subject. Although containing no theoretical novelty, the manner and method of its expositions were entirely original. Astronomical phenomena were for the first time described in familiar language. The book formed Herschel's introduction to celestial science. Ferguson's

great merit as a scientific teacher lay in clearness, both of thought and style, and in the extreme ingenuity with which

by means of machines and diagrams he brought the eye to help the mind of the learner. Hutton recognized his "vary uncommon genius, especially in mechanical contrivances and executions." Brewster

considered him as "in some degree the first elementary writer on natural philosophy."- CLERKE, MISS A. M., 1886, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XVIII, pp. 345, 346.

A BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF

ENGLAND 1769

I write neither for fame nor bread; but have taken up the pen for the same reason that some of my brethren have laid it down, that is, only to amuse myself.

This singular book, which has been the employment of my leisure hours for several years of my life, will, doubtless, be numbered among my idlenesses, perhaps my weaknesses; but, I hope, never amongst my sins. GRANGER, JAMES, 1769, A Biographical History of England, Dedication to Horace Walpole.

I have, since I saw you, read every word of "Granger's Biographical History." It has entertained me exceedingly, and I do not think him the Whig that you supposed. Horace Walpole's being his patron is, indeed, no good sign of his political principles. But he denied to Lord Mountstuart that he was a Whig, and said he had been accused by both parties of partiality. It seems he was like Pope,

"While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory."

I wish you would look more into this book; and as Lord Mountstuart wishes much to find a proper person to continue the work upon Granger's plan, and has desired I

would mention it to you, if such a man occurs, please to let me know.-BOSWELL, JAMES, 1776, Letter to Samuel Johnson, Aug. 30.

I have no hesitation in designating it as a delightful and instructive book; but whoever republishes it should add the portraits of the different characters which were unknown to the author. Considering that Granger may be said to have first walked the field alone, it is surprising what he has done. His catalogue of engraved heads is immense. His style is always clear, pointed, and lively and if he talked and preached as he wrote in his biographical history, it would have been difficult to have withdrawn attention from so intelligent a quarter.-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, The Library Companion, p. 509, note.

That a certain class of bibliomaniacs and bibliolaters should be denounced as biblioclasts and bibliophobians by all the great community of bibliocists, bibliophilists, bibliographers, bibliopolists, bibliologists, bibliopegists, bibliotaphists, bibliothecarys and bibliognostes would seem, to the lay mind, to imply a very serious condition of affairs. Yet this is, and has been, exactly the position of the Grangerites since the founder of this sect

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."JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1776, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. III, p. 79.

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.-COLMAN, GEORGE, 1830, Random Records.

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. -PEAKE, RICHARD BRINSLEY, 1841, Memoirs of the Colman Family, vol. I, p. 395, note.

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.-FORSTER, JOHN, 1854, Samuel Foote, Quarterly Review, vol. 95, p. 487.

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.RUSSELL, A. P., 1883, Characteristics, p. 234.

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 frocksuit 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.MOLLOY, J. FITZGERALD, 1884, The Life and Adventures of Peg Woffington, vol. 1, p. 28.

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.-JERROLD, WALTER, 1894, ed., Bon-Mots of Samuel Foote and Theodore Hook, Introduction, p. 7.

WELL.

GENERAL

BOSWELL. "Foote has a great deal of humour?" JOHNSON, "Yes, Sir." Bos"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, 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."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1769, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. II, p. 109.

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.-DAVIES, THOMAS, 1780, Life of David Garrick, vol. II.

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!"-COOKE, WILLIAM, 1805, Memoirs of Samuel Foote, vol. I, pp. 2, 4.

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 enemies, virtuous or vicious, who preindiscriminate expense of friends and sented 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. -SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1814-23, The Drama.

A careful examination of Foote's writ

ings 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.-FORSTER, JOHN, 1854, Samuel Foote, Quarterly Review, vol. 95, p. 486.

Some of Foote's apologists have almost worshipped him as the reformer of terror of evil-doers. But Foote does not abuses, the scourge of hypocrites, and the 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.-DORAN, JOHN, 1863, Annals of the English Stage, vol. II, pp. 131, 132.

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 "bearleaders" 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. -CLARKE, CHARLES COWDEN, 1872, On the Comic Writers of England, Gentleman's Magazine, N. S., vol. 8, p. 315.

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.-BAKER, HENRY BARTON, 1878, English Actors from Shakespeare to Macready, vol. 1, p. 255.

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.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 317.

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.-KNIGHT, JOSEPH, 1889, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XIX, p. 374.

Lays bare as with scalpel, in his farce of "The Author," the struggles, and expedients, and humiliations of the literary profession.-AUBREY, W. H. S., 1896, The Rise and Growth of the English Nation, vol. III, p. 113.