Surprize of 20 guns. In August 1766 he was moved to the Boreas, and in June 1767 to the 28-gun frigate Carysfort for the Mediterranean, where he was for the next three years. He was then for another three years in the Solebay, on the home station, and, after a couple of temporary commands, in December 1773 commissioned the Asia for the North American station. Here he remained for three years, for the most part at, or in the neighbourhood of, Boston and New York. It appears to have been off New York in 1776—the details are only vaguely given—that a tender of the Asia captured a small vessel laden with gunpowder. Whether by accident or caution, Vandeput ordered her to lie off for the night at some little distance; and this led to one of the prisoners, in his terror, confessing that in one of the barrels was a musket-lock, which would be fired by clockwork at a given time. It had been hoped that the barrels of powder would be at once put into the Asia's magazine and the coasting vessel allowed to go free. In 1777