Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/382

368 F O so numerous that no less than sixty rales are required for their regulation. The intricacies of the Association game are far fewer, and only require a very plain set of thirteen rules. No handling or touch ing the ball, except by the goal-keeper, is permissible, "dribbling" or kicking with the feet being the sole mode of propulsion. The goal posts are 24 feet apart, and the cross-bar only 8 feet from the ground, the ball in this case having to be driven under the latter in order to obtain a goal. "Tries " are unknown, and the gaining of goals are the sole points whereby the game is decided. The rules of both games will be found in most football works, the chief of which are Routledge s Handbook of Football, 1867 ; C. W. Alcock s Football Animal, annually from 1868 ; Alcock s Football, Our Winter Game, 1874; G. H. West s Football Calendar, annually from 1874. (H. F. W.) FOOTE, SAMUEL (c. 1720-1777), comic dramatist and actor, was born at Truro about the year 1720. Of his attachment to his native Cornwall he gives no better proofs as an author than by making the country-booby Timothy (in The Knights) sound the praises of that county and of its manly pastimes ; but towards his family he showed a loyal and enduring affection. His father was a man of good family and position ; his mother, the daughter of a baronet (Sir Edward Goodere), is said, in person as well as in dis position, to have strongly resembled her famous son. Ac cording to tradition, she afterwards fell into pecuniary em barrassments closely analogous to his own ; but in the days of his prosperity he liberally supported both her and an un fortunate clerical brother. After her death he indignantly vindicated her character from the imputations recklessly cast upon it by the revengeful spite of the duchess of Kingston. About the time when Foote came of age, a family quarrel between his two maternal uncles ended in the brutal murder, under extraordinary circumstances, of the one by the other, who was, with his accomplices, hanged for the crime. By this event Foote came into his first fortune, through which he ran with great speed in the be ginning of his London life. Before this he had completed his education in the collegiate school at Worcester, and at Worcester College, Oxford, distinguishing himself in both places by practical jokes, mimicry, and audacious pleasant ries of all kinds, but also acquiring a classical training which afterwards enabled him neatly to turn a classical quotation or allusion, and helped to give to his prose style, when he chose to write seriously, a sufficient degree of fluency and elegance. Foote was, it is stated, " designed " for the law, but cer tainly not by nature. In his chambers at the Temple, and in the Grecian Coffee-house hard by, he learned to know something of lawyers if not of law, and picked up a smatter ing of law-terms, and a knowledge of the forms and features of ordinary law-suits. Thus he was afterwards able to jest at the jargon and to mimic the mannerisms of the bar, and to satirize the Latitats of the other branch of the profession with particular success. The famous argument in Hobson v. Nobson (in The Lame Lovers) is as good of its kind as that in Bardell v. Pickwick itself ; and doubtless Foote had duly studied some of the most ludicrous or contempt ible types among the 1175 barristers ("if we reckon one barrister to twenty attorneys") and 23,518 attorneys (if we "only quarter one attorney upon fifty houses"), of whom, according to the lecturer in The Orators, the profes sion was in his day composed. But a stronger attraction drew him to the Bedford Coffee-house in Covent Garden, and to the theatrical world of which it was the social centre. After he had got rid of a second fortune (which he appears to have inherited at his father s death), and had in the interval passed through severe straits of want, he gave up playing the part of a fine gentleman, and in 1744 made his first appearance on the actual stage. Whether before this time Foote had married remains a very doubtful question. It is said that about the time of the family catastrophe he had married a young hdy in Worcestershire actually, and not -F O in imagination only, like young Wilding in The Liar ; but the traces of his wife (he affirmed himself that he was married to his " washerwoman ") are mysterious, and probably apocryphal ; in after days no lady presided at his table, or controlled the libations of claret which flowed with equal abundance in his servants hall, and his two sons were illegitimate. Foote s first appearance as an actor was made little more than 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 1745-6, 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 (as he tersely expressed it) "where the devil it did lie," when his successful per formance of the part of Bayes in The Rehearsal at last suggested to him the true outlet for his peculiar talent. 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 what in stage parlance is called " gag." He lost no time in availing himself of the discovery that in his powers of mimicry lay his surest means of securing a hold over the public. After engaging a small company of actors, he boldly announced for April 22, 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. Though, of course, nine-tenths of the fun in all such entertainments would evaporate even in a short hand report, and though of these Diversions it is only possible to form a notion from scattered recollections and from such parts as were afterwards incorporated in one of Foote s comedies (Taste, act i.), or adapted for later repro duction at Drury Lane (act ii, printed in Cooke s Memoirs), yet there is no difficulty in understanding the secret of Foote s immediate success, which is said at once to have obtained for him the name of " the English Aristophanes." The absurdity of this compliment has often been remarked upon ; but it may be worth observing that Foote was probably himself the first (in his letter on The Minor) to decline the comparison, while " leaving the task of pointing out the mistake to his enemies." The Diversions consisted of a series of imitations of actors and other well-known per sons, 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 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 repeti tion, 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 enter tainer pretended to impart (typifying them under char acters embodying their several chief peculiarities or de fects the massive and sonorous Quin as a watchman, ! tho shrill- voiced Ryan as a razor-grinder, the charming