Born, in Truro, Jan. 1720 [?]; baptized 27 Jan. 1720. At school at Worcester. Matric. at Worcester Coll., Oxford, 1 July 1737; took no degree. Became an actor; first appeared at Haymarket Theatre, 6 Feb. 1744. Acted in Dublin same year. Acted in London, 1745–49. Lived in Paris, 1750–52. Acted in London, 1753–57; in Dublin, winter of 1757–58; in Edinburgh, spring of 1759; in Dublin, winter of 1759–60. Manager of Haymarket, 1760; of Drury Lane, 1761. Acted till 1766; in that year lost leg through accident. Granted patent to build a theatre. Opened new theatre in Haymarket, May 1767. Visited Dublin, 1768. Manager of Edinburgh theatre, 1770. Sold patent of London theatre, 16 Jan. 1777. Died, at Dover, 21 Oct. 1777. Buried in West Cloister of Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Genuine Memoirs … of Sir J. D. Goodere” [1741?]; “A Treatise on the Passions” [1747]; “The Roman and English Comedy Consider’d,” 1747; “Taste,” 1752; “The Englishman in Paris,” 1753; “The Knights,” 1754; “The Englishman Returned from Paris,” 1756; “The Author,” 1757; “The Minor,” 1760; “A Letter … to the Reverend Author of the ‘Remarks … on the Minor,’” 1760; “The Orators,” 1762; “The Comic Theatre; being a free Translation of all the best French Comedies, by S. Foote and others” (5 vols.), 1762; “The Lyar” (adapted from Corneille), 1764; “The Mayor of Garratt,” 1764; “The Patron,” 1764; “The Commissary,” 1765; “The Lame Lover,” 1770; “Apology for ‘The Minor,’” 1771; “A trip to Calais” (under pseud.: “Timothy Timbertoe”), 1775; “The Bankrupt,” 1776. Posthumous: “The Maid of Bath” (anon.), 1778; “The Devil upon Two Sticks,” 1778; “The Nabob,” 1778; “The Cozeners” (anon.), 1778; “The Capuchin,” 1778. Collected Works: in 4 vols., 1763–78; in 3 vols., 1830. Life: “Memoirs” (anon.), [1778]; by W. Cooke, 1805; by J. Bee, in 1830 edn. of “Works.”

Personal

  Foote being mentioned, Johnson said, “He is not a good mimick.” One of the company added, “A merry Andrew, a buffoon.” JOHNSON. “But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has in an eminent degree, that of escape. You drive him into a corner with both hands; but he’s gone, Sir, when you think you have got him—like an animal that jumps over your head. Then he has a great range for wit; he never lets truth stand between him and a jest, and he is sometimes mighty coarse. Garrick is under many restraints from which Foote is free.” WILKES. “Garrick’s wit is more like Lord Chesterfield’s.” JOHNSON. “The first time I was in company with Foote was at Fitzherbert’s. Having no good opinion of the fellow, I was resolved not to be pleased; and it is very difficult to please a man against his will. I went on eating my dinner pretty sullenly, affecting not to mind him. But the dog was so very comical that I was obliged to draw down my knife and fork, throw myself back upon my chair, and fairly laugh it out. No, Sir, he was irresistible.”

  He was, perhaps, the only man among the set, totally independent of Johnson’s monarchy; he had an intrepid wit and pleasantry of his own, and was fearless of any colloquial antagonist.

  Foote’s clothes were, then, tawdily splashed with gold lace; which, with his linen, were generally bedawbed with snuff; he was a Beau Nasty. They tell of him that, in his young days, and in the fluctuation of his finances, he walked about in boots, to conceal his want of stockings, and that, on receiving a supply of money, he expended it all upon a diamond ring, instead of purchasing the necessary articles of hosiery.

  The strength and predominance of Foote’s humour lay in its readiness. Whatever the call that might be made upon it, there it was. Other men were humorous as the occasion arose to them, but to him the occasion was never wanting. Others might be foiled or disabled by the lucky stroke of an adversary, but he took only the quicker rebound from what would have laid them prostrate. To put him out was not possible.

  Was ever wit more audacious than Foote? Perspicacious and bold—seeing everything and stopping at nothing,—no wonder the great town shook with terror and laughter at his daring personalities and mimicries. As quick to say as to see, the strokes of his humour were as surprising as they were instantaneous, and his victims fell without staggering. There was no threatening, to forewarn or alarm; no waste by elaboration; and when the mischief was done, there was no smell of spent forces. On the stage, at the club, at the coffee-house, he took off everybody of prominence. Nobody seemed to escape him. At the Haymarket, for forty nights in succession, he imitated Whitefield. “There is hardly a public man in England,” said Davies, “who has not entered Mr. Foote’s theatre with an aching heart, under the apprehension of seeing himself laughed at.” His rule was, that you ought not to run the chance of losing your friend for your joke unless your joke happens to be better than your friend.

  And wittiest among them all, creating roars of laughter by his sallies, or his mimicry of some well-known actor or politician, was a young gentleman of family and fortune, at this time a student of the Inner Temple. Dressed in a frock-suit of green, and silver lace, bag wig, sword, bouquet, and point ruffles, he frequented the place daily, until the carriage of some woman of quality would drive to the door, and Mr. Samuel Foote being inquired for, he would hasten out, hat in hand, and ride away with his lady fair.

  His humour was decidedly Aristophanic; that is to say, broad, easy, reckless, satirical, without the slightest alloy of bonhomie, and full of the directest personalities.—A meteor that delighted by the splendour of its blaze.—The meteor of the moment who possessed every species of wit.—He was of that sort that he would rather lose his friend than his jest.—He never stopped the career of his bon-mot out of respect to persons; it as readily struck a royal duke as a poor player.—His conversation was of such a description that “nought but itself could be its parallel!” Teeming with fancy, and various knowledge, fearless of consequences, and privileged in the character of a wit, he took his stand with confidence, and threw his shafts around him with the dexterity of a master, the first and last of his own school.—Whatever we talked about—whether fox-hunting, the turf, or any other subject—Foote instantly took the lead and delighted us all.—Very entertaining, with a kind of conversation between wit and buffoonery.—He has a great range for wit, he never lets truth stand between him and a jest, and he is sometimes mighty coarse.—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.

General

  BOSWELL. “Foote has a great deal of humour?” JOHNSON. “Yes, Sir.” BOSWELL. “He has a singular talent of exhibiting character.” JOHNSON. “Sir, it is not a talent; it is a vice; it is what others abstain from. It is not comedy, which exhibits the character of a species, as that of a miser gathered from many misers: it is farce, which exhibits individuals.”

  Foote was certainly a great and fertile genius, superior to that of any writer of the age; his dramatic pieces were most of them, it is true, unfinished, and several of them little more than sketches; but they are the sketches of a master, of one who, if he had labored more assiduously, he could have brought them nearer to perfection. Foote saw the follies and vices of mankind with a quick and discerning eye; his discrimination of character was quick and exact; his humour pleasant, his ridicule keen, his satire pungent, and his wit brilliant and exuberant. He described with fidelity the changeable follies and fashions of the times; and his pieces, like those of Ben Jonson, were calculated to please the audience of the day; and for this reason posterity will scarcely know anything of them.

  Other comic writers have merely shown “the body of the time its general form and pressure,” but Foote has soared beyond this common flight, he has adventured to drag the objects of vice and folly individually before the public, and with a kind of dramatic boldness (unknown to any stage since the days of Aristophanes) to punish the delinquents in the first instance, as a warning to others: and here he has, generally, so regulated his satire, that although a single character may now and then be distinguished, it seems to embrace a whole genus…. Allowing for some instances of ill directed satire, taking Foote in general as a dramatic writer, an actor, a wit, an humourist, and lively companion, he stands on so high a scale of eminence, that all must exclaim, “This was a most extraordinary man!”

  The plays of Foote, the modern Aristophanes, who ventured, by his powers of mimicking the mind as well as the external habits, to bring living persons on the stage, belong to this period, and make a remarkable part of its dramatic history. But we need not dwell upon it. Foote was an unprincipled satirist; and while he affected to be the terror of vice and folly, was only anxious to extort forbearance-money from the timid, or to fill his theatre at the indiscriminate expense of friends and enemies, virtuous or vicious, who presented foibles capable of being turned into ridicule. It is a just punishment of this course of writing, that Foote’s plays, though abounding in comic and humorous dialogue, have died with the parties whom he ridiculed. When they lost the zest of personality, their popularity, in spite of much intrinsic merit, fell into utter decay.

  A careful examination of Foote’s writings has satisfied us that they are not unworthy of a very high place in literature, though not perhaps in all respects the place he would have claimed.

  Some of Foote’s apologists have almost worshipped him as the reformer of abuses, the scourge of hypocrites, and the terror of evil-doers. But Foote does not seem to have been moved by any higher principle than gain. If Mrs. Salmon had a Chamber of Horrors, the more murders that were committed, the better she was pleased, for the more she made by the crime. Foote endeavored to crush Whitfield by personal ridicule; but Whitfield was a far more useful man in his very wicked generation than Foote, who did not denounce the wickedness, but mimicked the peculiarities of the reformer…. Except in ceasing to mimic Whitfield on the stage, after the death of that religious reformer, I can scarcely find a trait of delicacy in Foote’s character. He seems to have been as unscrupulous in act, as he was cruel in his wit.

  If “The Liar” be his cleverest, “The Mayor of Garratt” retained the largest and the longest popularity: but, alas! it is now consigned to the tomb of the ungenteels. It has not been revived for many years; and when that admirable actor, Dowton, last appeared in Major Sturgeon (and in which performance I can believe that he never was surpassed in richness of humour—even by the author himself), and when Russell played Jerry Sneak (who avowedly exceeded all his predecessors in the part), the piece was pronounced “low,” and even hissed. Our “bear-leaders” in society “hates everything as is low; their bears shall dance only to the genteelest of tunes—‘Water parted from the sea,’ and ‘The minuet in Harihadne’”—and so they turned up their exclusive noses at the major’s history of his campaign, and the death of Major Molasses.

  It is strange that while all the other English humorists of the eighteenth century have received such ample appreciation, the plays of Foote should be so little read. To those who would form a perfect conception of the manners of a hundred years ago, his works are invaluable; there is not a folly, a vice, a sham of the time, which they do not expose; they are frequently coarse, but so was the age, and a true mirror must reflect what is presented to it. But their coarseness is palliated by real wit and well-written dialogue; his characters, it is true, are too frequently caricatures founded on some physical deformity or eccentricity of manner, but they are usually typical, and their humour springs out of the absurdities common to all humanity; and if they display no very profound knowledge of the mainsprings of human nature, they are seldom unnatural, and are almost uniformly drawn with justness and vigor.

  Cibber had been succeeded by Foote (1721–1777), in whose numerous dramas the development of characteristic dialogue was entirely subordinated to the illustration of such oddities and whimsical singularities as could be emphasised by the talent for mimicry possessed by the author-actor himself; and not one of Foote’s plays holds a niche in literature.

  Foote’s prose tracts, like his letters, are forcibly, wittily, and logically written. It is, however, as a dramatist, a wit, and an actor that he has to be judged; in all these qualities he is noteworthy. No complete collection of his plays has been made, more than one of his pieces, chiefly his early entertainments, having never been printed…. As a rule the plays are invertebrate, and the manners they sketch are not to be recognised in the present day. Foote had, however, a keen eye to character, and on the strength of the brilliant sketches of contemporary manners which he afforded, and of the wit of the dialogue, they may be read with pleasure to this day. Foote’s satire is direct and scathing. Much of it is directed against individuals, not seldom with no conceivable vindication, since Foote singled out those, such as Garrick, to whom he was under deepest obligations. During his lifetime and for some years subsequently Foote was known as the English Aristophanes. Without being deserved, the phrase is less of a misnomer than such terms ordinarily are. As an actor Foote seems to have attracted attention only in his own pieces. Tom Davies, who speaks with something not far from contempt of his general performances, praises his Bayes in the “Rehearsal.” In this, however, Foote, like Garrick, used to introduce allusions to contemporary events.

  Lays bare as with scalpel, in his farce of “The Author,” the struggles, and expedients, and humiliations of the literary profession.