Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER XI.

SAMUEL FOOTE.

"ONE Foote, a player," is Walpole's contemptuous reference to him who was otherwise designated as the "British Aristophanes." But, as often happens, the player was as good a man by birth, and at least as witty a man by nature, as he who despised him. His father was a Cornish gentleman, and an M. P.; his mother a daughter of Sir Edmund Goodere, Bart., through whom Foote called cousins with the ducal family of Rutland. A lineal successor of this baronet followed Mrs. Clive, as Walpole's tenant at Little Strawberry Hill, and Horace called him "a goose."

Young Sam Foote, born at Truro, in 1720, became a pupil at the Worcester Grammar School. His kinsfolk on the maternal side used to invite him to dinner on the Sundays, and the observant, but not too grateful guest, kept the Monday school hilarious and idle, by imitations of his hospitable relatives. The applause he received, helped to make Foote, ultimately, both famous and infamous.

Later in life he entered Worcester College, Oxford, and quitted both with the honors likely to be reaped by so clever a student. Having made fun of the authorities, made a fool of the provost, and made the city turn up the eye of astonishment at his audacity in dress, and way of living, he "retired," an undergraduate, to his father's house. There, by successfully mimicking a couple of justices who were his father's guests, he was considered likely to have an especial call to the Bar. He entered at the Temple, and while resident there, a catastrophe occurred in his family. His mother had two brothers; Sir John Goodere and Captain Samuel Goodere. The baronet was a bachelor, and the captain in the royal navy, being anxious to enjoy the estate, strangled his elder brother on board his own ship, the Ruby. The assassin was executed. Shortly after, Cooke introduced his finely-dressed friend Foote, at

a club in Covent Garden, as "Mr. Foote, the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for murdering his brother!"

Foote succeeded as ill at the Temple as at Oxford; and his necessities, we are told, drove him on he stage. As, when those necessities were relieved, he preferred buying a diamond ring, or new lace for his coat, to purchasing a pair of stockings, we may fairly conclude that the stage was a nore likely place wherein he might succeed than the back benches of a court of law. Indeed, he did not live to make, but to break, fortunes. Of these he "got through" three, and realized the motto on his carriage, “Iterum, iterum, iterumque."

His connection with those great amateur actors, the Delavals, was of use to him, for it afforded him practice, and readier access to the stage, where, as a regular play er, he first appeared at the Haymarket, on the 6th of February, 1744, as Othello, "dressed after the manner of the country." He failed; yet "he perfectly knew what the author meant," says Macklin. Others, again, describe his Moor as a master-piece of burlesque, only inferior in its extravagance and nonsense to his Hamlet, which I do not think he ever attempted. His Pierre and Shylock were failures, and even his Lord Foppington, played in his first season, indicated that Cibber was not to depart with the hope that he was likely to have in Foote an able successor.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to assign Foote's position exactly. According to Davies, he was despicable in all parts, but those he wrote for himself; and Colman says he was jealous of every other actor, and cared little how any dramas but his own were represented. Wilkinson ascribes to him a peculiar excellence.

[ocr errors]

In Dublin, 1744-5, he was well received, and drew a few good houses; and thence came to Drury Lane. He played the fine gentlemen, Foppington, Sir Novelty Fashion, Sir Courtly Nice, Sir Harry Wildair; with Bayes, and Dick; Tinsel, and the Younger Loveless, in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Scornful Lady;" but he could not reach the height of Cibber, Booth, or Wilks. He had the defects of all three, and nothing superior to either, but in the expression of the eye and lip. His thick-set figure, and his vulgar cast of features, he had not yet turned to purpose. He was conscious of a latent strength, but knew not where it lay. He had

failed in tragedy, and was pronounced unfit for comedy; and he asked, almost despairingly, "What the deuce then am I fit for?" As we find him the next three years, 1747, 8, 9, at the Haymarket, giving his "Diversions of the Morning," his "Tea," his "Chocolate," and his "Auction of Pictures;" it is clear that he soon discovered where his fitness lay.

At the outset, he combined the regular drama with his "Entertainment," Shuter, Lee, and Mrs. Hallam, being with him. The old wooden house being unlicensed, Foote got into difficulties, for a time, but he surmounted them by perseverance. He drew the town, morning after morning, and then night after night, with imitations of the actors at other houses, of public characters, and even of members of private clubs. Some of the actors retaliated, Woodward particularly. Their only strong point was that Foote, in striving to enrich himself, was injuring the regular drama. His Cat Concerts did really constitute fair satire against the Italians. But people paid, laughed, and defied law and the constables; and Foote continued to show up Dr. Barrowby, the critic; Chevalier Taylor, the quack oculist; Cocks, the auctioneer; Orator Henley; Sir Thomas De Veal, the Justice of the Peace; and other noted persons of the day.

How these persons were affected by the showing-up, I cannot say; but Foote objected to being himself shown up by Woodward. Whereon, Garrick asked, "Should he dress at you in the play, how can you be alarmed at it, or take it ill? The character, exclusive of some little immoralities which can never be applied to you, is that of a very smart, pleasant, conceited fellow, and a good mimic."

66

For a few years Foote was engaged alternately at either house, on a sort of starring engagement, during which he produced his Englishman in Paris" (Buck, by Macklin; Lucinda, by his clever daughter); "Englishman Returned from Paris" (Buck, by Foote); "Taste" (Lady Pentweazle, by Worsdale); and the "Author" (Cadwallader, by Foote). In the first two satires, was scourged the alleged folly of sending a young fellow to travel, by way of education; but in this instance the satire fails, for Buck, who leaves home a decided brute, returns in an improved form as only a coxcomb. "Taste" satirized the enthusiasm for objects of VOL. II.-6

vertú, the gross humbug of portrait painters, and the vanity of those who sat to them. Worsdale was himself an artist, and a scamp. He kept, half-starved, and kicked Letitia Pilkington, the very head of all the house of hussies, obnoxious to such treatment. In the "Author" Foote did not so much satirize writers, or care for improving their condition, as he did to caricature one of his own friends, Mr. Ap Rice (or Apreece), a patron of authors, who sat open-mouthed and silly, in the boxes, to the delight of the audience, and mystified by the reflection of himself, which he beheld on the stage.

In 1760, Foote brought out his " Minor" in Dublin, he playing Shift, and Woodward, Mrs. Cole. In the summer of the same year he reproduced it at the Haymarket, playing Shift, Smirk, and Mrs. Cole. After occasionally acting at the two larger theatres, and creating Young Wilding, in the "Liar," he finally went to the Haymarket, where, from 1762 to 1776, he acted almost exclusively.

In the "Minor," the author pilloried Longford, the plausible auctioneer, Mother Douglas, a woman of very evil life, and, in Shift, the Rev. George Whitfield, who was nobly, and with much self-abnegation, endeavoring to amend life wherever he found it of an evil quality. Here was Foote's weakness. He did not care for the suppression of vice; but if he who attempted to suppress it had a foible, or a strongly-marked characteristic, Foote laid hold of him, and made him look like a fool or a rascal, in the eyes of a too willing audience.

The "Minor" failed in Dublin, very much to the credit of an Irish audience, if they condemned it on the ground of its grossness and immorality. To the credit of English society, there was strong protest made against it here; and also in Scotland-in and out of the pulpit; but the theatres were full whenever it was represented, nevertheless! The injury it effected must have been incalculable, for the wit was on a par with the blasphemy; but when Saving Grace and the work of the Holy Ghost are employed to raise a laugh of derision, the edification of the hearers is as little to be expected as it was hoped or cared for by the author. Foote, nevertheless, protested that in this piece, which brought back the coarseness of Aphra Behn, with a deeper irreligious tint, he meant

66

no offence against the pious, but only against hypocrites. He was merely driven to that excuse. It is one, I think, that cannot be accepted, for Foote was not a truthful man. When he was taxed with ridiculing the Duchess of Kingston as Kitty Crocodile, in the Trip to Calais," he assured Lord Hertford, the Chamberlain, that he had no idea that the allusions in that piece could apply to the duchess; and when he failed in procuring a license to play it, he had the impudence to assert as the grounds of failure, that he had refused to put Lord Hertford's son on the box-keeper's free list-or as a more improbable story has it, to make the young gentleman box-keeper; and hence, denial of the license! Lady Llanover, in a note in her Memoirs of Mrs. Delaney, roundly asserts that when Foote had completed his caricature of the duchess, "he informed her of it, in the hopes of extorting a large bribe for its suppression;" but from this assertion I dissent; though it is not improbable, as Walpole has recorded, that the duchess offered him a bribe "just as if he had been a member of parliament!"

Foote's fourteen years of summer seasons at the Haymarket, formed an era of their own. There had never been any thing resembling it, nor has any thing like it succeeded. In his first year, 1762, he produced the "Orators." "There is a madness for oratories," writes Walpole, alluding to Macklin's school, and Foote's lectures. In the satire on public speakers, Foote caricatured Faulkner, the Irish publisher; a fact which Chesterfield was the first to joyfully proclaim to the victim, whose infirmity-he had but one leg-should have saved him from what otherwise may have been due to his conceit, if personal caricature be justifiable at all.

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 Poppoa. The individual pilloried in this piece was Lord Melcombe, under the form of Sir Thomas Lofty, played by Foote;

« PreviousContinue »