interest at some coffee-house in London to buy, for a small matter, the old volumes of newspapers, and send them into the country to him? They would pass away his time rarely in rainy weather. Lack-a-day! he's glad the Pope is not to have Gibraltar, though! We will leave him with Son Tim reading his favourite London Evening to him, that we may show how honestly he likes to have it read.

Lackaday! good now, Tim, the politics, child: and read the stars, and the dashes, and the blanks, as I taught you, Tim. Yes, father. We can assure our readers that the D dash is to go to F blank, and that a certain noble L— is to resign his pl—e in the T-y, in order to make r―m for the two three stars.-Wonderful! Good now! good now! great news, Tim! Ah, I knew the two three stars would come in play one time or other. This London Evening knows more than any of them. Well, child, well."

And so the reader gets a tolerably clear notion of both miser and quidnunc, of whom it is as easy to believe that both characters had living prototypes in Foote's day, as it would be difficult to believe that either has quite ceased to have his living representative in our own. The peculi. arities are so true to the respective foibles and vices exhibited, the colouring so rich, and the humorous extravagance of detail so racy and effective. He tells us, himself, that he had copied them from life, having met with them in a summer's expedition; and in that sense he challenges for them the merit, as one by no means common in his day, of being neither vamped from antiquated plays nor pilfered from French farces. The plot, we should add, is in such manner constructed that Sir Penurious does not himself appear except in the assumption of the lover of the piece, who in that disguise imposes on Sir Gregory; and this part was played by Foote himself, who dressed it after a certain gentleman in the West of England, whose manners, Mr. Cook tells us, he took off with uncommon humour and perspicuity.

But while thus engaged, a somewhat startling announcement in the General Advertiser greeted him. It came

from the comedian Woodward, now one of the company at Drury-lane under Garrick's new lesseeship; and its purport was, that on a certain evening, by particular desire, Mr. Woodward would present his very good friend the Auctioneer with Tit for Tat, or one dish of his own Chocolate. He was to imitate him in Bayes and Othello, laugh at him as a tragic actor, and dress at him in a character of Otway's. Now Foote was no exception to the rule which makes the mimic intensely sensitive to mimickry, and he wrote at once to Garrick. It was rumoured, he said, that a very contemptible friend of the Drury-lane manager was to appear in a particular character of a revived comedy, habited like his humble servant, the present writer; of course his humble servant laboured under quite as little apprehension from the passive wit of Mr. Garrick, as from the active humour and imitation of Mr. Woodward; nevertheless, as it seemed they, Mr. Garrick and himself, were to be in a state of nature, he might as well mention that he had a plan for a short farce that would be wormwood to some, entertaining to many, and very beneficial to Samuel Foote. The temper of the letter further appeared in a postscript somewhat the reverse of dignified, about the free admission at Drury-lane. "If your boxkeeper," he added, "for the future returns my name, he will cheat you "of a sum not very contemptible to you, namely, five "shillings." Garrick had a pen, however, only less neat than his antagonist's; and though he retorted about the five shillings almost as poorly as Foote had introduced it, there was wit and point in what he added as to Woodward. "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." It was the character of Malagene in Otway's Friendship in Fashion; but, as the play, and Woodward too, excellent comedian as he was, were hissed off the stage together for the mixed dullness

66

and indecency of the entertainment they presented, nothing more on the subject need here be said. Its only interest for us is, that it shows us something thus early of that fitful intercourse of Garrick and Foote, which, while they lived, interfered not a little with the comfort of both, and which cannot be omitted from any view of the character of either.

From the first they were marked out for rivalry. Distinguished by their superior intellectual qualities from all competitors in the profession to which they belonged, they had only each other to carry on a competition with; and if, as Pope says, war is necessary to the life of a wit upon earth, what are we to expect when the wit has another in the same line to make war upon, who is not only jester and player like himself, but rival manager too? The virtue must be more than human that refrains; and the "state of nature" at which Foote hints in his letter, was accordingly very often renewed. No doubt also,

Foote was almost always the aggressor. His wit was ever at its best with a victim wincing under it, and Garrick's too obvious weaknesses were a temptation difficult to be resisted. Gravely to dispute the genius of such a man would have been in Foote himself a weakness less pardonable, but in Garrick's own restless distrust of it, in his perpetual fidget of self-doubt and suspicion, in his abundance of small social defects, the occasion for laughter was incessant. Foote came into the Bedford one night, and kept him on the rack for an hour with the account of a most wonderful actor whom he had that

instant seen. He had been so moved by spoken words, he declared, as he could not till then have thought possible. Nothing like it had occurred in his experience. It was an effect to make itself felt far and wide. The manifest suffering of his listener at last became so pitiful that Foote good-naturedly brought it to a close by asking him what he thought of the histrionic talents of Mr. Pitt? when Garrick's glad surprise broke out into unaffected enthusiasm, and he declared, as he seems truly to have

felt, that if Pitt had chosen the stage he might have been immeasurably the first actor upon it.

66

66

66

As

There was also in Garrick another kind of weakness or suffering which Foote's jokes never spared, and of which we have heard many whimsical examples from the poet and wit who is happily still the living link' between that age and our own. "Garrick lately invited Hurd," said Foote to a friend of Mr. Rogers's, "to dine with him in the Adelphi; and after dinner, the evening being very warm, they walked up and down in front of the house. "they passed and repassed the dining-room windows, "Garrick was in a perfect agony; for he saw that there was a thief in one of the candles which were burning on the table, and yet Hurd was a person of such consequence that he could not turn away from him to prevent "the waste of his tallow." Another was told to Mr. Rogers by Murphy, who, describing to Foote some remarks made by Garrick on Lacy's love of money as a mere attempt to cover his own parsimony by throwing it on his fellow patentee, had ended with the old question of Why on earth didn't Garrick take the beam out of his own eye before attacking the mote in other people's. "He is not sure," said Foote, "of selling the timber." Yet a third instance Mr. Rogers was not less fond of relating, and told with infinite humour. At the Chapter coffee-house, Foote and his friends were making a contribution for the relief of a poor fellow, a decayed player, who was nick-named the Captain of the Four Winds because his hat was worn into four spouts. Each person of the company dropped his mite into the hat, as it was held out to him. "If Garrick "hears of this," exclaimed Foote, "he will certainly send us his hat.

That Garrick was not absolutely a mean or illiberal man, there is nevertheless abundant proof; but he began

1 Mr. Rogers died in December 1855. But many of his best anecdotes and most subtle sayings have been collected in the scholar-like book

VOL. II.

of Table Talk by which Mr. Dyce has paid worthy tribute to his

memory.

66 6

the world, as Johnson expresses it, with a great hunger for money, and what at the outset of life was a commendable feeling in him, became in later life a habit of which he could not always divest himself, and which exposed very often to undeserved derision a really kind and open nature. In the main, however, the impression derived from the great run of Foote's jokes on this subject is rather friendly and even cordial than otherwise. "There is a witty sati"rical story of Foote," says Johnson. "He had a small "bust of Garrick placed upon his bureau. 'You may "be surprised,' said he, 'that I allow him to be so near my gold;-but you will observe he has no hands?'” The joke is a good one, but a man would hardly so place an object displeasing to him that his eye would have to rest upon it daily and hourly, for the sake of making fifty jokes infinitely better; and the sarcasm is less worth remembering than the friendly good-will lurking under it. Another story is told of a somewhat pompous announcement, at one of Foote's dinner-parties when the Drurylane manager was among the guests, of the arrival of "Mr. Garrick's servants;" whereupon, "Oh, let them "wait," cried the wit, adding, in an affected under-tone to his own servant, but sufficiently loud to be generally heard; but, James, be sure you lock up the pantry." A third, which continues to exhibit them in cordial intercourse, is of their leaving the Bedford together one night when Foote had been the entertainer, and on his pulling out his purse to pay the bill, a guinea had dropped. Impatient at not immediately finding it, "Where on earth can it be gone to?" he said. "Gone to the devil, I think," rejoined Garrick, who also had been seeking for it everywhere. 'Well said, David," cried Foote, "let you alone for making a guinea go farther than anybody else."

The friendly feeling may often be imperilled by a laugh, but the laugh is never without a friendly feeling. Again we find it most predominant, when, one sultry summer night at the Haymarket, the Lying Valet had been put up after the Devil upon Two Sticks to please Garrick, and the satis