No one could so promptly overthrow an assailant; so quietly rebuke an avarice or meanness; so effectually "abate and dissolve" any ignorant affectation or pretension. "Why do you attack my weakest part?" he asked, of one who had raised a laugh against what Johnson calls his depeditation: "did I ever say any thing about your head?" Dining when in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then ambassador, as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters and dispensed it in the smallest of The only men of his day, putting aside glasses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite Johnson's later fame, who had the least pregrowth and enormous age. "It is very little tentions to compare with him in social repute, of its age," said Foote, holding up his were Quin for wit, and Garrick for powers of diminutive glass. A stately and silly country conversation. But Quin was restricted to squire was regaling a large party with the particular walks of humor; and his jokes, number of fashionable folk he had visited though among the most masterly in the lanthat morning. "And among the rest," he guage, had undoubtedly a certain strong, said, "I called upon my good friend, the morose, surly vein, like the characters he Earl of Chol-mon-dely, but he was not at. was so great in. Foote's range, on the other home." "That is exceedingly surprising," hand, was as universal as society and scholarsaid Foote, "what! nor none of his pe-o-ple." ship could make it; and Davies, who was no Being in company where Hugh Kelly was great friend of his, says it would have been mightily boasting of the power he had as a much more unfashionable not to have laughed reviewer of distributing literary reputation to at Foote's jokes, than even at Quin's. Garany extent, "Don't be too prodigal of it," rick again, though nothing could be more Foote quietly interposed, or you may leave delightful than the gaiety of his talk, had none for yourself." The then Duke of Cum- yet to struggle always with a certain restless berland (the foolish Duke as he was called) misgiving, which made him the sport of men came one night into the green-room at the who were much his inferiors. Johnson puts Haymarket Theatre. "Well, Foote," said he, the matter kindly. "here I am, ready as usual, to swallow all your good things." "Really," replied Foote, your royal highness must have an excellent digestion, for you never bring any up again." "Why are you for ever humming that air?" he asked a man without a sense of tune in him. "Because it haunts me." 66 No won der," said Foote: "you are for ever murdering it." One of Mrs. Montague's bluestocking ladies fastened upon him at one of the routs in Portman-square with her views of "Locke on the Understandng," which she protested she admired above all things; only there was one particular word very often repeated which she could not distinctly make out, and that was the word (pronouncing it very long) "i-de-a; but I suppose it comes from a Greek derivation." "You are per Garrick, Sir, has some delicacy of feeling; it is possible to put him out; you may get the better of him: but Foote is the most incompressible him into a corner, and think you are sure of him, fellow that I ever knew; when you have driven he runs through between your legs, or jumps over your head, and makes his escape. Could familiar language describe Falstaff better than this, which hits off the character of Foote's humor exactly? It was incom. pressible. No matter what the truth of any subject might be, or however strong the position of any adversary, he managed to get the laugh on his own side. It was not merely a quickness of fancy, a brilliance of witty resource, a ready and expert audacity of invention. but that there it moral or immoral, which unfainingly warded of humiliation. In another form the same remark was made on another occasion by Johnson, when some one in his company insisted that Foote was a mere buffoon and merry-andrew, and the conscientious | Samuel interposed of his less conscientious namesake : when coarse. brimful, when in motion not to run over. The habit of jesting and contempt, and of looking always at the ludicrous and sarcastic side, got the mastery over Foote; it became a tyranny from which there was no escape; and its practice was far more frequent, and its application more wide, than even such potency of humor as his could justify, or render other than hurtful and degrading to his own nature. 66 But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not Perhaps the most startling introduction empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to upon record to a club of wits, is that for fill up his part. One species of wit he has in an eminent degree, that of escape. You drive him which Foote, when a youth of one-andinto a corner with both hands; but he's gone, Sir, twenty, had to thank the Mr. Cooke who think you This," said Mr. Cooke, have got him-like an ani- translated Hesiod. you mal that jumps over your head. Then he has a presenting his protégé, "is the nephew of great range for wit; he never lets truth stand be- the gentleman who was lately hung in chains tween him and a jest, and he is sometimes mighty for murdering his brother." Startling as the statement was, however, it was quite true; and it is probable that Mr. Cooke, who had an ingenious turn for living in idleness by his wits, and was reported to have subsisted for twenty years on a translation of Plautus for which he was always taking subscriptions, thought of nothing in making it but his young friend's luck and advantage, in having come to a considerable fortune by such windfalls as a murder and an execution. Such was actually the case; and the eccentric translator was now helping him to spend his fortune, making him known at his favorite club. A position of greater temptation is hardly conceivable than that of a man gifted with such powers, and from such restraints; and the outline we now propose to give of his career will best show to what extent he was able to resist the temptation, to what extent he fell. Johnson admits, while certainly he underrates, his scholarship; and detects, though he exaggerates, his chief moral defect; but he also asserts, what the contradictory testimony of too many witnesses forbids us to believe, that he was not a good mimic. He seems on the contrary to have carried mimicry much higher than its ordinary strain, by combining with it a comic genius and invention peculiar to himself. It is seldom a mere mimic is so extraordinarily endowed. This gave him the range of character as well as of manners, in the perception and appropriation of what was ludicrous; and put a surprising vitality into his satire. It was at the same time that dangerous facility and force of imitation, which in connection with the exuberance of his humor, most limited his power of resisting its indulgence. None better than himself knew the advantage at which it often placed him, compared with duller men, and there is affecting significance in his remark to young O'Keefe, "Take care of your wit," he said; "bottle up your wit." In the sketch we are about to attempt, not a few indications will appear that Foote, often as he subjected himself to the charge of cruelty and inhumanity, had certainly not a malignant disposition. But in his case we shall do well to remember what Halifax said of Bishop Burnet, that our nature scarcely allows us to be well supplied with anything, without our having too much of it; and that it is hard for a vessel that is Samuel Foote, born at Truro in 1720, came of what in courtesy must be called a good family, notwithstanding the alarming fact just mentioned. His father had some time sat in parliament as member for Tiverton; and in 1720 was an active Cornish magistrate and influential country gentleman, receiver of fines for the duchy, and a joint commissioner of the Prize Office. His mother was the daughter of a baronet, Sir Edward Goodere, who represented the * She survived till she was 84. She lived to see the triumphs of her son, and was spared the knowledge of his suffering. She died shortly before the affair of the Duchess of Kingston, when Foote defended her memory with affection and spirit. letter, "and her morals 'irreproachable, till your "Her fortune was large," he said in his famous Grace condescended to strain them. She was upwards of fourscore years old when she died; and what will surprise your Grace, was never married but once in her life." When she was 79 years old, daughter, at a barrister's in Gray's Inn, and, though Cooke dined with her in company with her grandshe had sixty steps to ascend to the drawing-room, she did it without the help of a cane, and with the activity of a woman of forty. Her talk, too surconvivial, and made her the heroine of the party. prised every one. It was witty, humorous, and She had the figure and face of her son, with the same continual mirth and humor in the eye. That he quitted it, in spite of all these follies, with a very respectable amount of scholarship, there can be no question; and this he now carried up to London, entering himself of the Temple. It had been settled that the law was to be the making of his fortune, ever since a scene of mimicry at his father's dinner-table some four years before this date, long remembered and related by his mother, when he had taken measure of the judicial wit of no less than three justices of quorum in an imaginary affiliation case. Nevertheless it did not prefigure the woolsack, all that ensued to him from a nearer acquaintance with the law being greater facilities for laughing at it. But it is difficult to say what effect the tragedy of his uncles may have had on the outset of his studies. Hardly had he begun residence in the Temple, when this frightful catastrophe became the talk of the town. county of Hereford for many years; and who, He certainly acted without disguise, many kinds of extravagance there, of which the principal drift was to turn the laugh, when he could, against the provost of his college, with of course the unavoidable result of penalties and impositions, which became themselves however but the occasion for a new and broader laugh. Provost Gower was a pedant of the most uncompromising school, and Foote would present himself to receive his reprimand with great apparent gravity and submission, but with a large dictionary under his arm; when, on the Doctor beginning in his usual pompous manner with a surprisingly long word, he would immediately interrupt him, and, after begging pardon with great formality, would produce his dictionary, and pretending to find the meaning of the word would say "Very well, sir; now please to go on." It is clear, however, that under no extent of laxity of discipline could this be expected to go on; and accordingly we find him, in the third year of his undergraduateship, after an interval of gaiety at Bath, flaming suddenly through Oxford in society not very worshipful, attended by two footmen, and with a ridiculous quantity of lace about his clothes; taken to task more gravely than usual for so marked an indecorum; and quitting the college in consequence, in 1740, onet, who was unmarried and somewhat ec- and a white hand on the throat of the deceased. Captain Goodere would have defended himself by the plea that he had no part in the murder, and that his share in the seizure of his brother was only to withdraw him from improper influences until a settlement of the question whether his eccentricities should not render him incapable of disposing of his property; the friends of the murderer on the other hand would have defended him on the plea, that the act, if he had indeed committed it, was not that of a person in his senses. But as occasional eccentricities are no definition of perfect madness, so neither can any murderer be considered so perfectly sane as to be entitled to escape responsibility on proof that he may sometimes have lost self-command; and Captain Goodere, therefore, was duly and deservedly hanged; and a portion of the family inheritance came to young Sam Foote; and Mr. Hesiod Cooke took him to his club, as already we have faithfully recorded. such was the ease of his bearing, and the point and humor of remark with which he at once took part in the conversation, that his presence seemed to disconcert no one; and a sort of pleased buz of "Who is he?" was still going round the room unanswered, when a handsome carriage stopped at the door, he rose and quitted the room, and the servants announced that his name was Foote, that he was a young gentleman of family and fortune, a student of the Inner Temple, and that the carriage had called for him on its way to the assembly of a lady of fashion. Any more definite notion of his pursuits within the next two years we fail to get, but he underwent some startling vicissitudes. For some months of the time he appears to have rented Charlton-house, once the family seat in Worcestershire; and here there is a pleasant story told of his having his former schoolmaster Doctor Miles to dine with him amidst his magnificence, when the unworldly old pedagogue, amazed at the splendor, innocently asked his quondam pupil how much not then know how much it might cost, but certainly soon should know how much it would bring. And doubtless this anticipation came very suddenly true; for an old schoolfellow told Murphy that he remem same year, in company with a man named Waite, confined there for a fraudulent debt to the bank; when, Waite having supplied the turbot, venison, and claret for the feast, and young Foote the wit, humor, and jollity, never did he pass so cheerful a day. Murphy adds the surprising fact that his first essay as an author was written at about this time, and that it was "a pamphlet giving an account of one of his uncles who was executed for murdering his other uncle.' Those were great days for clubs and tav-it might cost, and got for answer that he did erns. The Grecian, in Devereux-court, still retained some portion of that fame for Temple wit which made Steele propose to date from it his learned papers in the "Tatler," and here was Foote's morning lounge; while in the evening he sought the Bedford in Covent-bered dining with him in the Fleet within the garden, which had succeeded lately to the theatrical glories of Tom's and Will's, and where, to be one of the knot of well dressed people that met there and modestly called themselves the world, was of course a natural object of youthful aspiration. For the vicinity of the theatre was still the headquarters of wit; and still the ingenious apothegm of Steele's passed current, that what the bank was to the credit of the nation the playhouse was to its politeness and good manners. Here accordingly breaks upon us the first clear glimpse of our hero. A wellknown physician and theatrical critic of the day, Dr. Barrowby, sketches him for us. One evening, he says, he saw a young man extravagantly dressed out in a frock suit of green and silver lace, bag-wig, sword, bouquet, and point-ruffles, enter the room, and immediately join the critical circle at the upper end. Nobody recognized him; but We have made unavailing search for this pamphlet, any account of which at second hand it is manifestly dangerous to take. But by those who profess to have seen it, it is represented to have been a quasi-defence of the justly-hanged captain; a sort of "putting the best face" on the family discredit; though in what way this too-partial nephew could possibly prove that the one uncle did not deserve strangling publicly, without at the same time making it clear that the other uncle did deserve strangling privately, we are quite at a loss to comprehend. wrote some such pamphlet, however, seems certain, urged to it by hunger and the ten pounds of an Old Bailey bookseller; the | subject continuing to occupy all the gossips That he But confused as are some of the dates and details at the outset of his career, the main particulars may be given with reasonable confidence; and the second fortune which undoubtedly he inherited, he had as certainly spent before he was twenty-four years old. The thing was then easily to be done by a hand or two at hazard. In 1742 and '43 he topped the part of a fine gentleman upon town; dressing it to such perfection, in morning and evening equipment, and giving such a grace to his bag-wig and solitaire, his sword, muff, and rings, that he received the This anecdote rests on the authority of frequent compliment of being taken for a Mr. William Cooke, commonly called Con- foreigner. At the opening of 1744, howversation Cooke, who put together half a ever, the scene had again changed with him, century since, for Sir Richard Phillips's book- and he was once more to be found among mart, a memoir of Foote not without many the wits and critics at the Bedford, with as points of merit, though discrimination is not much sore necessity to live by his wits as one of them; and who, with Murphy, fixes they. In this second clearly discernible apthe date of the pamphlet at the period when pearance of him, Doctor Barrowby reappears its author "immersed in all the expensive also; and Foote for once has the laugh follies of the times, had just outrun his first somewhat against him. A remnant of his fortune." His second fortune is supposed to newly-wasted fortune is clinging to him still have fallen to him on his father's death; but in the shape of a gold repeater, in those times the dates and circumstances are not at all something of a rarity, which he ostentaclear, and Mr. Cooke further confuses them tiously parades with the surprised remark, by the statement that the worthy old magis-"Why, my watch does not go!" "It soon trate, shortly before he died, had sanctioned his son's marriage with a young Worcestershire lady, and received them in Cornwall for the honeymoon; when, on their arrival one dreary January night, a serenade was heard which no one next morning could account for, and, the moment being carefully noted by Foote, it turned out afterwards to be exactly that of the consummation of the frightful tragedy at Bristol. "Foote always asserted the fact of this occurrence," says Cooke, "with a most striking gravity of belief, though he could by no means account for it." It may have been so, but the alleged marriage is equally difficult to account for, and would seem indeed to rest on no sufficient authority. No traces of any such set will go," quietly says Doctor Barrowby. Since we last looked in at the Bedford, the theatres have taken new importance, and the critics found fresh employment, in a stage-success without parallel within living. recollection. When Foote went first to that coffee-house, one of its habitués was a lively little man who supplied it with "red port;" with whom he formed an acquaintance; whom he then described living in Durhamyard with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine merchant; and whom he afterwards knew living in the same locality, when Durham-yard had become the Adelphi, and the little wine merchant one of the first men in England for princely wealth and popularity. The close of 1741 saw Gar |