the piece as 'corrected and prepared for the press by the Archbishop of Canterbury.' 'The Minor' elicited many sharp pamphlets and letters against Foote, but he readily disposed of them all in a reply which he published, replete with learning, wit, and satire; and which contains an admirable vindication of the Comic Muse. It has been said that if all his other works had perished, this one letter would have sufficed to establish his wit, scholarship, and sense as of the rarest order; every line tells. His defence of the course which he adopted in ridiculing Whitefield contains the following spirited passage: 'Why should I not ridicule what is done in a church if it deserves ridicule? Is not the crime greater if you pick a pocket at church? and is the additional reason why a man should _not_ have done it, to be the only argument why he should not be punished for doing it? You call profaneness an offence; you will not have ignorant men idly invoke the name or attributes of the Supreme; and may not I ridicule a fanatic whom I think mischievous because he is for ever polluting that name with blasphemous associations--mixing it with the highest, the meanest and most trivial things; degrading Providence to every low and vulgar occasion of life; crying out that he is buffeted by Satan, if only bit by fleas, and, when able to catch them, triumphing with texts of Scripture over the blessing specially vouchsafed?' Foote seems at this time to have lodged in Suffolk Street, and to have got into several petty quarrels with his fellow-actors, whose manners and defects he imitated only too closely, and whose antecedents he used to make fun of: for instance, alluding to Garrick's having failed in his first start in life as a wine-merchant, Foote used to say: 'I remember Davy when he used to live in Durham Yard, and all his stock-in-trade was three quarts of vinegar in what he called his wine-cellar.' But such were his tact and jolly manner, that the estrangements were rarely of long endurance; and most, if not all of the offended parties were, sooner or later, glad to shake hands with the reckless mimic. He was always, however, implacably hostile to newspaper critics--then, by the way, a new institution--and very coarse in his remarks upon them, although the critics generally wrote of him with respect and praise; but it should be added that at one time managers were almost invariably their own critics, and the innovation was to them most unwelcome. Nor did he think much of the reliability of the judgment of the public. In Foote's 'Treatise on the Passions,' he says: 'There are 12,000 playgoers in London; but not the four-and-twentieth part of them can judge correctly of the merits of plays or players.'