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Rh two years after that of Garrick, as to whose merits the critics, including Foote himself, were now fiercely at war. His own first venture, as Othello, was a failure; and though he was fairly successful in genteel comedy parts, and was, after a favourable reception at Dublin, enrolled as one of the regular company at Drury Lane in the winter of 1745–1746, he had not as yet made any palpable hit. Finding that his talent lay neither in tragedy nor in genteel comedy, he had begun to wonder “where the devil it did lie,” when his successful performance of the part of Bayes in The Rehearsal at last suggested to him the true outlet for his extraordinary gift of mimicry. Following the example of Garrick, he had introduced into this famous part imitations of actors, and had added a variety of other satirical comment in the way of “gag.” Engaging a small company of actors, he now boldly announced for the 22nd of April 1747, at the theatre in the Haymarket “gratis,” “a new entertainment called the Diversions of the Morning,” to which were to be added a farce adapted from Congreve, and an epilogue “spoken by the B-d-d Coffee-house.” Foote’s success in these Diversions obtained for him the name of “the English Aristophanes,” an absurd compliment, declined by Foote himself (see his letter in The Minor). The Diversions consisted of a series of imitations of actors and other well-known persons, whose various peculiarities of voice, gesture, manner or dress were brought directly before the spectators, while the epilogue introduced the wits of the Bedford engaged in ludicrous disputation, and specially “took off” an eminent physician (probably the munificent Sir William Browne, whom he afterwards caricatured in The Devil on Two Sticks), and a notorious quack oculist of the day. The actors ridiculed in this entertainment having at once procured the aid of the constables for preventing its repetition, Foote immediately advertised an invitation to his friends to drink a dish of tea with him at the Haymarket on the following day at noon—“and ’tis hoped there will be a great deal of comedy and some joyous spirits; he will endeavour to make the morning as diverting as possible. Tickets for this entertainment to be had at St George’s coffee-house, Temple-Bar, without which no person will be admitted. N.B.—Sir Dilbury Diddle will be there, and Lady Betty Frisk has absolutely promised.” The device succeeded to perfection; further resistance was abandoned as futile by the actors, whom Foote mercilessly ridiculed in the “instructions to his pupils” which the entertainer pretended to impart (typifying them under characters embodying their several chief peculiarities or defects—the massive and sonorous James Quin as a watchman, the shrill-voiced Lacy Ryan as a razor-grinder, the charming Peg Woffington, whose tones had an occasional squeak in them, as an orange-woman crying her wares and the bill of the play); and Mr Foote’s Chocolate, which was afterwards converted into an evening Tea, became an established favourite with the town.

In spite of this success, he seems to have contrived to spend a third fortune, and to have found it necessary to eke out his means by a speculation in small-beer, as is recorded in an amusing anecdote told of him by Johnson. But he could now command a considerable income; and when money came he seems to have freely expended it in both hospitality and charity. During his engagements at Covent Garden and at Drury Lane, of which he was joint-manager, and in professional trips to Scotland, and more especially to Ireland, he appeared both in comedies of other authors and more especially in his own. He played Hartop in his Knights (1749, printed 1754). Taste (1752), in which parts of the Diversions were incorporated, was followed by some eighteen pieces, the majority of which were produced at the Haymarket, the favourite home of Foote’s entertainments. In 1760 he succeeded in obtaining for this theatre a licence from the lord chamberlain, afterwards (in 1766) converted into a licence for summer performances for life. The entertainments were a succession of variations on the original idea of the Diversions and the Tea. Now, it was an Auction of Pictures (1748), of part of which an idea may be formed from the second act of the comedy Taste; now, a lecture on Orators (1754), suggested by some bombastic discourses given by Macklin in his old age at the Piazza coffee-house in Covent Garden, where Foote had amused the audience and confounded the speaker by interposing his humorous comments. The Orators is preserved in the shape of a hybrid piece, which begins with a mock lecture on the art of oratory and its representatives in England, and ends with a diverting scene of a pot-house forum debate, to which Holberg’s Politician-Tinman can hardly have been a stranger. At a later date (1773) a new device was introduced in a Puppet-show. The piece (unprinted) played in this by the puppets was called Piety in Pattens, and professed to show “by the moral how maidens of low degree might become rich from the mere effects of morality and virtue, and by the literature how thoughts of the most commonplace might be concealed under cover of words the most high flown.” In other words, it was an attack upon sentimental comedy, which was still not altogether extinguished. An attack upon Garrick in connexion with the notorious Shakespeare jubilee was finally left out from the Puppet-show, and thus was avoided a recurrence of the quarrel which many years before had led to an interchange of epistolary thrusts, and an imitation by Woodward of the imitative Foote.

On the whole, the relations between the two public favourites became very friendly, and on Foote’s part unmistakably affectionate, and they have not been always generously represented by Garrick’s biographers. A comparison between the two as actors is of course out of the question; but, though Foote was a buffoon, and his tongue a scurrilous tongue, there is no authentic ground for the suggestion that his character was one of malicious heartlessness. Of Samuel Johnson’s opinions of him many records remain in Boswell; when Johnson had at last found his way into Foote’s company (he afterwards found it to Foote’s own table) he was unable to “resist” him, and, on hearing of Foote’s death, he thought the career just closed worthy of a lasting biographical record.

Meanwhile most of poor Foote’s friendships in high life were probably those that are sworn across the table, and require “t’other bottle” to keep them up. It is not a pleasant picture—of Lord Mexborough and his royal guest the duke of York, and their companions, bantering Foote on his ignorance of horsemanship, and after he had weakly protested his skill, taking him out to hounds on a dangerous animal. He was thrown and broke his leg, which had to be amputated, the “patientee” (in which character he said he was now making his first appearance) consoling himself with the reflection that he would now be able to take off “old Faulkner” (a pompous Dublin alderman with a wooden leg, whom he had brought on the stage as Peter Paragraph in The Orators) “to the life.” The duke of York made him the best reparation in his power by promising him a life-patent for the theatre in the Haymarket (1766); and Foote not only resumed his profession, as if, like Sir Luke Limp, he considered the leg he had lost “a redundancy, a mere nothing at all,” but ingeniously turned his misfortune to account in two of his later pieces, The Lame Lover and The Devil on Two Sticks, while, with the true instinct of a public favourite, making constant reference to it in plays and prologues. Though the characters played by him in several of his later plays are comparatively short and light, he continued to retain his hold over the public, and about the year 1774 was beginning to think of withdrawing, at least for a time, to the continent, when he became involved in what proved a fatal personal quarrel. Neither in his entertainments nor in his comedies had he hitherto (except in Garrick’s case, and it is said in Johnson’s) put any visible restraint upon personal satire. The Author, in which, under the infinitely humorous character of Cadwallader, he had brought a Welsh gentleman of the name of Ap-Rice on the stage, had, indeed, been ultimately suppressed. But in general he had pursued his hazardous course, mercilessly exposing to public ridicule and contempt not only fribbles and pedants, quacks or supposed quacks in medicine (as in The Devil on Two Sticks), enthusiasts in religion, such as Dr Dodd (in The Cozeners) and George Whitefield and his connexion (in The Minor). He had not only dared the wrath of the whole Society of Antiquaries (in The