Johnson rightly _pooh-poohed_ this passage. Foote was admirable in impromptu. When he once saw a sweep on a blood-horse, he remarked: "There goes Warburton on Shakspeare!" When he heard that the Rockingham cabinet was fatigued to death and at its wit's end, he exclaimed, that it could not have been the length of the journey which had tired it! Again, when Lord Caermarthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced it, with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than I." How much better does Foote appear thus, than when we find him coarsely joking on Lord Kelly's nose, while that lord was hospitably entertaining him, or sneering at Garrick for showing respect to Shakspeare, by a "jubilee." After all, the enemies he had provoked killed him. His fire and his physical powers were decaying when some of those enemies combined to accuse him of an enormous crime.[130] He did not fly, like guilty Isaac Bickerstaffe, under similar circumstances, but manfully met the charge, and proved his innocence. The anxiety, however, finished him. He had an attack of paralysis, played for the last time on the 30th of July 1777, in his "Maid of Bath," and after shifting restlessly from place to place, died on the 21st of October, at Dover. A few months previously, he had made over the Haymarket Theatre to Colman, for a life annuity of £1600, of which Foote lived but to receive one half-year's dividend. At the age of fifty-six, he thus passed away--an emaciated old man--and on Monday, the 27th of October, he was carried, by torchlight, to the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, whither Betterton, Barry, Mrs. Cibber, and others of the brotherhood of players, had been carried before him. The Haymarket season of that year indicated a new era, for in 1777, Edwin, as Hardcastle,[131] Miss Farren, as Miss Hardcastle, Henderson, as Shylock, and Digges, in Cato, made their first appearance in London. The old Garrick period--save in some noble relics (Macklin, the noblest of them all)--was clearly passing away. What the dramatic poets produced from the period of Garrick's withdrawal to the end of the century will be best seen by a reference to the Supplement, which I append to this volume. SUPPLEMENT TO CHAPTER XXII. LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL DRAMATIC PIECES PRODUCED AT THE PATENT THEATRES, FROM THE RETIREMENT OF GARRICK TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:-- 1776-77.--_Drury Lane._ "Trip to Scarborough" (altered by Sheridan from Vanbrugh). Miss Hoyden, Mrs. Abington. "School for Scandal" (Sheridan). Sir Peter Teazle, King; Charles Surface, Smith; Lady Teazle, Mrs. Abington. 1776-77.--_Covent Garden._ "Caractacus" (Mason). Caractacus, Clarke; Evelina, Mrs. Hartley. "Know Your Own Mind" (Murphy). Millamour, Lewis; Lady Bell, Mrs. Mattocks. 1777-78.--_Drury Lane._ "Battle of Hastings" (Cumberland). Edgar Atheling, Henderson; Edwina, Mrs. Yates. 1777-78.--_Covent Garden._