the Suppression of Vice, by those who passed over Beppo, as one of the pleasantest light productions of the time; and Boswell is laughed at and abused by everybody, as an egotist and an absurd fellow, for having written one of the most valuable and interesting books in the English language. Lastly, for the list gets long-the subject of the present paper, Foote, passes with the many, as a man of disreputable character, who had a sort of knack at writing libellous farces.

Various causes have united to produce the low estimation in which the writings of Foote are held. Amongst these, the enmity of Dr Johnson, as displayed in the entertaining volumes before referred to, was not one of the least. Foote complained, and justly, of the crabbed moralist's harsh and contemptuous way of speaking of him, and had he, in return, exhibited the uncouth censor on the stage, it certain ly would not have been the most unprovoked of his outrages on private feelings. He has been called the English Aristophanes. The Greek wit, however, actually caricatured Socrates on the Athenian boards, and that without any provocation at all. It would be useless to deny, that the personalities which gave temporary attractions to the dramas of Foote, were in the highest degree reprehensible. Still, it must be granted that these pieces embody a vein of wit, a natural display of character, and an elegance of style, which should ensure them readers, long after the immediate personal causes of attraction have been forgot

ten.

of any feeling but that of self-interest, makes no scruple of exciting the laughter of an audience by outraging the feelings of another. There is a subdued ease and scholarlike elegance in his diction, which no occasion ever tempts him to desert. The gentleman is never sunk in the satirist, nor the man of education in the droll. His wit is not often licentious, nor ever gross. It has always the air of being suppressed rather than forced. His thoughts, if they did not flow easily, seem to have been systematically rejected; and he appears to have resolved not to say anything, however keen, which could not be said with a graceful and unperturbed propriety such is the style of Foote. If he was a buffoon in conversation, he certainly is not so in literature. That he was a buffoon at all, I must be permitted to doubt. The strong prejudice against him, which his writings were no doubt calculated to excite, has probably left a load upon his memory, at once undeserved and irremediable. That this has been the case with many others is undeniable. Boccacio passes for a mere profligate; Hobbes, for an atheist; Priestley, for adeist; and Machiavel for a fiend. With what reason, let those who are familiar with their works bear witness.

Some Jacobin wit-probably on the hustings at Covent-garden-has asserted, that the best sample of English government was to be found within the rules of the King's Bench-and of English prosperity at the settlement of Botany-bay. It is, perhaps, equally odd, and quite as true, to say that some of the best specimens of moral satire and of English style, are to be selected from the dramas of Foote. The personal eccentricities upon which many of his characters more or less depend; and which, at first, were perhaps their principal attraction, have ultimately been their greatest injury. Thus

"Return the ingredients of the poison'd chalice

To our own lips That his characters, however, included the representation of individual particularities and obliquities, ought not to detract from their other merits. They are singular, but still faithful representations of human nature. The talent which seized and delineated their superficial peculiarities, has not omitted to embody that substratum of natural

sentiment and feeling, which is common to our experience, and which "comes home to our business and our bosoms." Who knows but that Hamlet, that natural yet almost inexplicable mixture of passion and reflection; or that Shallow, or that Falstaff, or that Overreach, or that Volponè, or that Mr Hardcastle, or, to quit the drama, that Parson Adams, or Trulliber, or Morgan, or Whiffle, or Pallet, or Paulus Pleydell, Esq.; was drawn from some individual, in the author's eye, at the very time of his writing? Who does not know that some of these characters were so drawn? yet this does not detract from their general interest and acknowledged merit, nor ought it to do so. Foote's disadvantage is, that the public knew the individuals from whom he drew, in the other cases this was known only to the author.

finished.-It stuck at five and forty I, charmed with the picture, and piqued at the people-a-going at five and forty nobody more than five and forty? pray, ladies and gentlemen, look at this piece quite flesh and blood, and only wants a touch from the torch of Prometheus to start from the canvass, and fall a-bidding!-A general plaudit ensued; I bowed, and in three minutes knocked it down at sixty-three, ten." "That (observes Sir George) was a stroke at least equal to your master." "O dear me! you did not know that great man; alike in every thing; he had as much to say upon a ribbon as a Raphael.-His manner was inimitably fine. I remember they took him off at the Play-house some time ago;-pleasant,-but wrong. Public characters are not to be sported with-they are sacred. But we lose time. There will be a world of company. I shall please you-but the great nicety of our art is the eye. Mark how mine skims round the room. Some bidders are shy, and advance only with a nod ; but I nail them. One, two, three-four

It has happened to Foote, as to many other dramatic writers, that those of his pieces which keep possession of the stage are by no means his best. In the Mayor of Garrat, Sturgeon and Sneak, though sufficiently laughable, are coarse caricatures; and the Lyar is perhaps carried off more by the sprightliness of the action, than by originality of character or humour of dialogue. It has always appeared to me that the Minor is his best acting play, although some other of his pieces undoubtedly contain characters more artfully drawn than the best in this comedy, excellent as they are. It is impossible that any scene can be more amusing-more airily hit off-than that in which Shift personates Mr Smirk. Nor does it at all detract from the pleasure of the reader to be told that Smirk was drawn from the celebrated Mr Cock the auctioneer. The absurd self-importance, whim, and flippancy, will always tell, whether Cock, Smirk, or Shift be the vehicle. His panegyric on his predecessor Mr Prig cannot itself be too much panegyrized. It may be a bur− lesque, but the tints, though rather more vivid, are little less delicate than those of nature. It is to the truth, what the solar is to the lunar rainbow. His account of his own rise is not less whimsical and spirited. "One flower," says he, "flounced involuntarily from me that day, as I may say. I remember Dr Trifle called it enthusiastic, and pronounced it a presage to my future greatness. The lot was a Guido; a single figure; a marvellous fine performance, well preserved and highly

five; you will be surprised-ha ha! heigh-ho!" Mrs Cole is a powerful though somewhat coarse delineation of one of those strange jumbles of the flesh and the spirit, half repentance and half vice; half hypocrisy, half fear; half cant, half feeling-which the early and more fanatical days of methodism produced. The composi tion is a most unaccountable one; and when Loader the black-leg exclaims "may I lose a deal with an honour at bottom, if old Moll does not bring the tears into my eyes," we feel it is impossible that the heterogeneous can be carried further.

The farce of Taste is a happy effort. Garrick's Lethe, which is something similar, as to the species of satire, is not to be compared to it. Foote never let the antiquaries and virtuosi alone; and he has here added hit after hit to his numerous catalogue, at which, though they are repeated in almost every variety of form, it is difficult to refuse a smile. When the mock "Mynheer Baron de Groningen" asks Novice of his bust, "but where is de nose?" the replication of the irritated connoisseur is what a Frenchman would call superb. "The nose! what care I for the nose? where is de nose!-why, Sir, if it had a nose, I would not give sixpence for it. How the devil should we distinguish the works of the an

cients, if they were perfect? the nose, indeed,-why I don't suppose now but, barring the nose, Roubiliac could cut as good a head, every whit.-Brush, -who is this man, with his nose?" "The Commissary" is another good acting play, and was, I believe, for many years very popular. The story of the Patron" has been more than once dramatized in English. Tobin left a farce on the same subject, which, however, is much inferior to Foote's. Sir Thomas Lofty, the patron, is depicted with great truth: and Rust, the old antiquary, who falls in love because the lady's nose is turned up like that of the bust of the Empress Poppaa, "the chaste moiety of the amiable Nero," is very amusing. It has always appear ed to me, however, that the characters in which he has been most successful are Sir Luke Limp, in the Lame Lover, and Sir Christopher Cripple, in the Maid of Bath. He seems to have written them in order to display his own acting, after the misfortune of his broken limb, and exhibit that nicely balanced union of humour, licentiousness, cleverness, and absurdity, in which he delighted. That his own character was of this cast there is no doubt; and they are evidently written con amore. Sir Luke Limp ("not to speak it profanely") is in farce, very much what Hamlet is in tragedy, and Falstaff in comedy. At once attractive, odd, clever, weak, and vain: in short, a natural, and yet rather inexplicable, composition. His halting activity is not his worst part. He has "a thousand things to do, for half a million of people,-positively. Promised to procure a husband for Lady Cicely Sulky, and match a coach horse for Brigadier Whip; after that, must run into the City to borrow a thousand for young Atall at Almack's; send a Cheshire cheese, by the stage, to Sir Timothy Tankard, in Suffolk, and get at the Herald's Office a coat of arms to clap on the coach of Billy Bengal, a nabob newly arrived: so you see (he adds) I have not a moment to lose." Nothing, in farce, can be better than his shifts to change his engagements, when he is invited to dinner, first by Sir Gregory Goose, then by Lord Brentford, and lastly, by his Grace the Duke of, whose title he never waits to have repeated" Grace where is he, where but scuttles out, after he has got Lord Brentford's engagement disposed of, with " I beg ten thousand

pardons for making his Grace wait, but his Grace knows my misfor-." The concluding scenes, in which they plead as they think before the Sergeant's gown and wig, whilst he himself is hidden under them; and in which the knight and the lawyer make each other tipsey with such ludicrous success, are not easy to be outdone.

It would be tedious to particularize further. The genius of Foote, like that of all other writers of farces, and many writers of comedies, sometimes runs wild, and deviates into downright extravagance. Sir Peter Pepperpot's account of his getting a turtle down to one of his boroughs, at election time, by putting on it a Capuchin, and taking it a seat in the fly, though it is hardly possible to read it with gravity, is a glaring instance. His names, like those ofthe author of Waverley, though sometimes a little too ludicrous, have always a happiness about them. We have "the part of Othello by Lord Catastrophe's butler,"-" Lord Gorman's fat Cook,"-" Mynheer Vancaper, the Dutch figure dancer at the Opera-house in the Haymarket;" and we are told of the match between "the Marquis of Cully and Fanny Flipflap, the French dancer."

His "Trip to Calais" does him least honour. The piece itself is indifferent, and the transactions to which it gave rise, to say the truth, had better be left in the cloud which envelopes them. The attack upon the Duchess of Kingston was decidedly the most unfortunate action of his unguarded and volatile life. In that unaccountable woman he met with his match. Lady Kitty Crocodile was, in the end, too hard for him. His laxity of principle could not contend against her entire disregard of it: and to her vindictive intrigues was owing the prosecution which is thought to have shortened his days. That it did so, is a proof that he was possessed of strong feelings, although they might not always have been excited when they ought. With all his knowledge of the world, it would seem that he attained to know only by bitter experience "Furens quid Foemina possit."

In a notice of Foote's works, it would be unpardonable to omit mentioning his excellent "Comic Theatre from the French." There is not room, however, to do more than mention it.

T. D.