* * * * *
'Sir Peter Primrose, smirking o'er his tea,
Sinks from himself and politics, to me.
"Paper, boy!" "Here, sir, I am!" "What news to-day?"
"Foote, sir, is advertised—" "What! run away?"
"No, sir, he acts this week at Drury Lane."
"How's that," cries feeble Grub; "Foote come again?
I thought that fool had done his devil's dance:
Was he not hanged some months ago, in France?"'
Foote once again took the Haymarket Theatre in 1754; and, for a few nights, ridiculed Macklin's celebrated School of Oratory, in the 'Inquisition.'[140] But he soon returned to Drury Lane, as an actor chiefly in his own pieces, and at the same time was occupied in preparing for publication his amusing farce of 'The Knights.' 'The Author,' which was successful, but which was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain in consequence of the severity of its satire on Mr. Ap Reece (Cadwallader), appeared in 1757; and, probably owing to complications arising out of the matter, early in 1758 Foote went to Dublin with Tate Wilkinson the mimic (who imitated Foote himself so well, as more than once to deceive a shrewd audience). With the same companion Foote visited Edinburgh during the following season, where they reaped a good harvest. It was whilst on this occasion in Ireland that he exclaimed of the Irish peasantry: 'I never knew before what the English beggars did with their cast-off clothes.' In the winter, however, the two returned to Dublin, and here on 28th January, 1760, that clever comedy, 'The Minor,' made its first appearance, but with indifferent success, so that Foote lost a considerable sum of money. During his first visit to Dublin, in January, 1758, having hung a room at his lodgings in black, and provided himself with a dark lanthorn, Foote disseminated hand-bills to the effect that 'there was a man to be met with at such a place who wrote down people's fortunes without asking them any questions.' He is said to have carried on the deception with great success for many days, sometimes clearing as much as £30 a day, it is said, from his dupes. He soon after returned to London, and, having enlarged and improved 'The Minor,' brought it again before the public, and this time with the most satisfactory results, the theatre closing, after the piece had run thirty-eight nights, 'with a full treasury.' Foster thinks its three acts are worth almost any five that he knew. The object of the play was to ridicule religious cant, and especially Whitefield, then in the height of his popularity.[141] The story runs that Foote submitted the MS. to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Secker, with a request that his Grace would strike out anything that, from a religious point of view, might appear objectionable. But the Archbishop—knowing the sort of character he had to deal with—returned the MS. untouched, observing that if he erased or corrected anything, Foote would probably have advertised the piece as 'corrected and prepared for the press by the Archbishop of Canterbury.' 'The Minor' elicited many sharp pamphlets and letters against Foote, but he readily disposed of them all in a reply which he published, replete with learning, wit, and satire; and which contains an admirable vindication of the Comic Muse. It has been said that if all his other works had perished, this one letter would have sufficed to establish his wit, scholarship, and sense as of the rarest order; every line tells. His defence of the course which he adopted in ridiculing Whitefield contains the following spirited passage:
'Why should I not ridicule what is done in a church if it deserves ridicule? Is not the crime greater if you pick a pocket at church? and is the additional reason why a man should not have done it, to be the only argument why he should not be punished for doing it? You call profaneness an offence; you will not have ignorant men idly invoke the name or attributes of the Supreme; and may not I ridicule a fanatic whom I think mischievous because he is for ever polluting that name with blasphemous associations—mixing it with the highest, the meanest and most trivial things; degrading Providence to every low and vulgar occasion of life; crying out that he is buffeted by Satan, if only bit by fleas, and, when able to catch them, triumphing with texts of Scripture over the blessing specially vouchsafed?'
Foote seems at this time to have lodged in Suffolk Street, and to have got into several petty quarrels with his fellow-actors, whose manners and defects he imitated only too closely, and whose antecedents he used to make fun of: for instance, alluding to Garrick's having failed in his first start in life as a wine-merchant, Foote used to say: 'I remember Davy when he used to live in Durham Yard, and all his stock-in-trade was three quarts of vinegar in what he called his wine-cellar.' But such were his tact and jolly manner, that the estrangements were rarely of long endurance; and most, if not all of the offended parties were, sooner or later, glad to shake hands with the reckless mimic. He was always, however, implacably hostile to newspaper critics—then, by the way, a new institution—and very coarse in his remarks upon them, although the critics generally wrote of him with respect and praise; but it should be added that at one time managers were almost invariably their own critics, and the innovation was to them most unwelcome. Nor did he think much of the reliability of the judgment of the public. In Foote's 'Treatise on the Passions,' he says: 'There are 12,000 playgoers in London; but not the four-and-twentieth part of them can judge correctly of the merits of plays or players.'
In January, 1762, 'The Liar,' the plot of which was taken from the Spanish, was produced at Covent Garden, and those who, like the writer of these pages, have had the good fortune to see the late Charles Mathews in the piece, will readily believe that it was highly successful. 'The Orators' shortly followed; it is said that it was in this piece that he intended to introduce Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that he was only deterred from doing so by the sturdy Doctor's threat that, if Foote did, he would get on the stage and soundly thrash the mimic with an oaken cudgel. But Johnson had a real regard for Foote and his abilities. Resolved not to be pleased with him, the Doctor was compelled to give in, and to laugh with the rest of the company that Foote was entertaining. 'Sir,' said Johnson, 'the dog was so very comical that he was irresistible.' Charles James Fox thought even more highly still of Foote's conversational powers. In fact he generally got the better of his opponents in all verbal encounters:—but the tables were once turned against him. He leased the Edinburgh Theatre for 500 guineas a year—a lawsuit arose, and Foote was defeated. The Scotch lawyer called upon him for his bill of costs; and on Foote's paying him the money and observing to the lawyer that he would no doubt, like most of his countrymen, return in the cheapest way possible, was drily answered: 'Yes, I shall travel on foot.'
'The Mayor of Garrat;'[142] 'The Patron' (in which he ridiculed the 'Enthusiasm of Antiquaries,' drawing his friend and host, Lord Melcombe, in the character of Sir Thomas Lofty, which Foote played himself); and 'The Commissary' (in which the Duke of Newcastle figured as Matthew Mug), followed 'The Orators' at the Haymarket in rapid succession, bringing Foote considerable profit, and his worldly success now seemed assured. But early in 1766, a sad accident whilst hunting (when he broke his leg) marred his prospects, and embittered the close of his career. Amputation above the knee was pronounced necessary, and, though this was, of course, before the days of chloroform, he bore the terrible operation with remarkable fortitude, and could not, even then, resist the temptation to joke, begging the surgeons to deal gently with him, as it was his 'first appearance in the character of a patientee'—an allusion which will presently be made apparent. From this time he always wore, and played in, a cork leg. It was pitiable, O'Keefe remarks, to see Foote leaning sorrowfully against the wall of his stage dressing-room while his servant dressed this sham leg to suit the character in which his master was to appear; but in an instant resuming all his high comic humour and mirth, he hobbled forward, entered the scene, and gave the audience what they expected, their fill of laughter and delight.
The Duke of York, with whom Foote seems to have been a favourite, now procured for him a Royal Patent for a summer theatre, thus enabling him to keep it open between the 14th May and the 14th September; and in May, 1767, the old theatre having been pulled down, and a new one erected in its stead, Foote appeared, as Himself, in 'An Occasional Prelude,' concluding with the following not ungraceful allusion to his Royal Highness's timely succour in the hour of misfortune:
'Consult,' he says, referring to the audience on the opening night:
'Consult with care each countenance around,
Not one malignant aspect can be found
To check the Royal hand that raised me from the ground.'