insipid, insufferable coxcomb; and, without genius, judgment, or generosity, has been set up for his wealth alone, by underling bards he feeds, and broken booksellers he bribes, as a sharp-judging Adriel, the muse's friend, himself a muse. Eagerly he swallows their fulsome praise, while he affects not to claim it for himself but for that hidden genius he is ever labouring to discover in a dull unfavourable age. In such a dearth of invention, give him leave, gentlemen, to introduce to them a little smart satirical epigram; new, as he says, and prettily pointed; a production that he thinks even Martial himself would not have blushed to acknowledge. His own? O, fie! No; sent him this morning anonymously. It is wretched rubbish, but is pronounced fine! fine! very fine! by Sir Thomas's friends; it has such an ease and simplicity, a turn so unexpected and quick, a satire so poignant; to all which Sir Thomas replies, Yes, he thinks it possesses, in an eminent degree, the three great epigrammatical requisites, brevity, familiarity, and severity. And is he not, really now, himself the author? Ah, cry the flatterers, name! name! To which Lofty loftily replies, the name is needless. So it is an acquisition to the republic of letters, any gentleman may claim the merit that will. The hint is not lost on the chorus, who protest thereupon that Sir Thomas is the great manufacturer, and other poets but pedlars that live by retailing his wares. The idea finds favour in his eyes. Why, he says, to pursue the metaphor, if Sir Thomas Lofty were to call in his poetical debts, he certainly believes there might be a good many bankrupts in the Muse's Gazette. Not that Sir Thomas is poet only. Science, as he is told, and he really thinks it the most classical thing he ever heard, "science first saw the day with Socrates in the Attic

porch; her early years were spent with Tully in the "Tusculan shade; but her ripe, maturer hours, she "enjoys with Sir Thomas Lofty near Cavendish-square." So struck is he with that compliment, indeed, that as he happens to have written a play (a chef-d'œuvre) which is

to be performed this very evening, he privately selects, out of his faithful chorus, this particularly enthusiastic young friend to father upon him the entire credit of it, with all its chances of success or damnation. The subject will surprise you, he observes to his victim. It is the story of Robinson Crusoe. Are you not struck? The whole fable is finely conducted, and the character of Friday, qualis ab incepto, nobly supported throughout.

As the young gentleman's the play is accordingly produced, and, chiefly by the help of the unwitting chorus, damned; whereupon Sir Thomas, with more than the unruffled temper and equability of a Sir Fretful, encourages his friend under the disaster which he affects to consider wholly his. The public are blockheads; a tasteless, stupid, ignorant tribe; a man of genius deserves to be damned who writes anything for them: but courage, dear Dick! the principals will give you what the people refuse; the closet, the critics, the real judges, will do you that justice the stage has denied. Print your play-"My play! "Zounds, Sir, 'tis your own!" "Speak lower, dear Dick;

"be moderate, my good, dear lad!"

All the details of this comedy are equally rich and effective. In the entire acting drama we do not know a succession of more telling points, for a true actor, than the three scenes that deal with the failure of the play the first, in which Sir Thomas receives, act by act, the account of its cold reception and gradual damnation, from his footman, his coachman, and his tailor, whom he had stationed in the theatre to witness it; the second, in which the troop of egregious flatterers who had so fulsomely praised his trashy epigram, as extravagantly to his face abuse his luckless comedy, in the same hope of currying favour with him; and the third, in which his agony of fear under the threat of exposure compels him at last to purchase silence from Dick by the bribe of his niece's hand. Compared with these, even Sheridan's Sir Fretful is weak; and Foote himself not only acted the part every night, but also a characteristic little sketch of

an irascible West Indian, Sir Peter Pepperpot, which he had brought in for the mere sake of an individual portraiture it enabled him to give.

A sketch of a very different kind he had also introduced, for a laugh at the Society of Antiquaries. It was playing many fantastic tricks at the time, having recently obtained its charter; and preparatory to a grander laugh at it, which he soon after indulged in his Nabob, he made a distinguished member of the body one of Miss Lofty's lovers, much to the amazement of all who knew him. For though Martin Rust may pretend to be in love with Juliet Lofty, they are sure she's too modern for him by a couple of centuries. He likes no heads but upon coins. Married! the mummy! why 'tis not a fortnight ago since he was seen making love to the figure without a nose in Somerset-gardens; he was caught stroking the marble plaits of her gown, and asked if he was not ashamed to take such liberties with ladies in public. The inconstant old scoundrel! But you know how it happened? Juliet met him last week at her uncle's: he was a little pleased with the Greek of her profile, on closer inquiry he found the turn-up of her nose to exactly resemble the bust of the Princess Poppæa, and his business was done in an instant. In favour of the tip of that nose he has offered carte blanche for the rest of the figure, and is resolved to add Juliet's charms to the catalogue of his capital and curious collection. On the other hand, the young lady wonders at his impudence in thinking to marry a goddess, and makes strenuous resistance thereto; but having her father's consent he declines to give her up, until it happily becomes necessary to give up either her or a burnt bit of newspaper, the precious remains of the very Number Forty-five of the North Briton that was burnt at the Royal Exchange, the edges soiled by the link, but many of the letters exceedingly legible. He straightway resigns Juliet without a moment's hesitation. As inimitably as Foote had written, Weston played this part, and made it a gem of comic acting as precious as the rarest and rustiest of the old antiquary's coins.

Nor without some allusion to the underling bards and broken booksellers spawned from such patronage as Lofty's, should we close our account of this comedy, so justly a favourite with Foote himself. Mr. Dactyl and Mr. Puff are another and even lower chapter of the Vamps and Harry Handys. Puff was a fellow, according to Mr. Dactyl's account, that to him owed every shilling; whose shop was a shed in Moorfields, whose kitchen was a broken pipkin of charcoal, whose bedchamber was under the counter, and whose stock in trade was two odd volumes of Swift, the Life of Moll Flanders with cuts, the Five Senses printed and coloured by Overton, a few Classics thumbed and blotted by the boys of the Charterhouse, and the Trial of Dr. Sacheverel: until Mr. Dactyl set him afloat with his Elizabeth Canning and his quack medicines, his powders for flatulent crudities, his lotions, potions, and paste, all of which he invented. On the other hand, according to Mr. Puff, when he first knew Dactyl, the rascal was a mere garretteer in Wine-officecourt (where, by the way, Goldsmith at this moment lived), furnishing paragraphs to the Farthing Post at twelvepence a dozen; from which Mr. Puff promoted him to be collector of casualties to the Whitehall and St. James's, which he soon lost by his laziness, for he never brought them a robbery till the highwayman was going to be hanged, a birth till the christening was over, or a death till the hatchment was up. In spite whereof Mr. Puff had continued to give the fellow odd jobs at translations, which got him boiled beef and carrots at mornings, and cold pudding and porter at night: only, for this winter forsooth, Dactyl had got a little in flesh by being puff to a playhouse. But the hungry days of vacation will soon be back, and he'll be fawning and cringing again like a lean dog in a butcher's shop before the counter of his publisher, begging a bit of translation that Mr. Puff won't buy no, not if he could have it for twopence a sheet.

The extraordinary frequency with which Foote introduces matter of this kind into his comedies, leaves us at

least not doubtful of the view he took in regard to the relations of literature and publishing in his day; and we may add that the distinction he is careful to mark, in authorship, between the hack and the gentleman, he more rarely recognises in the bookselling branch of the trade. Only a couple of summers before the Patron was acted he had introduced into his Orators, from which the threat of an oak-stick was alone thought to have saved Johnson, a publisher and printer of much consideration and dignity; an alderman in Ireland, and, though with but one leg, a pompous person everywhere; who had corresponded with Swift, who still corresponded with Lord Chesterfield, who was understood to have given advice privately to sundry Lords Lieutenant, and who had a Journal of his own through which he continued to give advice publicly to Lords and Commoners in both kingdoms; whose numerous foibles had mightily amused Foote in all his visits to Dublin, and who on a recent visit to London had himself shown them off in such flourishing exuberance, that the temptation to put him in a farce was no longer resistible. Yet opinions differ still as to George Faulkner, and one cannot quite make out whether or not his self-satisfied and sleek exterior covered anything that fairly provoked and justified satire. Cooke says that his peculiarities were but trifling, and his manners unoffending; on the other hand, Cumberland says that so extravagant were they, and such his solemn intrepidity of egotism and daring contempt of absurdity, that they fairly outfaced even Foote's imitation, and set caricature at defiance. This also is borne out by what Isaac Reed remarks of his ludicrous affectation of wit and fine society, and of his perpetual boastings, in the teeth of every disadvantage of age, person, address, and deficient leg, of lavish favours from the fair sex. Nor can there be a doubt, we think, especially since Lord Mahon's publication of suppressed passages in the letters, that what in Lord Chesterfield had been taken for an honest admiration of his sense, was after all but a humorous liking for his