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he put Foote himself, and not a few of his good things, bodily into a play not many months after he died, and even then had not forgotten his contemptible supposed grievance." He has wit to ridicule you," says Bygrove to Dashwood in Know Your Own Mind, "invention to "frame a story of you, humour to help it about; and "when he has set the town a laughing, he puts on a familiar air, and shakes you by the hand." After his own death, too, his executor found among his papers this outline of an imaginary scene in which he proposed to have introduced the failings of his old friend. "Foote "gives a dinner-large company-characters come one "by one-sketches them as they come :-each enters— "he glad to see each. At dinner, his wit, affectation, pride; his expense, his plate, his jokes, his stories ;"all laugh;-all go, one by one-all abused, one by "one;-his toadeaters stay;-he praises himself-in a passion against all the world." We have here perhaps the very worst, to set against the best, that was to be said against Foote by those who most intimately knew him.

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It may remind us that what has been held to be one of his most grave offences dates at this time. He began an engagement with Garrick at Drury-lane in September 1756, and, after playing several of his own characters and of Congreve's, produced on the 5th February 1757 his little comedy of the Author. It was admirably written; it contained the outline of a story which would have tasked only a little more patience than Foote's to give a masterly completeness to (the father's return in disguise to test the honour of his son was a hint for Sheridan); and it was rich in character. Very creditable also was the spirit in which it dealt with the claims of Authorship to higher esteem, and to a better kind of patronage, than it was the fashion of those days to award to it; and perhaps many an author whom its title attracted to Drury-lane crept back to his garret not ungrateful to the laughing

comedian.

And here, before describing the offence just hinted at,

we may interpose the remark that this feeling in Foote was an honest one, and that in his writings there is never any disguise of the man, where such disclosure may properly be made. Indeed of all their characteristics there is none so marked as the absence of any sort of pretence either in language or sentiment. When serious, you perceive that he means to be so; just as, when he laughs, he leaves you in no doubt as to that. There is no mere face-making in either case. He is an avowed satirist, and this must always detract from the pleasure he might otherwise give; more especially as the subjects of his satire for the most part necessitate the treatment implied in the remark of the French wit, that to give a Muscovite a sensation you must flay him alive. But we repeat our conviction that in the main it is honest satire, and that its force with his contemporaries lay precisely in that truth and reality of it. In this direction he is always strong. His scenes and subjects are often trivial in the extreme, but are yet held together by the vividness and bustle of something actual going on in them. No one who now carefully reads them can have any surprise at their success, or any feeling but regret that they dealt so much with what is transitory. As mere examples of comic dialogue they are perfect. Within a more limited range they have not much less than the wit, and they have more than the character, of Congreve. His people are not to be mistaken when you have once made their acquaintance; for they retain always so perfectly the trick of talk by which you knew them first, that perhaps no dramatic writings might be read aloud so easily without repetition of the speakers' names. Their great fault is the haste and impatience which has left them often a mere succession of witty scenes, when with a little more labour, and no more invention, a developed plot would have given more consistency and completeness even to the characters. But when he had once had his laugh, he was too easily satisfied; and, partly because of the restriction of his theatre to a summer fare lighter than

that of the winter houses, partly because of his own careless temperament, he was too ready to throw away upon a farcical sketch what would have supplied, to his friend Murphy for example, matter for elaborate comedies. The comparison of him with Aristophanes is absurd, because he had nothing of the imagination, or wealth of poetry, of the Greek; but he was like him in wit, whim, ready humour, practical jokes, keen sarcasm, vivid personation, and above all in the unflinching audacity with which he employed all these in scorn and ridicule of living vices and hypocrisies. As it was said of the Greek satirist that he exercised a censorship more formidable than the archon's, hardly less is to be said of the English wit who took a range of jurisdiction wider than Sir John Fielding's or Sir Thomas de Veil's; and for all the vast difference that remains, it is perhaps little less or more than between Athens in the age of Pericles and London in the time of Bubb Dodington. To find ourselves again in the thick of a not very dignified age, we have but to read Foote's comedies and farces; and though it was a grander thing no doubt to have such subjects for satire as a cowardly Bacchus or a gormandizing Hercules, veritable Gods to pull to pieces, yet among the sham divinities who received the Londoner's worship, or had the disposition of his fortunes, there was food enough for laughter and exposure. "Virgil had his Pollio," says Foote's poor author, "Horace his Mæcenas, Martial "his Pliny; but my protector is Mr. Vamp." And who was Mr. Vamp that thus protected poor Master Cape?

You may hear him bragging of his protective powers, as he first enters the scene. Old Vamp would not have kept a shop so long at the Turnstile if he did not know how to be secret. Why, in the year forty-five, when he was in the treasonable way, he never squeaked. He never gave up but one author in his life, and he was dying of consumption, so it never came to a trial. side of his head; cropped close!-bare as a board!-and

Look at the other

for nothing in the world but an innocent book of indecency, as he is a Christian! Oh! the laws are very

hard, very severe upon his brotherhood. But gad so! he must mind business, though. Master Cape here must provide him with three taking titles for these pamphlets, and let him think of a pat Latin motto for the largest. Books are like women; to strike, they must be well dressed; fine feathers make fine birds; a good paper, an elegant type, a handsome motto, a catching title, has driven many a dull treatise through three editions. Did any one here know Harry Handy? He was a pretty fellow he had his Latin ad anguem, as they say: he would have turned you a fable of Dryden's or an epistle of Pope's into Latin verse in a twinkling: except Peter Hasty the voyage-writer, he was as great a loss to the trade as any within old Vamp's memory. He was hanged for clipping and coining, but Vamp perhaps wasn't a loser by his death. His execution made a noise, and sold the booksellers seven hundred of his translations, besides his last dying speech and confession; and Vamp got that. For Harry was mindful of his friends in his last moments; he was a pretty fellow. About the spring Mr. Vamp will deal with Master Cape for a couple of volumes in octavo. Master Cape knows what will do? Novels, now, are a pretty light summer reading, and do very well at Tunbridge, Bristol, and the other watering-places; no bad commodity, neither, for the West-India trade; so let 'em be novels, Master Cape. No, the newspaper still hangs fire that was to have been started by Vamp and Titlepage. It promised uncommonly well. They got a young Cantab for the essays, for the true intelligence they imported an historian from Aberdeen, and they had made sure of an attorney's clerk; but it dropped for want of a politician. Was there an opening in that capacity for Master Cape? "No, thank you, master Cape," says Vamp; "in half a year's time, I have a grandson of my own that "will come in. He is now in training as a waiter at the "Cocoa-tree Coffee-house; I intend giving him the run

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"of Jonathan's for three months, to understand trade and "the funds, and then I'll start him.”

But notwithstanding his work for old Vamp, Foote's author is a pretty fellow in a better than either the Handy or the Hasty school. He is a gentleman. He refuses to defend a colonial government which had proved highly profitable to its governor in everything but good name (Lord Pigot had just published an immense got-up quarto in defence of his administration in India), because, he says, though he is the servant of the public, he is not the prostitute of its masters, and, as he has never dipped his pen into gall to gratify popular or private resentments, its integrity shall not now be sacrificed to palliate guilt or flatter pride. Yet to his pen he owes all his subsistence. I am sure my heart bleeds for him, says an honest fellow in the play. Consider to what temptations he is exposed. Lack-a-day, learning, learning, Sir, is no commodity for this market; nothing makes money here, Sir, but money, or some certain fashionable qualities that a good man would not wish to possess. Patron! the word has lost its use. A guinea subscription at the request of a lady, whose chambermaid is acquainted with the author, is all that may now and then be picked up. Protectors! why, one dares believe there's more money laid out upon Islington turnpike-road in a month, than upon all the learned men in Great Britain in seven years. Where now are the Oxfords and Halifaxes?

And then Foote introduced Mr. Cadwallader, the part which he played himself. Here was something in default of the Oxfords or Halifaxes. Next to a peer Mr. Cadwallader honours a poet, though Mr. Cape was the first he ever had in his house except the bellman for a Christmas-box. His ruling passion is to know any notable body, but otherwise he is made up of contrarieties. Pride and meanness contend for him one minute, folly and archness the next. In one breath he tells you, that he'd have made an immense figure in the learned world but for his cursed fool of a guardian's