FOOTE, SAMUEL, a celebrated English humourist and actor of the eighteenth century, was born of a good family at Truro, in Cornwall, in 1720. He was educated at the collegiate school of Worcester, and in his seventeenth year elected scholar of Worcester College, Oxford. During his academic career his powers of mimicry and humour began to show themselves, and were exercised with such success and indiscretion against some of the University dons, that Foote found it convenient to leave college in 1740, "without having incurred, however, any public censure." He carried away with him a very respectable amount of classical learning, and entered himself of the Temple as a student of law. But the pleasures of the town had greater attractions for him than Coke upon Lyttleton, and in a short time he had lost a handsome patrimony at the gambling-table. It is generally stated that about this time Foote married; but no traces of any such settled connection are discoverable in his career. He had two sons, indeed, but they were not born in lawful wedlock, and he used wittily to excuse his bachelorhood by saying, that "you
Foote. must count a lady's age as you do a hand at picquet, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine—sixty, and he had no ambition to awake one morning and find himself so unequally matched for the whole length of a life." Driven to the stage for support, he made his début in the character of Othello; but finding tragedy ill-suited to his powers, he renounced it and betook himself to comedy, in which, however, he only played with mediocre success, till he began to parts of his own writing. In 1747 he became manager of the Haymarket theatre, and succeeded in drawing large crowds by his admirable mimicry of all the social and political notabilities of the day. He kept his theatre open for many years without a patent; but he procured one at length through the influence of the Duke of York in the following manner. Riding out one day in company with that nobleman, he was thrown from his horse, and received injuries which necessitated the amputation of his leg. The Duke of York procured for him the long-withheld patent by way of compensation for the accident. The loss of his limb did not force him immediately to quit the stage, but it undermined his constitution so much that he disposed of his patent to the elder Colman, and only acted when it suited his humour. His death is said to have been accelerated by the shock he received from being obliged to stand a public trial in consequence of an infamous charge brought against him by an old servant of his own, suborned by the notorious Duchess of Kingston, whose enmity Foote had incurred by delineating her character and detailing her history in one of his comedies. In October 1777 he set out for France with the hope of there recovering his health, but death arrested his progress at Dover. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where no memorial has yet been erected in his honour. Common consent has awarded to Foote the title of the English Aristophanes. In some respects the epithet is happy enough; in others it is little short of ridiculous. It was said of the Greek comedian that he wielded a censorship more formidable than that of the archons; it is equally true of the Englishman, that he exercised a wider jurisdiction than any chief-justice of his day. There was also a strong resemblance between the two satirists in point of wit, ready and abundant flow of humour, keen sarcasm, and above all in the audacity with which both employed their powers in bringing down laughter and scorn upon the living vices and hypocrisies of their respective eras. But Aristophanes, had he chosen to devote himself to tragedy, would have attained to as high eminence in that field as he has done in comedy. In this he shows to great advantage beside Foote, who, with comic powers as great, had neither the imagination nor the wealth of poetry of the Greek. Few of Foote's pieces are now produced on the stage. The very qualities which made him so formidable in his own day have contributed more than anything else to ensure his being forgotten in ours. His comedies, though containing admirable delineations of character, were generally pièces d'occasion, and are consequently devoid of that wide and general human interest which secures the immortality of an author. The whims, humours, caprices, and even persons of his own day were the subjects to which Foote was most partial. His plays are now more valuable in an historical than a dramatic point of view, and are now read chiefly by those who desire to know the spirit of social life in London during the latter half of last century.
Foote's most important plays are "The Minor," levelled chiefly against the Methodists; "The Englishman returned from Paris," which satirizes the mania for travelling. The bar is lashed in "The Lame Lover;" debating societies in "The Orators;" and newspapers in "The Bankrupt." Those of his pieces which kept the stage longest were "The Liar" and "The Mayor of Garret," the humour of which is less individual than in most of his other plays. Altogether Foote is likely to be remembered by posterity rather as a
social figure than as a writer or actor. As a converser he is admitted to have had almost no superior in his own day in England, except Johnson. His bon-mots are scarcely inferior to any in the English tongue. The personal character of Foote was in many respects very amiable. He dissipated three fortunes, of which he inherited the first and made the other two, but his heart remained as open to noble influences at the end of his career as at the beginning. He was utterly devoid of jealousy, the besetting sin of his craft; and countless instances are recorded of his generosity to obscure but meritorious actors. His friend Jewel erected a monument to his memory in Dover where he died, and inscribed on it nothing about his genius or his humour, his acting or his writing, but merely that "he had a hand as open as day to melting charity." (See Quarterly Review, vol. xcv., p. 483.)