decently; and Foote often said, "he kept him on purpose to show the superior gentlemanly manners of the old school." Usher played with him till Foote relinquished the theatre; he then descended to the elder Colman as an heir loom, and from him to the present manager, in whose service he closed the last act of a long and irreproach able life.

In thus detailing the private life of Foote, we are almost naturally led to a comparison of him with Garrick. They were the two theatrical meteors of their day : both men of wit and education; both authors, managers, and actors; both objects that attracted the admiration of the public; and by this collision of characters they may perhaps better elucidate each other, than by an individual description.

Foote was by far the better scholar of the two and to this superiority he added also a good taste, a warm imagination, a strong turn for mimicry, and a constant fresh supply of extensive occasional reading from the best authors of all descriptions. He could likewise apply all these advantages with

great readiness; so that either with his pen, or in conversation, he was never at a loss.

Garrick was no Grecian. Davies says of him, in his Memoirs, that "he had once made himself master of all the Greek words;" but admitting that he had retained them, what sort of a Greek scholar would this knowledge have made him? In respect to the Latin, he might, perhaps, have acquired some proficiency when he was under the care of Dr. Johnson at Litchfield; but Johnson afterwards said of him, " David has not Latin enough; he finds out the Latin by the meaning, rather than the meaning by the Latin." He was, however, tolerably conversant in the classics; a good Frenchman; and read and conversed occasionally in the Italian. He also possessed a good taste, with a pleasing lively manner of delivery. The fact was, that Garrick's literary pursuits were in a great degree checked by the sudden influx of his fame and fortune; for when he became a manager, it happened of course, that from the care of a great theatre, from his own performances, and the attention which he paid to pecuniary concerns, he

had no time for the high and regular improvement of his mind: he saw a mass of wealth presenting itself before him, and he "clutched" it with a much more certain grasp than the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth leaving at his death more than one hundred thousand pounds, with this most affectionate compliment to his relations, "that he knew of no friend out of their circle."

Though Foote was not deficient in paying his respects to men of rank and fashion, he never sought them with any kind of unbecoming eagerness, or made the least distinction at his table between them and the

obscurest guest. When that table too was all in a roar, as it usually was, he never stopped the career of his bon-mot out of respect to persons; it as readily struck a noble duke as a poor player. His visitors knew the terms on which they met some approved of them from the general love of wit and good humour, while others endured them in order the better to keep within his favour and friendship.

Garrick, on the contrary, was all submission in the presence of either a peer or a

poet; equally loth to offend the dignity of the one, or provoke the irritability of the other hence he was, at times, too methodical in his conversation to admit of his mixing in "the feast of reason and the flow of soul." To his dependents and inferior players, however, he was indeed king DAVID, except when he had a mind to mortify them by means of one another. On such occasions he generally took up some of the lowest among them; whom he not only cast in the same scenes with himself, but frequently walked arm in arm with in the Green-room, and sometimes in his morning rambles about the streets.

In his domestic arrangements Garrick was uniform and respectable: a handsome house in town and country, carriages, servants, &c.; and when he gave grand entertainments, he saw some of the first company, for rank and abilities, in the kingdom. But in such meetings conversation generally partook more of a high-bred style, than the easy familiarity of a social party; except when Foote, Chase Price, Rigby, Fitzherbert, and others of this class were present. Then indeed the

pale of high breeding was instantly broken down; and wit, fun, and good humour, became the order of the day.

But fairly to taste the respective powers of these two distinguished characters, was to see them pitted together at the table of a third person, in the range of general and free conversation: a scene in which they often appeared, and where they both displayed powers which placed them so deservedly high on the scale of public importance.

The mind of Garrick,-strong in natural force, which was further aided by great professional knowledge, talents for mimicry, a wide range of good company, and much acuteness of observation,-afforded him innumerable topics of conversation, which he dilated upon in a very pleasing and agreeable manner: but this was in all cases regulated by, and made subordinate. to, his deference for superiors in rank or station, and his great respect for the decorums of life. He dared not let his shaft fly with the freedom of Foote's, for fear of giving offence; and from this cause has probably often repressed those