GARRICK AND FOOTE.

Frequent and sharp were the encounters between these two celebrities. They were the two great rivals of their day. Foote usually attacked, and Garrick, who had many weak points, was incessantly the sufferer. One night Samuel came into the Bedford where Garrick was seated, and there kept him in torture for a full hour with an account of a most wonderful actor whom he had just seen. At last Foote, compassionating the suffering listener, brought the attack to a close by asking Garrick what he thought of Mr. Pitt's histrionic talents, when Garrick, glad of the release, declared that if Pitt had chosen the stage, he might have become the first actor upon it.*

Garrick, in early life, had been in the wine-trade, and had supplied the Bedford Coffee-house with wine: he was then described by Foote as living in Durham-yard, with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine-merchant. How Foote must have abused the Bedford wine of this period!

But Garrick's parsimony was the strongest temptation to Foote's caustic humour. He related that Hurd was dining with Garrick in the centre house of the Adelphi Terrace, and after dinner, the evening being very warm, they walked up and down in front of the house. As 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.

Murphy was repeating to Foote some remarks by Garrick on Lacey's love of money as a mere attempt to cover his own stinginess by throwing it on his fellow patentee-when it was asked, 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," replied Foote, "of selling the timber."

At the Chapter Coffee-house,† Foote and his friends were

* Wilkes, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, calls Mr. Pitt "the first orator, or rather, the first comedian of the age.'

The Chapter Coffee-house, 50, Paternoster-row, is mentioned in No. 1 of the Connoisseur, Jan. 31, 1754, as "the resort of those encouragers of literature, and not the worst judges of merit, the booksellers." Chatterton dates several letters from the Chapter. Foote

making up a subscription for the relief of a poor player, who was nicknamed 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 cer tainly send his hat."

"There is a witty satirical 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.'" At one of Foote's dinner-parties, when the Drury-lane manager arrived, "Mr. Garrick's servants" were also announced. "Oh! let them wait," said Foote, in an undertone to his own servant, adding loud enough to be generally heard, "but, James, be sure you lock up the pantry.' One night, Garrick and Foote were about to leave the Bedford together, when the latter, in paying their bill, dropped a guinea; and not finding it at once, said, "Where on earth can it be gone to ?" "Gone to the devil, I think,” rejoined Garrick, who had assisted in the search. "Well said, David,” was Foote's reply; "let you alone for making a guinea go further than anybody else."

One warm summer night, at the Haymarket, Foote had put up Garrick's Lying Valet, when the little manager called in at the green-room, and with self-satisfaction said, “Well, Sam, so you are taking up, I see, with my farces, after all." Why yes, David," was Foote's reply, "what could I do I must have some ventilator this intolerable hot

better?

weather."

FOOTE AND MACKLIN.

Among the contemporaries of Foote, none ministered so abundantly to his humour as Charles Macklin, the actor and dramatic writer, who, at one period of his life, seems to have got up schemes only to be laughed at by Foote and other

appears also to have frequented it. Of its later celebrities-from 1797 to 1805 some very interesting recollections were left by the late Alexander Stephens, among his papers, and published in the Monthly Magazine for 1821, with additions by the editor, Sir Richard Phillips. They are reprinted in the Anecdote Library, 1822. The Chapter maintained its reputation for good punch and coffee, scarce pamphlets, and liberal supply of town and country newspapers, until the house was altered into a general tavern and wine-vaults.

wags of the day. In the spring of 1754, after Macklin had taken leave of the stage, he opened a tavern and public ordinary in Covent Garden, in that portion of the Piazza houses which is now the Tavistock Hotel. Here to his three-shilling ordinary he added a shilling lecture, or, as he pompously called it, "a school of oratory and criticism;" and what was still more absurd, Macklin presided at the dinner-table, and carved for the company; after which he played a sort of Oracle of Eloquence. Fielding has happily hit him off in the former character, in his Voyage to Lisbon:

Unfortunately for the fishmongers of London, the Dory only resides in the Devonshire Seas; for could any of this company but convey one to the temple of luxury under the Piazza, where Macklin the high priest daily serves up his rich offerings, great would be the reward of that fishmonger.

In the post-prandial lecture, Macklin undertook to make each of his audience an orator, by teaching him how to speak. The subjects of his lectures ranged from the wisdom of the Ancients to the follies of the Moderns; and fortunately for Foote, poor Macklin, big as he was in stature, contrived to occupy that ticklish space between the sublime and the ridiculous. He invited hints and discussion, which, by the way, is generally asking for approbation: Foote came, and fastened upon the lecturer, and by his witty questionings, soon contrived to become the leading attraction. Here is a specimen of his superior fun:

"I

The subject of the lecture was Duelling in Ireland, which he had illustrated as far as the reign of Elizabeth. Foote cried "Order!" he had a question to put. "Well, sir," said Macklin, "what have you to say upon this subject ?” think, sir," said Foote, "this matter might be settled in a few words. What o'clock is it, sir ?" Macklin could not possibly see what the clock had to do with a dissertation upon Duelling, but gruffly reported the hour to be half-past nine. "Very well," said Foote, "about this time of the night, every gentleman in Ireland that can possibly afford it is in his third bottle of claret, and therefore in a fair way of getting drunk; and from drunkenness proceeds quarreling, and from quarreling duelling, and so there's an end of the chapter." The company were much obliged to Foote for his interference, the hour being considered; though Macklin did not relish the abridgment.

Memory is a favourite subject with orators of Macklin's

class: each has a system of his own, and Macklin asserted that, by his system, he could learn anything by rote at once hearing it. This was enough for Foote, who, at the close of the lecture, handed up the following sentences to Macklin, desiring that he would be good enough to read them, and afterwards repeat them from memory. Here is the wondrous

nonsense:

"So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie, and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap ?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of their boots."

The laugh turned strong against old Macklin; and the laugh has been echoed from the Great Piazza Room by thousands during the century that has elapsed since Foote's drollery put out Macklin's monstrous memory with these straws of ridicule.

Macklin delivered his lectures on elocution elsewhere: thus we find him in Pewterers' Hall, in Lime-street, in the City, until

No more in Pewterers' Hall was heard
The proper force of every word.

Churchill, The Ghost.

And in the Mayor of Garratt, one of the characters speaks of Peter Primmer. "Lord," says Sneak, "I know him, mum, as well as my mother: why, I used to go to his Lectures to Pewterers' Hall, 'long with Deputy Firkin."

MURPHY AND FOOTE.

Arthur Murphy's acquaintance with Foote is recorded in many a pleasant incident of their congenial humour. They shone together at the Bedford, and they met in various excursions and parties of pleasure. Such contemporaries whetted each other. Foote figured in Murphy's early letters to his friends: Arthur was at Bristol, in low spirits, when Foote drove up to the hotel; and, Murphy relates," while I am writing this, he is grinning at me from a corner of the room; we have had Mr. Punch already, and his company

has lifted my spirits." Or, as Murphy tells us in his Life of Garrick, he and Foote were dining with Hogarth and Sir Francis Delaval, at the Rose, near Drury-lane, on the first night of Murphy's Orphan of China: they were anxious as to the fate of the tragedy, in which Mrs. Yates had been substituted for Mrs. Cibber in the heroine, a hazardous change; when a note scribbled by Mrs. Cibber, perhaps in her dressing-room, was handed to Murphy, assuring him that she was praying for his success; the note was passed to Foote, who read it aloud, and returned it with the telling remark that "Mrs. Cibber is a Roman Catholic, and they always pray for the dead."

However, the two friends disagreed: Murphy unreasonably complained of Foote having turned to account a suggestion of his the piece was produced, and failed, and thenceforth Arthur took to pilfering witticisms from Foote's productions, and put him bodily into a play not many months after his death, as follows: "He has wit to ridicule you, invention to frame a story of you, humour to help it about, and when he has set the town a laughing, he puts on a familiar air, and shakes you by the hand." This was, indeed, kicking the dead lion. But Murphy meditated worse; for after his own death was found among his papers this sketch of Foote's vanities-certainly, not the worst things that were said against him, but very biting, and in many respects true: "Foote gives a dinner-large company-characters come one by one-sketches them as they come-each enters—he glad to see each. At dinner, his wit, affectation, pride; his expense, his plate, his jokes, his stories;-all laugh;—all go one by one-all abused one by one ;-his toadeaters stay ;he praises himself in a passion against all the world."

FOOTE'S LECTURE ON MACKLIN.

The success of Foote's fun upon Macklin's lectures led him to establish a summer entertainment of his own at the Haymarket. He took up Macklin's notion of applying Greek Tragedy to modern subjects. This he did by showing London struck suddenly with terror by a despot appearing in its streets, attended by a chorus of tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, musicians, bakers, &c., who should threaten to storm the Tower, subjugate the City, and dethrone the Sovereign—all for no reason on earth; the chorus of trades, burlesquing the