Kenrick is not badly characterised by the following epigram, written by himself to his own honour: 'The wits who drink water, and suck sugar-candy, However, Garrick very properly moved the Court of King's Bench, in the person of the famous Dunning, for leave to file an information for the libel, and retained Wallace, Dunning, Mansfield, and Murphy. Foote, I have been told, did not conduct himself with the fortitude that became so great a man, and was melted into tears by the declaration of his innocence. But it is wrong to assume the possession of great mental firmness from the unrestrained sallies of satire, and the desperate imprudence of wit. I have frequently been astonished at such retrocessions of spirit. It will be a source of constant regret to me that I never enjoyed the conversation talents of Foote; a reverend friend of mine felt himself, to use his own strong expression, in a state of 'intellectual rapture,' and I once hoped that he might preserve by writing some record of the delight which quite bewildered him.' But I fear the period for any exertion with the pen is past. He Murphy sadly disappointed the world by his Life of Garrick, which in fact, however difficult such a process must have been, sunk below the level of Tom Davies. promised us a life of Foote, and I for one did suppose that he might have made collections for it, during their long and close intimacy; but I do not think he really had much anecdote in his stores; and, when I used to meet him, his collection was very scanty and too frequently repeated. Murphy never gave his life of Foote. When he died, however, we had a slight, a very slight compensation, in Foote's Life of Murphy. Foote's name, like that of Selwyn, or Quin, or Jekyl, is the synonym of humour; and frequently appropriates the invention of another brain. I cannot course him through the Encyclopedia of Wit. I stop to give one instance of the readiness of his wit, which I do not fancy to be common. Foote was to dine in the country, and the whole of the party was assembled, with the exception of a whimsical gentleman, who wore a black scratch wig:-at length the company, looking out, saw somebody in motion down a fine avenue of trees; but a dispute arose at the windows, whether it was their friend. 'It is certainly he or Charles the Second,' said Foote, 'for I see a black wig bobbing up and down among the oaks.' I am quite ignorant how far mental uneasiness may contribute to such a disease as palsy. Foote had one attack of it upon the stage, during the last season of his public appearance. His impressions upon quitting town were gloomy; he was haunted by presentiments of his own end. He contemplated his fine collection of dramatic portraits, and, stopping some time before that of Weston, uttered an exclamation of foreboding tenderness. At Dover he had a second attack of paralysis, and lingered only a few hours. His body was brought to town and privately interred in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. But Mr. William Jewell, so many years treasurer of the 'little theatre,' devoted a friendly tablet to his memory in the Church of St. Mary at Dover. Poor Jewell should, however, have entrusted the inscription upon it to any taste but his own; for, though it may be as creditable to Foote as to Prince Harry 'To have a tear for pity, and a hand yet these excellencies, I willingly think, he but shared with the greater part of the theatrical community; and his genius merited a distinct and ample commemoration. The best, because most gentlemanly, portrait of him is a head, life size, in crayons, full of intelligence; seemingly as he dressed when to mingle in that high society which he frequented, without the smallest sacrifice of his independence, and delighted beyond any chance of competition. This picture was in the possession of Jewell, and I do not think it has ever been engraven, or, if it have, so indifferently as to bar discovery. Murphy was not yet become insensible to the fame of tragedy; and he secured, by a few alterations and additions, another theatre and a somewhat different audience to his Orphan of China, which was acted at Covent Garden on the 6th of November 1777. I honour this gentleman assuredly upon many accounts; but for nothing more than the manly expostulation which he addressed to Voltaire on the first appearance of this tragedy, in the year 1759. In reference to the rival play L'Orphelin de la Chine, he dared to say to the author that, though he had worked up his first act and the beginning of his second like a poet indeed, his exertion then slackened, or rather gave way all at once —the tumult of the passions was over, Gengiskan talked politics-the strong impulses of maternal affection are lowered into cold unimpassioned narrative—and even the Tartar conqueror becomes Le Chevalier Gengiskan, and sighs as true lover-like sentiment as ever breathed in the fantastic gardens of the Tuilleries. He reminds him of his own criticism upon Corneille, and shows that what he condemns in Theseus can never be endured in Gengiskan.1 Unlike Horace Walpole, whom his dear blind woman, Madame du Deffand, ensnared into a very submissive retreat from the controversy he had even provoked with Voltaire, Murphy with infinite delicacy reminds him of his own compliment to Metastasio-Ah! le cher voleur! il m'a bien embelli'-and then proceeds to track the French poet in his own plunder of Shakespeare. He reproaches him with his injustice to the great Islander, and affirms his sentence of disingenuousness and ingratitude by the authority of an excellent critic, who had observed 'that wherever in his avant-propos he has spoken in degrading terms of the great English Bard, it may be deemed a sure prognostic that his play was the better for him!' All this, too, seasoned by a just tribute to Voltaire's genius, which, at whatever distance, the writer is ambitious to imitate. 1 Voltaire is, however, felt to have influenced the dialogue of Murphy; and we detect the imitator sometimes by an uncouth and scientific term. MURPHY. 'The iron swarm Of Hyperboreans troop along the streets, Reeking from slaughter.' VOLTAIRE. 'J'ai vu de ces brigands la horde hyperborée Par des fleuves de sang se frayant une entrée.' It may be proper to observe with reference to Voltaire's play, which appeared four years before Murphy's, that the latter portion of it had been weakly conceived at first; and he condemned himself to the amende honorable of re-writing the whole of the fourth and fifth acts. But original deficiency of interest is rarely supplied by such afterthoughts. At the time when that singular man was correcting the great Tartar, he was also employed upon his General History and other works, so as to occupy a number of copyists. In addition to all which he was alarmed almost to insanity by the escape of his Pucelle d'Orléans, indiscreetly trusted to a female friend, which a fellow of the name of Grasset had grossly interpolated, and offered even to himself for sale. However, this might only be a pilot balloon before the grand machine to ascertain the aura popularis, and the reception of his most splendid folly. His efforts to interest the King's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, are quite amusing. In the midst of this mass of occupations he received Rousseau's Essai sur l'Inégalité des Conditions-the reader may smile at the pleasantries by which he reproves an insane philosopher. I have received,' he says, 'your new book against the human race. will give pleasure by the truths you tell, but you will not correct mankind. So much wit was never before employed in the desire to render us beasts. One feels anxious to go upon all fours when reading your work. However, as I have lost the habit these sixty years, I feel unhappily that it is impossible for me to recover it, and I leave that natural temptation to those more worthy of it than you and myself.' You To be brought by any accident to speak of such men is an allure naturelle (Voltaire's expression) which it is impossible for me to resist; and a book whose object is entertainment alone may permit, if it do not authorise, allusions so very miscellaneous. Before I entirely resign Murphy's Orphan of China to the oblivion which I fear is its settled lot, I think myself bound to repeat his acknowledgments to two of his performers, Mrs. Yates and Mr. Garrick. You would have beheld, M. de Voltaire, in Mandane, a figure that would adorn F any stage in Europe, and you would have acknowledged that her acting promises to equal the elegance of her person: moreover, you would have seen a Zanti whose exquisite powers are capable of adding pathos and harmony even to our great Shakespeare'; and then, with an address equal to that of Voltaire himself, and for which Garrick should have been bound to him for ever, 'let me add, Sir, that the genius of this performer has been in Mahomet, in Merope, and Zara, the chief support of your own scenes upon the English stage.' As Mr. Harris most unquestionably could not do even tolerable justice by his actors to this revival, I must presume him to have been caught by the Orphan, merely because he was a native of China; and that his taste for spectacle revelled in the splendid assemblages of foreign dress presented by the original inhabitants, and their more warlike, perhaps more picturesque, invaders. The next production at this theatre was an original tragedy by Miss Moore, called Percy, which, though wanting the true masculine nerve, will, from a kind of hereditary feeling, always interest those whose infancy is taught even to lisp the strong antipathies between the Percy and the Douglas. Many years have passed away since I read this tragedy. I have already, too sportively perhaps, commemorated the style in which the hero of Northumberland was acted by Lewis. The Douglas of Wroughton had a great deal of the feudal spirit. Miss Moore received the hint, and more than the hint, of her play from the romantic story of Raoul, Sire de Coucy, who flourished in the reign of Philippe Auguste, towards the end of the 12th century. This preux chevalier adorned the bravery common to his age with softer and more ingenuous accomplishments-his love was equal to his courage, and his muse became the faithful and not inelegant interpreter of his passion. That, however, was unfortunate the object of his affection was the lady of a chieftain named De Fajel. In the year 1191, De Coucy, after greatly distinguishing himself, died at the siege of Acre. A few days before his death he wrote tenderly to the sovereign of his affections, |