and his voice rather harsh except when imitating others. People wondered at him in Dublin, according to O'Keefe, for the dinners and wine he gave, and for what seemed something of a parade of affluence; but this made part of the man. He never saw him, he adds, that he was not surrounded by laughers, for none that came near him could help it; and nothing struck him so much as the effect produced upon him one night, when, sitting in the green-room as usual amid a crowded circle of the performers, all in full laugh at and with him, he was suddenly disconcerted by observing one young actor, who had fixed himself right before the centre of attraction, maintain steadily a calm, grave, quiet face, unmoved by the roar around It was an actor whom O'Keefe had that very morning seen drilled by Foote in one of his comedies, when he mispronounced a word. "Ha, ha!" cried Foote: "What's that, sarcophagus? the word is sarcophagus; it's derived from the Greek, you know; I wonder that did not strike you!" But the youth had some wit, it would seem, if he had little Greek, and punished Foote in the manner just related. It was not, however, simply as a jester he had such vogue with his brother performers. They are a kindly, genial race, and Foote was always generous to them. In this respect, certainly, he took the lead of the Drury-lane manager. He seems to have had less of the common vice of the profession than almost any actor on record, for it was assuredly not jealousy of Garrick that made him laugh at the attempt to set Powell above him, and, this case excepted, he was remarkable for his encouragement of debutants. Shuter, Weston, Tate Wilkinson, Castallo, Baddely, Edwin, all these men he brought forward himself, made known, assisted in every way; and it was not alone actors of merit, but the hoi polloi of the scene, who experienced his goodwill. Old actors were now with him at the Haymarket, who had been with him since he first went there, whom he had kept till they had long outlived their work, and whose presence on the salary; list he still justified to his economical friend Jewel, by the remark that "he kept them on purpose to show the superior gentlemanly manners of the old school." During this very winter in Dublin he was taken so ill one day at rehearsal that he was obliged to announce upon the stage his inability to play; “Ah, Sir," said a poor actor who overheard him, "if you will not play, we shall have no Christmas dinner." Ha!" said he at once, VOL. XXXIV.-NO. I. "if my playing gives you a Christmas dinner, play I will!" and, O'Keefe adds, ill as he was he kept his word. Not many days later his life was endangered by an accident which has not till now been publicly described. He relates it himself in a letter to Garrick, dated on the last day of December, 1773, which has not before been printed, and which leaves as vivid and characteristic an impression of Foote as perhaps any single letter has ever been able to convey of any writer. It requires little explanation. Jewel is his treasurer and secretary, and always faithful friend. The allusion to Macklin is to his recent authorship of plays. Little Jephson, whom he here so happily mimics on the page, is the same who afterwards wrote plays that Horace Walpole protested were superior to Beaumont and Fletcher, and would live for all ages. Faulkner needs no description from us, but the reader will compare what he is made to say so sleekly with what we have formerly said of him. Little Dot is the elder Colman. Nor is the allusion to the Literary Club the least curious point of this various and interesting letter. The Club had been in existence ten years, yet Foote, a man to whom the best society of his time was accessible, has only now heard of it! MY DEAR SIR,-Had it not been for the coolness and resolution of my old friend, and your last night have been reduced to ashes by reading great admirer, Jewel, your humble servant would in bed, that cursed custom! The candles set fire to the curtains, and the bed was instantly set in a blaze. He rushed in, hauled me out of the room, tore down and trampled the paper and curtains, and so extinguished the flames. The bed was burnt, and poor Jewel's hands most miserably foresee the great ends for which he was born. scorched. So you see, my dear Sir, no man can Macklin, though a blockhead in his manhood and youth, turns out a wit and a writer on the brink of the grave; and Foote, never very remarkable for his personal graces, in the decline of his life was very near becoming a toast. I never saw the Monitor you allude to. It is a paper stigmatized here for its virulence. Howlic, as it would have been impossible for them to ever, it has had no apparent effect upon the pubhave paid more attention to the nights I have played. Little Jephson, who owes his establishment on this side the water to me, is (by being smuggled into Parliament) become in his own idea a man of importance. He has been delivered, in a senand is unanimously declared by his colleagues ate frequent and full, of a false conception or two; incapable of either facundity or fecundity. The first time I met with my gentleman was about a month after my landing, at the Parlia 6 ment-house. He bad fixed himself on the lowest | structions. I have often met here a Mr. Vesey, who tells me that he belongs to a Club with you and some other gentlemen of eminent talents. I could not conceive upon what motive he had procured admittance; but I find he is the Accomptant-General here, so I suppose you have him to cast up the reckoning. I have not seen Alderman Fawkener. I thought myself obliged to take some little notice of him in an occasional prologue. The following is an original letter of his : "To- Tickle, Esq. uniform in perhaps the only part of my life-my esteem and veneration for her. Adieu, my dear Sir. A good-night, and God bless you. Take care of the candle. SAMUEL FOOTE. He soon followed his letter, and not long after his re-appearance in London produced his Cozeners. Here again was legitimate satire. It exposed traffickers in vice, laughed at a money borrowing adventure of Charles Fox's, and held up to reprobation macaroni preachers, and traders in simony. Here Mrs. Rudd rehearsed what she soon after acted with the Perreaus, and a gibbet was set up for Doctor Dodd three years before Lord Chesterfield hanged him. A clown was also introduced to be perpetually reminded of the Graces, in ridicule of the Chesterfield Letters then just given to the world. Foote had so strong an aversion to these Letters, indeed, that he contemplated also a more elaborate burlesque of them. Lord Eliot told the Boswell party that he intended to bring on the stage a father who had so tutored his son, and to show the son an honest man to every one else, but practising upon his father his father's maxims, and always cheating him. Johnson was greatly pleased with the design, but wished the son to be an out-and-out rogue, providing only that, for poetical justice, the father should be the sole sufferer. Perhaps Johnson's view was the more true, and Foote's the more dramatic. But an illness intercepted this purpose, which was not renewed, and it was at this time Boswell heard of Foote's having said that he was not afraid to die. Of course it was repeated to Johnson, and it was met by the remark that it was not true. Yet the good old man more truly felt, in another conversation, that it might have been true; that the act of dying is not really of importance, that it matters far less how a man dies than how he lives, and that it will at any rate do him no good to whine. But though Foote was not of the whining sort, he could now hardly fail to mix up, with wearying and depressing thoughts of sickness and approach "My most dear and esteemed Friend,-Your concurring in opinion with me the last day we spent so agreeably together, that it would be prudent in me forthwith to call in my debits, hath induced me to advertize you that I have commissioned our common friend, Mr. Thomas Croaker, attorney-at-law, to sue you to an outlawry for one hundred pounds, as per bond, with all possible speed. The steady and firm friendship we have ever maintained, and the great esteem and respect I entertain for the valuable memory of your very worthy deceased and ingenious father, Mr. Sec. retary Tickle, compels me to send you this notice, being, my dearest friend, "Your most faithful, affectionate, and obedienting "Humble servant till death, "GEORGE FAWKENER." I sincerely rejoice in your success, and feel no compassion for Macklin, Kenrick, Covent-garden, nor that little Dot, its dirty director. At this season the winds are so variable, that I may possibly see you before you can acquaint me with this reaching your hands. You may assure Mrs. Garrick that flattering is not one of my failings, and that she has the merit of making me constant and age, some sense of life misspent, of opportunities lost, of resources not husbanded, of powers imperfectly used if not misapplied; and accordingly, when he had mastered this illness, at the close of 1774 he wrote to Garrick in contemplation of passing some of managerial cares. time on the Continent, and ridding himself He would go there, he says, not for pleasure but prudence, for he is tired with racking his brain, tired of toiling like a horse, and crossing seas and mountains in the dreariest seasons, merely to pay servants' wages and tradesmen's bills. He has therefore resolved to let his theatre if he can meet with a proper tenant, and he asks Garrick to help him to one, and kisses Mrs. Garrick's hands. Such thoughts and purposes, however, were still in abeyance when the idea of a new comedy occurred to him, and brought on suddenly the last and most terrible trial of his life. He was now to have a bitter test unexpectedly applied to the principle on which throughout all his life he had based his habit of personal caricature, and to find it wofully fail him. There was at this time prominent before the world a woman of such notorious vice and such conspicuous station, that it might have been thought, if ever its application should be warrantable, it would be here; yet when he struck at her, she struck again, and her blow proved heavier than his. He had hereafter to reflect that whatever might be the supposed advantages of personal satire it had this enormous disadvantage, that it is the very vice which. most invites its exercise that is most able to bear up against and defy its consequence. The sensitive will sink under injustice which the coarse need only laugh at. is clear that he believed himself right, felt his case to be so strong that he must triumph, and perceived that if conquered in this instance his vocation as a satirist was gone. At He told Lord Hertford, therefore, that if he saw good to enforce the law against him, it would decide his fate for the future. After such a defeat, it would be impossible for him to muster up courage enough to face folly again. Yet even with this grave forecast of a lite made profitless, he would not shrink from claiming the addition of a Plaudite to the Valeat res ludicra! During his continuance in the service of the public, he had never sought to profit by flattering their passions or falling in with their humors. On all occasions he had exerted his little powers, as indeed he thought it his duty, in exposing foibles, however much the favorites of the day, and condemning prejudices however protected or popular. Sometimes he believed he had done this with success. any rate, he had never lost his credit with the public, because they knew, whatever errors of judgment he might have committed, he proceeded on principle. They knew that he had disdained being the echo or the instrument of any man, however exalted his station, and that he had never consented to The Duchess of Kingston obtained inform-receive reward or protection from any other ation that he had satinized her in a piece, the hands than their own. Trip to Calais, then in the licenser's hands. Through the Chamberlain's office the secret had oozed. She instantly brought all her influence to bear on Lord Hertford. Foote heard of her intention, and wrote a masterly letter to him. An interview with the duchess herself in the presence of witnesses followed, but equally against offers of money and threatenings of law Foote stood firm. It He took it lightly enough at this time. "The Duchess offered to buy it off," says Walpole, "but Foote would not take her money, and swears he will act her in Lady Brompton" (a character in Steele's Funeral), "which to be sure is very appli cable." He would not even hold the Duchess as of any account in the business. Why has Lord Hertford refused to license my piece?" he repeated, to one who asked that question of him. "Oh, that's intelligible enough. He asked me to make his youngest son a boxkeeper, and because I would not be stopped my play." To those who heard it th's had a double meaning. Garrick also thus wrote to Colman (June 25, 1775): "We wanted you much at the election to-day. Foote was in great spirits, but bitter against the Lord Chamberlain. He will bully them into a license. The Duchess has had him in her closet and offered to bribe him; but Cato himself, though he had one more leg than our friend, was not more stoically virtuous than he has been. You shall know all when I see you." A letter of Horace Walpole's is Lord Hertford felt the difficulty, and seems to have done his best to act fairly in the circumstances. He saw Foote and suggested a compromise. Foote at once conceded that he would remove any particular passages pointed out as overstepping the fair limits of public satire, but to this the Duchess flatly refused consent. Nothing would satisfy her. but entire suppression. For this she would even remunerate him, but no other condition would she tolerate. In a second interview at Kingston-house, in the presence of Lord Mountstuart, he rejected "splendid offers" to this effect then made to him. He still held himself safe. He could not believe, as he wrote to Lord Hertford, that because a capricious woman conceived that he had pinned her ruffle awry, he should be punished by a poignard struck deep in his heart. But he did not know the antagonist with worth adding ;-" The dame," he writes to Mason (August 5, 1775,) "as if he had been a member of parliament, offered to buy him off. Aristophanes's Grecian virtue was not to be corrupted; but he offered to read the piece, and blot out whatever passages she would mark that she thought applicable to her case. She was too cunning to bite at this; and they parted." whom he had to deal, or that the wound was indeed to be mortal. She had now to call to her aid a man as devoid of principles as herself, and with even more abundant means of giving effect to his reckless audacity of wickedness. This fellow, one Jackson, an Irish parson who afterwards became involved in treasonable practices before the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, and poisoned himself in prison on the eve of the day appointed for his execution, at once opened all the batteries of most unscrupulous libel against Foote. The effect may be imagined of the use of money without stint, in the execution without remorse of such a scheme. It is appalling even yet to turn to the newspapers and pamphlets of that day, and see the cold and cruel persistence in the attacks against the great humorist, into whose vortex even journals calling themselves respectable were drawn. Foote at last showed a certain sign of quailing under it. A cry of pain was wrung from him. He offered to suppress the scenes which had given offence, if the Duchess would give directions that the newspaper attacks should not continue. This, it is true, was after the visit of one of her friends, a member of the Privy Council, who had eagerly interceded for her but in whatever way elicited, it presented itself as a triumph, and so she treated it. She rejected his offer with contempt, and called him not only a base coward and a slanderous buffoon, a merryandrew and a theatrical assassin, but struck at him with even fouler and more terrible imputations. Walpole has described her letter and its sequel. "Drunk with triumph she would give the mortal blow with her own hand, but, as the instrument she chose was a goose-quill, the stroke recoiled on herself. She wrote a letter in the Evening Post which not the lowest of her class, who tramp in pattens, would have set her mark to. Billingsgate from a Ducal coronet was inviting; however, Foote, with all the delicacy she ought to have used, replied only with wit, irony, and confounding satire. The Pope will not be able to wash out the spots with all the holy water in the Tiber. I imagine she will escape a trial, but Foote has given her the coup de grace." Soon after he wrote to Mason, "What a chef-d'œuvre is Foote's answer!" to which Mason responds, "I agree with you in thinking Foote's answer one of the very best things in the English language, and prefer it in its kind: Mr. Pope's letter to Lord Hervey is nothing to it." "The Duchess is a clever sort of woman," said a country squire who had received some services from her, "but she was never so much out in her life as when she ventured to write a letter to Mr. Foote." Masterly and complete as the answer was, however, it was written with an aching heart. Openly Foote would not now shrink, but her stab was rankling in him. She did not escapę her trial. She was arraigned for bigamy before her peers, was convicted, stripped of her title of Duchess, and, as Dunning threatened her, might have been burnt in the hand, but that meanwhile the death of her first husband's brother, Lord Bristol, had given her still the right to that privilege of peerage she claimed, and which, enabling her to leave the court punished only by a lower step in the rank of nobility, left the record of those portentous proceedings, partly a State Trialand partly a History of Moll Flanders, to carry its traits of dignified morality and justice down to succeeding generations. But though her trial was thus over, Foote's was but to begin. He resolved to drag forth the secret libeller and fight the matter out with him. He recast the Trip to Calais; struck out Lady Kitty Crocodile; put in, under the guise of a low Irish pimp and pander whom he called Dr. Viper, his hidden slanderer Dr. Jackson; and announced the first night of the Capuchin. The comedy was played at the Haymarket a few months after the Kingston trial, when Foote played Dr. Viper and threw into it his bitterest pungency of manner as well as words. It was successful, yet with a difference from old successes. The house was packed with enemies, and, though the friends were strong enough to carry it against opposition, the opposition was strong also enough still to make itself heard. Jackson's libels had not been without their effect, even within the walls of the Haymarket. "There was great applause, but rather more disapprobation," says Miss Wilkes, when she saw it, some nights after the first. Nevertheless, it was acted until the theatre closed. Jackson had meanwhile resolved that if possible the theatre never should reopen, and he took his measures accordingly. Such was the character of the libels against Foote, and their inveterate frequency between the closing of that season and the opening of the next, that it soon became obvious the matter could not rest where it was. The impression became general that, without first applying authorized means to arrest the calumny, the Haymarket must remain shut. Notices to this effect appeared in the respect able journals. But, whatever Foote may | much better, but I am fatigued to death with With such crowds of comforters flocking round him, he was able to play his various comedies as usual, and is said never to have played better. So far from being abandoned, so far from any one doubting or turning from him, Cooke says that his theatre, from the first moment of the charge to the close of the trial, exhibited a continual assemblage of rank, learning, fashion, and friendship. Among the two former classes particularly are to be numbered two royal Dukes, the late Duke of Roxburgh, the Marquis of Townshend, Mr. Dunning, Mr. Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Fitzherbert, many foreign noblemen, and a group of others of the first respectability."* Mr. Dunning was his counsel, and, the case having been moved into the King's Bench, Lord Mansfield was his judge. The charge had scarcely been stated before it was demolished, and the special jury, even refusing to turn round in the box, at once cried out together, Not guilty. But hardly could it have been guessed, until this issue was known, what a deep and sensitive suffering Foote's manliness and spirit had concealed. Murphy hastened from the court to Suffolk-street to be the messenger of the glad tidings, when his old friend, instead of manifesting joy, fell to the ground in strong hysterics. His theatre was soon let to Colman, and under the new management he played but thrice. A few months before that final appearance we get our last near glimpse of him, and see one of the last flashes of his humor. It is at the Queen's drawing-room in January, 1777. Greeted heartily by all around him, made to feel that his infamous persecutors had not been able to sully his name, singled out for recognition by his sovereign, the old spirit for a while reasserts its But Jackson had not yet thrown his last stake. He had hardly been convicted as a libeller in the highest common-law court, and publicly dismissed from the paper which had to make a formal apology for his libel, when there appeared suddenly at Bow-street a discarded coachman of Foote's, a fellow of the worst character, whom the subsequent proceedings branded with unspeakable infamy, who preferred a charge against his late master giving open, confessed, and distinct form to all the unspeakable rumors for which Jackson had been convicted. We spare the reader the miserable detail. For months Foote was kept with an accusation hanging over him, of such a kind as to embitter the most unsullied life against which it might be breathed. Every artifice was used to prolong the time of trial. But meanwhile he proved his friends. There was not a step in the pre- * Cooke does not mention, but it is well worth paration of his defence which was not solici- recording here, that the King also took occasion tously watched by Garrick. "I have been during the interval to command the Haymarket most cruelly used," Foote at last writes to performances, when perhaps the solitary instance him, "but I have, thank God, got to the alty. It was the Contract, taken by Dr. Thomas occurred of a play damned in the presence of roybottom of this infernal contrivance. God for Franklin from the Triple Marriage of Destouches, ever bless you." "My dear, kind friend," and was played after one of Foote's comedies. he writes the following day, "ten thousand When Foote lighted the King to his chair, his Mathanks for your note. I shall make the pro-jesty asked who the pieces was written by "By one of your Majesty's chaplains," said Foote, unable even then to suppress his wit; "and dull enough to have been written by a bishop." per use of it directly. I am to swear to an |