He left, besides portraits and small legacies to sundry of his friends, the bulk of the property remaining to him to his two natural children, Francis and George; and I may here observe that, notwithstanding Cooke's positive statement that Foote married a Worcestershire lady, and that shortly after the wedding he took her to his father's house at Truro; and Polwhele's dictum that he married Miss Polly Hicks, of Prince's Street, Truro--(she is said to have been sixteen and Foote eighteen when they married, but she died early of consumption)--I have been unable to discover with certainty whether or not he was ever really married. Certainly, no Mrs. Foote ever appeared upon the scene when he lived at 'The Hermitage,' North End, between Fulham and Hammersmith (to which place he had moved from Parson's Green, where Theodore Hooke afterwards lived). Here he used to be very fond of entertaining his friends, amongst whom were many members of the nobility, and occasionally even royal personages, with his usual wasteful extravagance. There is a story of his having been 'reconciled' to his wife whilst he was living at Blackheath; and another story of his old fellow-collegian Dr. Nash, the historian of Worcestershire, having called to see him when confined for debt in the Fleet Prison, and finding a supposed Mrs. Foote hiding somewhere in the room; but there are, I believe, no proofs positive of the reckless, dissipated subject of this memoir having ever submitted to the marriage tie. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1777 says of him that 'As no man ever contributed more to the entertainment of the public, so no man oftener made the minds of his companions expand with mirth and good-humour; and in the company of men of high rank and superior fortune, who courted his acquaintance, he always preserved a noble independency. That he had his foibles and caprices no one will pretend to deny; but they were amply counterbalanced by his merit and abilities, which will transmit his name to posterity with distinguished reputation.'