Mrs. Garrick in a new piece, and as the compliment is not now to be found in his published writings, the reader may not object to see it here. The superiority of female government is asserted from the flourishing state of Spain, France and England, governed at the same period by the Princess des Ursins, Madame de Maintenon, and the Duchess of Marlborough; when, an objection being made from the success of Drury-lane theatre under the acknowledged direction of a man, to weaken that plea the director is said to have also the good fortune to be assisted in his councils by a Madame de Maintenon. Whereupon Garrick's delight reveals itself by a message of cordial congratulation on the success of the Bankrupt, which he has heard, from a gentleman who loves and understands alike the stage and the law, is Foote's best performance. Among the best it certainly is for its high and legitimate aim. That was the fatal year (1772) of the vast mercantile failures which Horace Walpole tells us were all owing to the Scotch bankers, which involved losses computed beyond four millions, and spread everywhere ruin and dismay. Suggested by such personal incidents, there "often navigated with great success was yet no mere personal bitterness in it. Indeed he struck out of it many allusions that might have given pain to Sir George Fordyce, whose failure from unwise speculation in this same year, though it spread wonder and dismay over London, left his character unimpeached; and he levelled it exclusively at knavish manufacturers of bankruptcies on 'Change, and at not less wicked inventors of calumnies in the low and prurient press. A distinction between their personalities, and his own, was here eagerly sought to be marked; for when the satirical editor claims to supply the law's defect by stigmatising offenders it cannot reach, his claim is called a malicious pretext under which to assail the innocent, and he is told that when slander is sown broadcast the deformity of vice is overgrown, and the result is to make bad men worse by hardening them in evil, and to render even the good indifferent to what is the source of patriotism and the sustainment of virtue, a just public opinion. However, Mr. Margin would rather be persecuted than preached at. Persecution, he says, is the life and soul of his trade, and his definition of hard times is a time with no prospect in it of getting lodged in Newgate for a libel. It was strange that Foote should not see that personal satire of any kind carried with it, in a greater or less degree, the vice he thus denounced in Mr. Margin; that no one can ever flatter himself he is extirpating knavery, by merely exposing a notorious knave; and that the only true course is to strike at the offence, and to leave the offender to be struck at by justice. It was after the production of this comedy Foote went to Ireland for the last time. In the preceding year he had bid Scotland farewell. Such journies involved fatigue and endurance in those days, and, though he is now little more than fifty years old, we may see that age is stealing on him. In that journey to Edinburgh,' he wrote to Tate 1 It was said of him on the occasion of this visit that he gave entertainments unusually extravagant as a rebuke to Scotch parsimony, and used to send his cook to market in a sedanchair. An anecdote of the visit, which we have from Boswell, ought not to be omitted. Foote was at a Wilkinson, he had encountered more perils than in a voyage to the Indies; for, not to mention mountains, precipices, savage cataracts, and more savage men, he had been locked up for near a week in a village, dirty, dismal, and desolate, by a fall of snow. But he turned with pleasanter thoughts to Ireland. Friends were there who had always welcome for him; the place was associated with his earliest success; and never had warmer greeting been given him than on his visit soon after his accident, the first after Faulkner's verdict. Lord Townshend was then Lord-lieutenant, and the Bedford and Rigby hospitalities were redoubled. His plays were commanded more than once, and the result of the engagement was to reimburse a great loss he had undergone at play in passing through Bath to Holyhead, and to restore him to the Haymarket a richer man than he left it. Lord Harcourt was now Lord-lieutenant, and he knew the same kindness awaited him. Yet there was a touch of sadness in the occasional prologue he had written for his opening night, when he appeared in the Nabob. He reminds the Irish that they first had acknowledged his humour as an actor ("you gave, "at least discovered first, the vein "); and, contrasting his youthful outset five-and-twenty years back with what he large dinner-party, where Boswell also was present, and the conversation turned upon Johnson. The wit instantly made merry at Johnson's expense. And it was very coarse jocularity, says Boswell, and made the company laugh so much that he felt it was not quite civil to himself. So, as a Roland for Foote's Oliver, he tells them that he at least had lately heard a capital thing from Johnson, whatever other people's experience of him had been. "Ah! my old friend "Sam," says Foote, "no man says "better things; do let us have it." "Why, he said," rejoins Boswell, "when I asked him if you were not "an infidel, that if you were, you were an infidel as a dog is an in"fidel; that is to say, you had never "thought upon the subject." There was a loud laugh at this coarseness, which of course Foote did not relish; and Boswell declares, with much selfadmiration for the disagreeable thing he had been delivered of, he never saw Foote so disconcerted, grave, and angry. "What, Sir!" said he, 'talk thus of a man of liberal edu"cation-a man who for years was at the University of Oxford-a man "who has added sixteen new characters to the drama of his coun'try!" And he proceeded earnestly to resent the gross imputation. 66 was then to present to them, he can find but this subject for self-congratulation in it, that— "If age contracts my muscles, shrills my tone, No man will claim those foibles as his own." But with his brother actors, before and behind the scene, all was with him as of old. O'Keefe was a hanger about the Dublin theatre in those days, and more than half a century afterwards recalled with a kindly and vivid impression the celebrated wit, with his humorous twinkle of the eye, his smile so irresistible with one corner of his mouth, and his voice rather harsh except when imitating others. People wondered at him in Dublin, according to O'Keefe, for the dinners and wine he gave, and for what seemed something of a parade of affluence; but this made part of the man. He never saw him, he adds, that he was not surrounded by laughers, for none that came near him could help it; and nothing struck him so much as the effect produced upon him one night, when, sitting in the greenroom as usual amid a crowded circle of the performers, all in full laugh at and with him, he was suddenly disconcerted by observing one young actor, who had fixed himself right before the centre of attraction, maintain steadily a calm, grave, quiet face, unmoved by the roar around. It was an actor whom O'Keefe had that very morning seen drilled by Foote in one of his comedies, when he mispronounced a word. "Ha, ha!" cried Foote: "What's that, sarcophagus? the word is sarcophagus; it's derived "from the Greek, you know; I wonder that did not strike you!" But the youth had some wit, it would seem, if he had little Greek, and he punished Foote in the manner just related. 66 It was not, however, simply as a jester he had such vogue with his brother performers. They are a kindly, genial race, and Foote was always generous to them. In this respect, certainly, he took the lead of the Drury-lane manager; as well as in the simple, business-like, unpretending way, in which he always treated of matters of busi 66 ness. An actress complained to him one day of the low salary she had from Garrick, on which Foote asked her why she had gone to him, knowing the salary she might have had at the Haymarket. "Oh, I don't know how it was," she said; "he talked me over so by telling me he "would make me immortal, that I did not know how to "refuse him." "Did he so indeed?" said Foote. "Well, "then I suppose I must outbid him that way. Come to "me, then, when you are free. I'll give you two pounds a week more, and charge you nothing for immortality!" Of the common vice of the profession, he seems to have had less than almost any actor on record, for it was assuredly not jealousy of Garrick that made him laugh at the attempt to set Powell above him, and, this case excepted, he was remarkable for his encouragement of debutants. Shuter, Weston,' Tate Wilkinson, Castallo, Baddely, Edwin, all these men he brought forward himself, made known, and assisted in every way; and it was not alone actors of merit, but the hoi polloi of the scene, who experienced his goodwill. Old actors were now with him at the Haymarket, who had been with him since he first went there; whom he had kept till they had long outlived their work; and whose presence on the salary-list he still justified to his economical friend Jewel, by the remark that “he kept "them on purpose to show the superior gentlemanly 1 Weston was Foote's favourite among all these men, and by all accounts he must have been an incomparable actor. "You should "have seen Weston," said Northcote to Hazlitt. "It was impossible, "from looking at him, for any one to "say that he was acting. You would suppose they had gone out and "found the actual character they "wanted, and brought him upon the "stage without his knowing it. Even "when they interrupted him with "peals of laughter and applause, he "looked about him as if he was not ''at all conscious of having anything "to do with it, and then went on as "before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and "other parts of that kind, he was "perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after "him. There was something peculiar "in his face; for I knew an old "school-fellow of his who told me he "used to produce the same effect "when a boy, and when the master "asked what was the matter, his "companions would make answer"Weston looked at me, Sir!' Yet "he came out in tragedy, as indeed "they all did!"—Conversations of Northcote, 210-211. |