SAMUEL FOOTE,[129]
WIT AND DRAMATIST.
'He was a fine fellow in his way, and the world is really impoverished by his sinking glories. I would have his life written with diligence.'[130]—Dr. Johnson.
It is not a little remarkable that the fame of Samuel Foote, great as it was during his lifetime, and for some time after his death, has so rapidly dimmed; for he was not only a capital mimic, a boon companion, a most generous master to his subordinates, a ready wit, and an accomplished actor, but he was also a fair scholar, a bitter though an avowed satirist, and a prolific, as well as skilled, dramatic writer and critic. He wrote about thirty pieces for the stage (which were translated into the German in 1796), and the list of his works in their various editions occupies about thirty pages in the MS. British Museum catalogue. His slightest sayings were carefully preserved; and the very slightness of some of them is, perhaps, one of the strongest evidences of the fame which he enjoyed.
Foster says of him, in the Quarterly Review for 1854, that his writings are 'not unworthy of a very high place in literature;' and that his name 'was once both a terrible and a delightful reality.' And yet, notwithstanding the amusing picture which they present of the manners and conversation of London a hundred years ago, they have not sufficed to preserve his fame. Who of the rising generation has ever read anything of Foote's besides his ever-ready and often quoted bon-mots; or knows anything more of his plays than has been learnt from an occasional representation of 'The Liar' on the stage? It is hardly necessary to inquire into the cause of this, for the joker's reputation is proverbially fleeting. Moreover, Foote's pieces are somewhat too slightly constructed, depending not so much upon the plot or the dénouement as upon such a delineation of the various characters as seems hardly to come within the scope of our modern actors; but, nevertheless, it certainly does cause one to reflect how soon a man, not without strong claims to be remembered, may be forgotten. Yet, while he lived, his name was in every man's mouth, and in a vast number of contemporaneous books. 'No man,' says Baker, 'was more courted when in the zenith of his fame: for instance, when the Duke of York returned from the Continent, he went first to his mother's, then to His Majesty's, and directly from them to Mr. Foote's.' And yet it should be well understood that he was, withal, no toady. To the Scotch nobleman, boasting of his old wine, which he doled out in very small glasses—'It is very little, of its age,' said Foote, handling his glass. He congratulated the Duke of Cumberland on his digestion, when the Duke said he had come for the purpose of swallowing all Foote's good things—'for,' said the coarse wit, 'you never bring any of them up again.' And when the Duke of Norfolk consulted him as to going to a masquerade in a new character—'Go sober,' was Foote's instant reply.