In the "Mayor of Garratt," the more general caricature of a class—the Sneaks and the Bruins, has been more lastingly popular; the individual, however, is included in Matthew Mug, aimed at the Duke of Newcastle.
In the "Patron," the general satire was levelled at the enthusiasm of antiquaries, men capable of falling in love with a lady, because her nose resembled that of the bust of the Empress Poppœa. The individual pilloried in this piece was Lord Melcombe, under the form of Sir Thomas Lofty, played by Foote; who also laughed at the English Nabob of that day, in Sir Peter Pepperpot, acted by him, in the same piece. Foote considered this his best play; but in this, as in all his pieces, with much original wit, there was rank, though judicious plagiarism, from the stores of other writers.
In the "Commissary," Foote, as Zachary Fungus, aimed his shafts at the gentility of the vulgar; hitting Dr. Arne, personally, in the character of Dr. Catgut. In 1766, Foote met with the accident which reduced him to the condition of one-legged George Faulkner, whom he held up to ridicule in the "Orators," and he did not play;[128] but in 1767 he opened the Haymarket Theatre, after reconstructing the interior. He wrote no new piece; but he had the Barrys for a few nights, and brought out that burlesque-tragedy, the "Tailors," which was said to have been left anonymously at Dodsley's shop, and which kept its vitality down to the days of John Reeve. The fault of this piece is not in having tailors instead of persons of consequence in a burlesque, but—that the tailors talk seriously, and like people of consequence, well brought up.
His great success in 1768, was with his "Devil on Two Sticks," by which he cleared between three and four thousand pounds—a golden harvest, of which scarcely a grain was left at the close of the year. The satire here is generally laid against medical quackery, in the person of Dr. Last, by Weston; but Foote, as the Devil in disguise, took upon him the burthen of individual caricature. As Dr. Squib, he rendered ridiculous Dr. Brocklesby; and as the President of a College of Physicians, he exposed to derision Sir William Browne, who had taken an active part in a professional controversy, now without interest. Sir William's wig, coat, contracted eye firmly holding an eye-glass, and his remarkably upright figure, were all there; but the caricaturist had forgotten Sir William's special characteristic—his muff, which the good-tempered doctor sent to Foote, to make the figure complete!
In 1769, Foote produced nothing new of his own; but the general business was good, and Sheridan drew good houses in tragedy, both this season and the next, though Foote described him as "dwindled down into a mere Cock and Bottle Chelsea Pensioner." In 1770, Foote, in his "Lame Lover," in which he acted Sir Luke Limp (Vandermere and Weston played Serjeant and Jack Circuit), made a miss in aiming at "those maggots of the law, who breed in the rotten parts of it." In the following year, the groundwork of his expected annual play, was the ungallant conduct of Mr. Walter Long to Miss Linley, afterwards Mrs. R. B. Sheridan. In the "Maid of Bath," Long is severely handled under the name of Flint, and Bath society is roughly illustrated. The taste, in using a private domestic story for such a purpose, is questionable. The satire, however, did not kill Long, who lived till 1807, and bequeathed then, to the already wealthiest heiress in England, Miss Tilney, daughter of Sir James Tilney, Bart., nearly a quarter of a million of money. It was this heiress's hard fate to marry a more worthless personage than he who only wooed and was false to the Maid of Bath; and the small wreck of her fortune is now being saved—or lost amid the breakers and breakwaters of the Court of Chancery.
Foote, characterising himself as a "popularity-monger," produced in the course of his next season the "Nabob," in which he made a combined charge on antiquaries and Anglo-East Indians generally, in the person of Sir Matthew Mite, in which was involved the individual caricature of General Richard Smith, whose father had been a cheesemonger. Some irascible Anglo-Indians called at Foote's house in Suffolk Street, behind the theatre, to administer personal chastisement; but he bore himself with such tact, convinced them so conclusively that he had not had Smith in his mind, and persuaded them, by reading the play, that it was only naughty old Indians generally against whom he wrote, that they who came to horsewhip remained to dine, and make a night of it. The piece was afterwards supported by the good old ladies, to show their antagonism to Anglo-Indian naughtiness.
Foote's "Nabob" afforded Walpole an excuse for withdrawing his name from the Society of Antiquaries. In the play, Mite is made an F.S.A.; and reads a foolish address to the Society, on Whittington and his Cat. This was in ridicule of Pegge, who had touched on the subject of the illustrious lad, but who was "gravelled" by the then inexplicable Cat. Walpole, affecting to see that Pegge and Foote had rendered the Society for ever ridiculous, took his name off the books; but not on that account. The true ground was that, in his own words:—"I heard that they intended printing some more foolish notes against my Richard III."
In 1773, Foote produced his Puppet-show-droll, "Piety in Pattens, or the Handsome Housemaid." In this he committed a mistake, not unlike that he had committed in the "Minor," by taking unworthy means to a certain end. In a dull and occasionally indecent introductory address, he professed to have chosen puppets for his actors, because the contemporary players were marked by inability. This was said to a densely crowded house, while Garrick and Barry were still at the head of their profession! In the piece itself, played by excellently contrived puppets, Foote intended to ridicule sentimental comedy, by professedly playing one, showing "how a maiden of low degree, by the mere effects of morality and virtue, raised herself to riches and honours." The sentiment here involved is, of course, made fun of; but, in fact, the author failed to render it ridiculous, for the housemaid declines the riches and honours which she might have taken as the rewards of her morality and virtue. There ensued a riot, and some damage, after which Foote resorted to the novel process of resting the approbation of his piece, on a show of hands; but though there was a majority in his favour, the piece was not permanently successful. The author found compensation in his "Bankrupt," which was chiefly aimed at a speculating Baronet, but generally at all who were concerned in cheating their creditors. In 1774 a better, but a more cruel piece of wit, was produced by "Foote, the celebrated buffoon," as Walpole had called him the year before. This was the "Cozeners." Mrs. Grieve, the woman who had extorted money, on pledge of procuring government appointments, and who had not only deceived Charles Fox, by pretending to be able to marry him to an heiress, but had lent him money rather than miss his chariot from her door, was fair game, and was well exposed, in Mrs. Fleecem. This was delicate ground, however, for Foote, who was very generally accused of having earned an annuity from Sir Francis Delaval, by bringing about a marriage between Sir Francis and the widow Lady Nassau Powlett, who had been a very intimate friend of Foote's. The cruelty of the satire lay in the character of Mrs. Simony, in which the vices of the once fashionable and lately hanged preacher, Dodd, were transferred to his then living widow.[129] It was an insult to that poor woman, and a brutality against the Rev. Richard Dodd, brother of the criminal, and the estimable Vicar of Camberwell. The ridicule of Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son is in far better taste. But Foote was now beginning to lose spirit, and he produced only one more piece, the "Capuchin," in which he played O'Donovan, in 1776. This piece was merely an alteration of the unlicensed "Trip to Calais," in which Foote had gibbetted the Duchess of Kingston. In the "Capuchin," he more rudely treated her Grace's Chaplain, Jackson, under the name of Viper; but the farce had small merit, and the only thing in connection with it, deserving of record is, that Jackson, while on trial for treason, in the time of the Irish Rebellion, destroyed himself.
Such are the dramatic works of the English satirist, to compare whom with Aristophanes is an injustice to the Athenian, whose works Plato admired; and even St. Chrysostom kept them under his pillow! In the eleven extant comedies, of the fifty-four written by Aristophanes, we find the inequality of the distribution of riches pointed at in "Plutus;" in the "Clouds" the poet is in jest, not in earnest, in denouncing vice; in the "Frogs" we have a humorous review of both Euripides and Æschylus; in the "Knights," a satire against Cleon, which is unequalled for fun and effect. The "Inhabitants of Acharnæ" is a "screaming farce" chiefly in favour of peace-makers. The "Wasps" caricatures the Athenian disposition to go to law. The "Birds" is made a vehicle to convince the audience of the necessity of a change in the government. "Peace," in which the heroine, so-called, never utters a word, was written to bring about the much-desired end of the Peloponnesian war. The "Female Orators" exposes the absurdity of women desiring to be beyond their vocation. The "Feast of Ceres" demonstrates that the women can both say and act to the purpose when called upon; and this is more seriously shown in "Lysistrata." All these, however, are original, plot and wit are the poet's own (which is far from being the case with Foote); and the chief end seems to be the public good, and not the satirising of particular individuals. Aristophanes, however, goes in this latter direction, even farther than Foote; his abuse of Socrates, a great and good reformer, is not palliated by the wit which accompanies it; a daring wit, which was carried to such excess that the downfall of the old comedy ensued, and Alcibiades forbade that any living person should be thenceforth attacked by name upon the stage.