The 'Devil on Two Sticks,' an excellent little piece, which appeared in 1768, and which ran for a whole season, is said to have brought Foote some three or four thousand pounds! This play is a satire on medical quackery. Amongst others caricatured was Sir William Browne, 'whose wig, coat, and 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!'
But, 'lightly come, lightly go;' Foote could not keep money as easily as he could earn it; and, on his way once more to Ireland, he fell in with some blacklegs at Bath, to whom he lost all his money; so that he was 'ruined once more,' and actually had to borrow £100 in order to complete his journey. The 'Devil on Two Sticks,' however, took as well in Dublin as it had done in London; Foote was again rehabilitated, and was received with great favour at the Castle.
His play 'The Lame Lover,' produced in London in 1770, did not prove a success; it was followed, in 1771, by the 'Maid of Bath;' and by the 'Nabob' in 1772. But the 'Primitive Puppet-show,' or rather 'Piety in Pattens,' in which the 'Puppet-show' was introduced, brought crowded houses to the Haymarket in 1773; it was performed by wooden puppets nearly as large as life. In the prologue, spoken by Foote in propriâ personâ, and in a scarlet livery, as was the practice with the theatrical managers of the time, he says: 'All our actors are the produce of England ... to their various families you are, none of you, strangers. We have modern patriots made from the box—it is a wood that carries an imposing gloss and is easily turned; for constant lovers we have the encircling ivy; crab-stocks for old maids; and weeping-willows for Methodist preachers; for modish wives we have the brittle poplar; their husbands we shall give you in hornbeam;' and so on. In this piece he ridiculed 'Sentimental Comedy;' it was not one of his most successful productions; but the 'Exordium' was very clever, and is given entire in the Town and Country Magazine, vol. v., p. 319.
'The Cozeners' appeared in 1774, with a prologue written by Garrick, to whom Foote was again reconciled, after a quarrel caused by Garrick's refusing to lend his successful but impecunious friend the sum of £500. 'The Cozeners' fairly enough caricatured Mrs. Grieve as Mrs. Fleecem—a woman who extorted money from her victims by promising to procure for them Government appointments. Now, Foote himself was generally thought to have obtained an annuity from Sir Francis Delaval, by bringing about a marriage between him and Lady Nassau Powlett, with whom Foote had been very intimate. It was, however, too bad of Foote to caricature, under the name of Mrs. Simony, the widow of the Rev. Dr. Dodd, then only recently hanged. But Foote's aims were really not lofty; he sought, as Dr. Doran says, less to reform vice and folly than to produce amusement (sometimes unscrupulously enough), by holding them up to ridicule. And here it must be observed that, although he was thin-skinned, and not over-courageous, yet Davies wrote of him: 'There is hardly a public man in England who has not entered Mr. Foote's theatre with an aching heart, under the apprehension of seeing himself laughed at.'
The following year saw Foote involved in one of the most disastrous and disagreeable events of his life—namely, his prosecution at the instance of the profligate Duchess of Kingston, whom Foote had prepared to lampoon in a little piece called 'A Trip to Calais,' in respect of her then approaching trial for bigamy, when she was found guilty by the House of Peers. The Duchess's influence, however, prevailed to prevent the appearance of the piece, and the Lord Chamberlain's license was withheld; and correspondence of a most virulent nature between Foote and the Duchess ensued. It was on this occasion that Foote penned the following defence of his writings: 'During my continuance in the service of the public I never profited by flattering their passions, or falling in with their humours. In exposing follies I never lost my credit with the public, because they knew I proceeded upon principle.' The Duchess tried to buy off her persecutor, but in vain; attacks on each side, of the grossest and most virulent nature, now appeared in the papers; and an expensive prosecution of Foote on a foul but imaginary charge, by one Jackson,[143] was instituted; but Lord Mansfield summed up in Foote's favour, and the result was his immediate and honourable acquittal (the jury not even turning round in the box to consider their verdict). The worry and anxiety attendant upon so abominable a persecution shattered Foote's health and spirits, and unfitted him for awhile for appearing again on the stage. He accordingly sold his patent, including the theatrical wardrobe and leave to perform any of Foote's unpublished plays, to George Coleman, for £1,600 a year; and he only went on the stage thrice afterwards.
During the quarrel with the Duchess of Kingston Foote had bitterly satirized some of her worthless creatures in a piece called 'The Capucin'—the last that he ever wrote except 'The Slanderer,' which, however, he left unfinished at his death.
In May, 1777, he made another attempt to appear on the stage; but illness and anxiety had made fearful havoc with his looks and his gaiety; and a paralytic stroke whilst acting in his own piece, 'The Devil on Two Sticks,' put an end for ever to his stage performances. He retired to Bath, and there his health and sprightliness somewhat recovered; but it was only a flickering of the expiring candle in its socket. The doctors advised him to try Paris, and thither, from his house in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, he proceeded, by way of Dover, in the following October, with a presentiment that he should never return to Town alive. It was here, whilst waiting at the Ship Inn for a favourable passage, the conversation occurred with the cook-maid, and probably Foote's very last jokes, without which no account of him seems to be considered complete. The woman was boasting that she had never left her native place, when Foote retorted by saying that he had heard upstairs that she had been 'several times all over Greece,' and that he himself had seen her at 'Spithead.' On the following day, the 21st October, 1777, he had another paralytic seizure, and was no more. On the 3rd November he was buried by torch-light in the west cloister of Westminster Abbey.[144] No stone marks his resting-place; but there is an epitaph to his memory at St. Mary's, Dover, of which the following is a copy:
Sacred to the memory of
Samuel Foote, Esq.,
Who had a Tear for a Friend,
And a Hand and Heart ever ready
To Relieve the Distressed.
He departed this life Oct. 21st, 1777 (on his journey to France),
at the Ship Inn, Dover,
aged 55 years.
This inscription was placed here by his affectionate Friend,
Mr. Wm. Jewell.[145]
He left, besides portraits and small legacies to sundry of his friends, the bulk of the property remaining to him to his two natural children, Francis and George; and I may here observe that, notwithstanding Cooke's positive statement that Foote married a Worcestershire lady, and that shortly after the wedding he took her to his father's house at Truro; and Polwhele's dictum that he married Miss Polly Hicks, of Prince's Street, Truro—(she is said to have been sixteen and Foote eighteen when they married, but she died early of consumption)—I have been unable to discover with certainty whether or not he was ever really married. Certainly, no Mrs. Foote ever appeared upon the scene when he lived at 'The Hermitage,' North End, between Fulham and Hammersmith (to which place he had moved from Parson's Green, where Theodore Hooke afterwards lived). Here he used to be very fond of entertaining his friends, amongst whom were many members of the nobility, and occasionally even royal personages, with his usual wasteful extravagance. There is a story of his having been 'reconciled' to his wife whilst he was living at Blackheath; and another story of his old fellow-collegian Dr. Nash, the historian of Worcestershire, having called to see him when confined for debt in the Fleet Prison, and finding a supposed Mrs. Foote hiding somewhere in the room; but there are, I believe, no proofs positive of the reckless, dissipated subject of this memoir having ever submitted to the marriage tie.