Samuel Foote (January, 1720 - October 21, 1777) is an English dramatist and actor, was baptized at Truro on January 27, 1720.
Of his attachment to his native Cornwall, he gives no better proofs as an author than by making the country booby Timothy (in The Knights) sound the praises of that county and of its manly pastimes; but towards his family, he showed a loyal and enduring affection. His father was a man of good family and position. His mother, Eleanor Goodere, whom he is said in person as well as in disposition to have strongly resembled, he liberally supported in the days of his prosperity, and after her death indignantly vindicated her character from the imputations recklessly cast upon it by the revengeful spite of the duchess of Kingston.
About the time when Foote came of age, he inherited his first fortune through the murder of his uncle, Sir John Dinely Goodere. Bart., by his brother, Captain Samuel Goodere. Foote was educated at the collegiate school at Worcester, and at Worcester College, Oxford, distinguishing himself in both places by mimicry and audacious pleasantries of all kinds, and, although he left Oxford without taking his degree, acquiring a classical training which afterwards enabled him neatly to turn a classical quotation or allusion, and helped to give to his prose style a certain fluency and elegance.
Foote was designed for the law, but certainly not by nature. In his chambers at the Temple, and in the Grecian Coffee-house hard by, he learned to know something of lawyers if not of law, and was afterwards able to jest at the jargon and to mimic the mannerisms of the bar, and to satirize the Latitats of the other branch of the profession with particular success. The famous argument in Hobsop v. Nobson, in The Lame Lovers, is almost as good of its kind as that in Bardell v. Pickwick.
But a stronger attraction drew him to the Bedford Coffee-house in Covent Garden, and to the theatrical world of which it was the social centre. After he had run through two fortunes (the second of which he appears to have inherited at his father's death) and had then passed through severe straits, he made his first appearance on the actual stage in 1744. It is said that be had married a young lady in Worcestershire; but the traces of his wife (he affirmed himself that he was married to his washer-woman) are mysterious, and probably apocryphal.
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