that in comedy he so far at once made his ground safe, that the public had always a certain welcome for him in parts, which, though leading ones, he seems to have chosen as not absolutely possessed by more successful competitors; and to which therefore, with occasional sallies into such extraneous matter as Shylock, he will be found upon the whole shrewdly to restrict himself. In the winter of 1744-45 he went over to Dublin, and played with some success at the Smock-alley theatre, then just opened by Thomas Sheridan, the son of Swift's friend; and in the winter of 1745-46 he was installed as one of the regular company at Drury-lane. His venture so far had succeeded, and the course of his future life was marked out.

No account has been kept of his performances in Dublin; for though he is said to have drawn crowded. houses, his wit was more remembered than his acting, and two of the jokes he made may therefore here be recorded instead of the parts he played. Being reproached, on praising the hospitality of Ireland, as but a half-qualified witness, not having visited the capital of the south, he insisted that he might claim to have as good as seen Cork, he had seen so many drawings of it; and being asked what impression was conveyed to him by the condition of the Irish peasantry, he declared that it had settled a question which before had been a constant plague to him, and he now knew what the English beggars did with their cast-off clothes. The comedies he appeared in at Drurylane, the winter after his return, are in some degree evidence not only of the character of his acceptance with the public, but of what he felt, himself, in regard to his powers. He played, four times, Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar's Constant Couple, with Peg Woffington, herself the once famous Sir Harry, for his Lady Lurewell. He repeated Lord Foppington, in Vanbrugh's Relapse, several times; with Mrs. Woffington as Berinthia, and Mrs. Clive as Miss Hoyden. He revived Addison's comedy of the Drummer, which had not been presented for some years,

that he might himself perform Tinsel. He played Sir Novelty Fashion in Cibber's Love's Last Shift. He played Sir Courtly Nice in Crowne's comedy of that name. He played the Younger Loveless in Beaumont and Fletcher's Scornful Lady, on the occasion of Mrs. Woffington selecting it for her benefit. He repeated, five or six times, the part of Dick in Vanbrugh's Confederacy. And finally, he appeared in the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, and gave, to the general surprise and delight of many audiences, and the particular consternation of some individuals among them, his version of the celebrated Bayes.

In this selected list, one cannot but recognise something of the personal wit and humorous peculiarity of the man. As the town would not have him in characters that would have carried him out of himself, he darted at once into the other extreme of playing characters closely resembling himself, and took his audiences into confidence with his personal weaknesses and failings. What he now played, he was or had been. He was the graceless son, the adventurer with the handsome leg; he was the flimsy fop and dandy, who had made a god of his tailor and scorned essential for non-essential things; he was the very embodiment of the heedless light-hearted coxcomb, the type of youthful spirits and recklessness let loose upon the world. But what a man is, he does not always look; and in such plays as these, it was Foote's disadvantage that his appearance told against him. In person he was short, with a tendency to stoutness; his face even in youth was round, fleshy, and flat, and his nose had breadth, without strength or delicacy: though he had a pleasing expression of mouth, more refined than in a man of his temperament might perhaps have been looked for; and he had an eye in whose sparkling depths lay a spring of humour unfailing and perpetual, which would have raised from insignificance or repulsiveness features fifty times as coarse or inelegant. In that dramatic gallery of the Garrick Club which may hereafter, to Horace Walpole's traveller from New York, or to Mr. Macaulay's from New

Zealand, be as the Nineveh of a delightful art even now lost and past away, there hangs a reasonably good copy of the portrait by Reynolds' in possession of the Duke of Newcastle, in which all this is visible yet; for though years of indulgence have done their work, and you look on the hardened clumsy features, the settled look, the painful stoop and infirmity of his later life, you see through them still what as a young man Foote must have been—a shrewd, keen, observant, mirthful, thoroughly intellectual man, but not exactly a Sir Harry Wildair, Dick Amlet, or my Lord Foppington. And so the matter seems to have struck himself, notwithstanding the amount of favour he received in such parts; for the expression is attributed to him, "If they won't have me in tragedy, and I am not fit "for comedy, what the deuce am I fit for?" A question which it was possible to answer more satisfactorily when he had once played the character of Bayes. It is not unlikely that this performance shaped entirely his subsequent career.

Garrick first introduced imitations into Bayes. The tradition of the part had connected it with Dryden, even to the great old poet's full suit of black velvet; but Garrick took off the black velvet, put on a shabby old-fashioned black coat, and presented a mere quizzical, conceited, solemn ass of a poet, going about reciting his own verses. Cibber condemned the innovation; and Lord Chesterfield said that Bayes had lost dignity by it, and, no longer the burlesque of a great poet, was become no better than a garretteer: but, besides that the character is really no higher than this, the hearty enjoyment of his audiences justified Garrick; and when, in the delivery of the verses, he gave a succession of comical pictures of the actors most familiar to them, they laughed and cheered him to the echo. Garrick's idea Foote now seized, and worked out

1 During the brief glories of the Manchester Art Festival the original was exhibited, and showed its title to a deservedly high place even among

the admirable specimens which had there been collected of the great English painter.

after his own fashion. What was mirthful exaggeration in Garrick, in him became bitter sarcasm; the license Garrick had confined to the theatre, Foote carried with keener aim beyond it; the bad actors on the mimic stage, he kept in countenance by worse actors on the real one; he laughed alike at the grave public transactions, and at the flying absurdities of the day; at the debates in parliament, the failures of the rebels, the follies of the quidnuncs, at politicians, play writers, players; and as, flash upon flash, the merriment arose, Foote must at last have felt where in all respects his real strength lay, and that there was a vacant place in theatres he might of right take possession of, a ground to be occupied without rival or competitor. Davies says, no doubt truly, that what he improvised and added to Bayes was as good as the original, indeed not distinguishable from it but by greater novelty of allusion. Why not strike out, then, another Bayes more strictly suited to himself, equip himself with character and wit provided solely from his own brain, and, with the high claim and double strength of author as well as actor, carry the town by storm?

The last night of his performance at Drury-lane was at the close of April 1746; the interval he employed in drawing out his scheme, and in getting together a small band of actors devoted to him who would help him in its accomplishment; and in the General Advertiser of the 22nd of April 1747, appeared the following advertisement:

"At the Theatre in the Haymarket this day will be performed a Concert of Mufic, with which will be given gratis a new entertainment called the Diverfions of the Morning, to which will be added a farce taken from the Old Batchelor called the Credulous Husband, Fondlewife by Mr. Foote; with an Epilogue to be spoken by the B-d-d Coffee House. To begin at 7.”

The little theatre was crowded; but the Diversions, as then given, was never printed, and its character can only be inferred from such casual recollections as have survived, and from the general effect produced. It was such an

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entertainment as till then had not been attempted. Perhaps the closest resemblance to it was Sir William Davenant's, of nearly a century earlier; when he evaded the general closure of the theatres, and baffled the stern watch of the puritans, by his entertainment at Rutlandhouse after the manner of the ancients." After the manner of the ancients, too, were Foote's diversions; yet such as no Englishman had attempted before him. In introducing himself upon the scene, it is true, he did only what Ben Jonson had done; in laughing at brother authors and rivals, he had the example of both Decker and Old Ben; in satirising politicians and statesmen, he but followed Fielding and Gay; in "taking off" the peculiarities of actors, Eastcourt and Garrick were before him; -but no man, since the old Athenian, had dared to put living people upon the stage, not simply in their impersonal foibles or vices, but with the very trick of voice that identified them, and with the dress in which they walked the streets. In the epilogue of the Bedford coffee-house, the wits and critics of that celebrated place of resort were shown in ludicrous dispute; a notorious physician, less remarkable for professional eminence than for the oddity of his appearance and the meddlesome singularity of his projects, was good-humouredly laughed at; a quack oculist, of wide repute and indisputably bad character, was more bitterly ridiculed; and the first performance had not ceased when Foote received the name which always afterwards clung to him, however in some respects strangely misapplied, of the English Aristophanes.

That a second performance should if possible be prevented, would also seem to have been determined before the first was over. The actors at once took up arms against their merciless assailant, and applied the licensingact against him.' Even if there could be a doubt as to his own spoken dialogue, the portion of Congreve's Old Bachelor which he had acted (and where, by the way, Davies,

1 The virulence of the feeling aroused may be estimated by some

lines which the Drury-lane prompter, Chetwood, thinks worth preserving