Among the fairest of Foote's sayings was the reply to Mr. Howard's intimation that he was about to publish a second edition of his _Thoughts and Maxims_. "Ay! second thoughts are best." Fair, too, was his retort on the person who alluded to his "game leg." "Make no allusion to my weakest part! Did I ever attack your head?" Then Garrick once took as a compliment, that his bust had been placed by Foote in the private room of the latter. "You are not afraid, I see, to trust me near your gold and banknotes." "No," retorted the humorist, "you have no hands!" Foote was sometimes beaten with his own weapons. After he had leased the Edinburgh Theatre from Ross, for three years, at five hundred guineas a year, a dispute arose, followed by a lawsuit, in which Foote was defeated. The Scottish agent for the vanquishing side, called on Foote, in London, with his bill of costs, which the actor had to defray. The _amari aliquid_ having been got through, the player remarked that he supposed the agent was about to return to Edinburgh, like most of his countrymen, in the cheapest form possible. "Ay, ay," replied the agent, drily, tapping the pocket in which he had put the cash, "I shall travel--_on foot_!" Foote himself is described as looking rueful at the joke. Again, Churchill only said of him that he was in self-conceit an actor, and straightway Foote, who lived by degrading others, was "outrageously offended." Foote wrote a prose lampoon on Churchill and Lloyd, but did not publish it. Churchill, the bruiser, was not a safe man for Foote to attack, and the actor was fain to be satisfied with calling him the "clumsy curate of Clapham." Foote took Wilkinson to Dublin in 1757, where they appeared as instructor and pupil, in one of Foote's entertainments, called a "Tea." Wilkinson imitated Luke Sparks as Old Capulet; convulsed the house, instead of being "stoned," as Mrs. Woffington expected, with his imitation of the two Dublin favourites, Margaret herself and Barry, in "Macbeth," and, emboldened by the applause, he imitated Foote in his own presence. Foote's audacity was tripped up by the suddenness of the action; and he looked foolish,--wishing to appear pleased with the audience, but not knowing how to play that difficult part. Subsequently, however, Foote called on Wilkinson, and threatened him with the duel, or chastisement, if he ever dared take further liberties with him on the stage. Wilkinson laughed at the impotently-angry ruffian, and all his brother actors laughed with him. The malignity of Foote found satisfaction in his writing the part of Shift, in the "Minor" (as it was first represented, in Dublin), as a satire on Wilkinson; and he knowingly misrepresented Wilkinson's origin, in order to bring him into contempt. [Illustration: (Tate Wilkinson)]