In the "Minor," the author pilloried Langford, the plausible auctioneer, Mother Douglas, a woman of very evil life, and, in Shift, the Rev. George Whitfield, who was nobly, and with much self-abnegation, endeavouring to amend life wherever he found it of an evil quality. Here was Foote's weakness. He did not care for the suppression of vice; but if he who attempted to suppress it had a foible, or a strongly-marked characteristic, Foote laid hold of him, and made him look like a fool or a rascal, in the eyes of a too willing audience. The "Minor" failed in Dublin, very much to the credit of an Irish audience, if they condemned it on the ground of its grossness and immorality. To the credit of English society, there was strong protest made against it here; and also in Scotland--in and out of the pulpit; but the theatres were full whenever it was represented, nevertheless! The injury it effected must have been incalculable, for the wit was on a par with the blasphemy; but when Saving Grace and the work of the Holy Ghost are employed to raise a laugh of derision, the edification of the hearers is as little to be expected as it was hoped or cared for by the author. Foote, nevertheless, protested that in this piece, which brought back the coarseness of Aphra Behn, with a deeper irreligious tint, he meant no offence against the pious, but only against hypocrites. He was merely driven to that excuse. It is one, I think, that cannot be accepted, for Foote was not a truthful man. When he was taxed with ridiculing the Duchess of Kingston as Kitty Crocodile, in the "Trip to Calais," he assured Lord Hertford, the Chamberlain, that he had no idea that the allusions in that piece could apply to the duchess; and when he failed in procuring a license to play it, he had the impudence to assert, as the grounds of failure, that he had refused to put Lord Hertford's son on the box-keeper's free list--or as a more improbable story has it, to make the young gentleman box-keeper; and--hence, denial of the license! Lady Llanover, in a note in her _Memoirs of Mrs. Delaney_, roundly asserts that when Foote had completed his caricature of the duchess, "he informed her of it, in the hopes of extorting a large bribe for its suppression;" but from this assertion I dissent; though it is not improbable, as Walpole has recorded, that the duchess offered him a bribe "just as if he had been a member of parliament!"