the least item of the evidence which convicts him of a certain narrow-mindedness and pettiness. In French history, too, the figure of the court-jester flits across the gay or sombre scene at times with fantastic effect. Caillette and Triboulet are well-known characters of the times of Francis I. Triboulet appears in Rabelais's romance, and is the hero of Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse, and, with some changes, of Verdi's opera Rigoletto; while Chicot, the lithe and acute Gascon, who was so close a friend of Henry III., is portrayed with considerable justness by Dumas in his Dame de Monsoreau. In Germany Rudolph of Hapsburg had his Pfaff Cappadox, Maximilian I. his Kunz von der Rosen (whose features, as well as those of our own Will Sommers, have been preserved by the pencil of Holbein), and many a petty court its jester after jester. Late in the 16th century appeared Le Sottilissime Astuzie di Bertoldo, which is one of the most remarkable books ever written about a jester. It is by Giulio Cesare Croce, a street musician of Bologna, and is a comic romance giving an account of the appearance at the court of Alboin king of the Lombards of a peasant wonderful in ugliness, good sense, and wit. The book was for a time the most popular in Italy. A great number of editions and translations appeared, and it was even versified. Though fiction, both the character and the career of Bertoldo are typical of the jester. That the private fool existed as late as the last century is proved by Swift's epitaph on Dicky Pearce, the earl of Suffolk's jester.

See Flögel, Geschichte der Hofnarren, Leipsic, 1789; Doran, The History of Court Fools, 1858.

(W. HE.) FOOTBALL is a game which consists, as the name implies, in giving motion to a ball with the feet alone. It has been aptly designated the "winter game" of Great Britain, and justly takes the place of cricket from Michaelmas to Lady Day. The ball requires to be larger than in all handball pastimes, in order that it may be easily kicked. This was accomplished in ancient times by inflating a bladder or skin termed follis. In Greece the έrioкupoç seems to have borne a resemblance to the modern game. Of this we read in Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities-"It was the game at football, played in much the same way as with us, by a great number of persons divided into two parties opposed to one another." Amongst the Romans the harpastum, derived from the Greek verb ápráw, to seize, thus showing that carrying the ball was permissible, bore a certain resemblance. Basil Kennett, in his Roma Antique Notitia, terms this missile a "larger kind of ball, which they played with, dividing into two companies and striving to throw it into one another's goals, which was the conquering cast,"- -a description which, if correct, certainly bears a strong resemblance to the modern game of football. The antiquity of football in Great Britain (introduced, there can be little doubt, by the Romans) goes some centuries farther back than cricket, probably because the requisites-only an inflated ball and rude goals-were fewer and simpler than in the summer game. The birthplace of the latter was in the southern counties, that of football in the north. In early times the great football festival of the year was Shrove Tuesday, though the connection of the game with this particular date is lost in obscurity. William Fitzstephen, in his History of London (about 1175), speaks of the young men of the city annually going into the fields after dinner to play at the well-known game of ball on the day que dicitur Curnilevaria. As far as is known this is the first distinct mention of football in England. A clear reference is made "ad pilam... pedinam" in the Rotuli Clausarum, 39 Edward III. (1365), memb. 23, as one of the pastimes to be prohibited on account of the decadence of archery, and the same thing occurs in 12 Richard II. c. 6 (1388). Down to the end of the first quarter of the present century Shrove Tuesday continued to be the high festival of football, but it had never taken root, like cricket, amongst the aristocracy and gentry. It was confined to the middle and lower classes. No clubs or code of rules had been formed, and the sole aim seems to have been to drive the ball through the opposing side's goal by fair means or foul. So rough did the game become that James I. forbade the heir apparent to play it, and describes the exercise in his Basilikon Doron as meeter for laming than making able the users thereof." Both sexes and all ages seem to have taken part in it on Shrove Tuesday; shutters had to be put up and houses closed in order to prevent damage; and it is not to be wondered that the

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game fell into bad repute under such violent horse-play and eccentric usages. Accidents, sometimes fatal, occurred; and Shrove Tuesday "football-day" gradually died out about 1830. For some thirty years football was only practised at the great public schools, at which there were, as still, two distinct forms of play. The Rugby game, so aptly described in Tom Brown's School Days, resembles the Roman harpastum and the rough Shrove-tide play, since seizing and carrying the ball, charging, and one player's holding another are freely allowed, and actual hacking was abolished at Rugby only as lately as 1877. Harrow and Winchester are the chief exponents of the game wherein kicking alone is allowed as a means of propulsion. Eton plays a hybrid game in two different ways, viz., "At the Wall” and “In the Field," the latter being a sort of mixture of both kinds of play. All other schools have arrayed themselves under one or other of these banners, with slight modifications in their rules. About the year 1860, when the great volunteer movement and the institution of amateur athletic sports gave a zest to many kinds of exercises, there came a revival of football amongst old public school and university men. It was soon found that a universal code of rules and a society to legislate on matters of dispute were necessary. Followers of the strict foot game were the first to recognize these wants, and the "Football Association was accordingly formed in 1863, the exponents of the other method not banding themselves together till the "Rugby Football Union" was instituted in 1871.

United Kingdom during the past few years, as is evinced Football has extended most rapidly throughout the by the fact of all large towns, villages, and schools now possessing football clubs, and has regularly taken the place of cricket during the winter months. It is a game more adapted to youths than to middle-aged persons, and should not be indulged in after the frame is full-grown and set, when the tumbles and scrimmages incidental to the Rugby code are apt to be baneful. The balls are now made of inflated india-rubber bladders, covered with strong leather laced together, the Rugby balls being elliptical or egg-shaped, and the association ones a perfect sphere. The two games may be briefly described thus:

Under the Rugby code a level piece of turf is the scene of action, and fifteen a side the usual number of players-ten "forwards," two "half backs," one "three-quarters back," and two "backs." Each goal is composed of two upright posts, exceeding 11 feet in height, and placed 18 feet apart, with a cross-bar 10 feet clear from the ground. The choice of goals is decided by lot, the side which wins the choice either availing themselves of any favorable breeze or gradients which may prevail, or electing to play at a disadvantage for the first period of the game till "half time" is called. The game is commenced by the opposite side to that which has choice of goals kicking off the ball (placed on the ground) from midway between the two goals. The object of both sides then is to drive the ball over the cross-bar, and between the line of the two upright posts of their opponents' goal, which achievement constitutes "obtaining a goal." This can be accomplished either by a player's touching the ball down behind his adversaries' goal line, then carrying it out, and thus obtaining a "try" or place stantly the ball rebounds from the ground. A match is decided kick at goal, or by kicking at goal with a direct drop-kick inby a majority of goals; if their number be equal, by a majority of ties; and if none of either be obtained, the match is drawn. The other minutiæ are so numerous that no less than sixty rules are required for their regulation.

The intricacies of the Association game are far fewer, and only require a very plain set of thirteen rules. No handling or touching the ball, except by the goal-keeper, is permissible, "dribbling" or kicking with the feet being the sole mode of propulsion. The goal posts are 24 feet apart, and the cross-bar only 8 feet from the ground, the ball in this case having to be driven under the latter in order to obtain a goal. "Tries" are unknown, and the gaining of goals is the sole point whereby the game is decided.

The rules of both games will be found in most football works, the chief of which are Routledge's Handbook of Football, 1867 C. W. Alcock's Football Annual, annually from 1868; Alcock's Football, our Winter Game, 1874; G. H. West's Football Calendar, annually from 1874. (H. F. W.)

FOOTE, SAMUEL (c. 1720-1777), comic dramatist and actor, was born at Truro about the year 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

show; and it is a pity that the piece played in this by the puppets should not have been committed to print. It was called Piety in Pattens, and professed to show "by the moral how maidens of low degree might become rich from the mere effects of morality and virtue, and by the literature how thoughts the most commonplace might be concealed under cover of words the most high flown." In other words, it was an attack upon sentimental comedy, to which more than one blow had been already dealt, but which was still not altogether extinguished. Indeed, though no one now reads Pamela, it may be doubted whether she and her cousinhood will ever be altogether suppressed on the modern stage. The Puppet-show was also to have contained a witty attack upon Garrick in connection with the notorious Shakespeare jubilee; but this was withdrawn, and thus was avoided a recurrence of the quarrel which many years before had led to an interchange of epistolary thrusts, when the manager of Drury Lane had permitted Woodward to attempt an imitation of Foote. On the whole, the relations between the two public favorites were very friendly, and on Foote's part (notwithstanding a number of witticisms directed especially against Garrick's interest in Queen Anne's farthings and the like) unmistakably affectionate; and they have been by no means fairly, or at least generously, represented by Garrick's most recent biographer. A comparison between the two as actors is of course out of the question; but, though Foote was a buffoon, and his tongue a scurrilous tongue, there is nothing in the well-authenticated records of his life to suggest that his character was one of malicious heartlessness. On the other hand, it was not altogether the fault of his position that he was unable to conciliate the respect of society, though, unlike Garrick, he could hardly have expected to form one of the chosen circle into which (though not without protest) the former gained admittance. It is at the same time characteristic of the difference between the London of that day and the London of our own, where club secrets are among the favorite morsels of public gossip, that the famous Club had been ten years in existence before Foote knew of it. Of Johnson's opinions of him many well-known records remain in Boswell; and if it is remembered that when Johnson had at last found his way into Foote's company (he afterwards found it to Foote's own table) he was unable to "resist" him, it should likewise not be forgotten that on hearing of Foote's death he recognized his career as worthy of a lasting biographical record.

Meanwhile most of poor Foote's friendships in high life were probably those that are sworn across the table, and require "t'other bottle" to keep them up. It is not a pleasant picture-of Lord Mexborough and his royal guest the duke of York, and their companions, bantering Foote on his ignorance of horsemanship, and after he had weakly protested his skill, taking him out to hounds on a dangerous animal. He was thrown and broke his leg, which had to be amputated, the "patientee" (in which character he said he was now making his first appearance) | consoling himself with the reflection that he would now be able to take off "old Faulkner" (a pompous Dublin alderman with a wooden leg, whom he had brought on the stage as Peter Paragraph in The Orators) "to the life." The duke of York made him the best reparation in his power by promising him a life-patent for the theatre in the Haymarket (1766); and Foote not only resumed his profession, as if, like Sir Luke Limp, he considered the leg he had lost "a redundancy, a mere nothing at all," but ingeniously turned his misfortune to account in two of his later pieces, The Lame Lover and The Devil on Two Sticks, while, with the true instinct of a public favorite, making constant reference to it in plays and prologues. He seemed to have lost none of his energy with his leg, though it may be observed that the characters played by him in several of his later plays are comparatively short and light. He continued to retain his hold over the public, and about the year 1774 was beginning to think of withdrawing, at least for a time, to the Continent, when he became involved in what proved a fatal personal quarrel. Neither in his entertainments nor in his comedies had he hitherto (except in Garrick's case, and it is said in Johnson's) put the slightest restraint upon the personal satire by which he terrified his victims and delighted their neighbors. One of his earlier experiments of this kind (The Author), in which, under the infinitely humorous character of Cadwallader, he had brought a

Welsh gentleman of the name of Ap-Rice on the stage, had, indeed, ultimately led to the suppression of the play. But, to an extent of which it is impossible fully to judge, he had pursued his hazardous course, mercilessly exposing to public ridicule and contempt not only fribbles and pedants, quacks or supposed quacks in medicine (as in The Devil on Two Sticks), impostors or supposed impostors in religion, such as Dr. Dodd (in The Cozeners) and Whitfield and his connection (in The Minor). He had not only dared the wrath of the whole Society of Antiquaries (in The Nabob), and been rewarded by the withdrawal, from among the pundits who rationalized away Whittington's Cat, of Horace Walpole and other eminent members of the body, but had in the same play attacked a well-known representative of a very influential though detested element in English society.-the "Nabobs" themselves. But there was one species of cracked porcelain or blemished reputation which he was not to try to hold up to contempt with impunity. The rumor of his intention to bring upon the stage, in the character of Lady Kitty Crocodile in The Trip to Calais, the notorious duchess of Kingston, whose trial for bigamy was then (1775) impending, roused his intended victim to the utmost fury; and the means and influence she had at her disposal enabled her, not only to prevail upon the lord chamberlain to prohibit the performance of the piece (in which, it should be observed, there is no hint as to the charge of bigamy itself), but to hire agents to vilify Foote's character in every way that hatred and malice could suggest. After he had withdrawn the piece, and letters had been exchanged between the duchess and him equally characteristic of their respective writers, Foote took his revenge upon the chief of the duchess's instruments, a Reverend Doctor" Jackson, who belonged to the "reptile" society of the journalists of the day, so admirably satirized by Foote in his comedy of The Bankrupt. This man he gibbeted in the character of Viper in The Capuchin, under which name the altered Trip to Calais was performed in 1776. But the resources of his enemies were not yet at an end; and a discharged servant of Foote's was suborned by Jackson to bring a charge and apply for warrant against him. Though the attempt utterly broke down, and Foote's character was thus completely cleared, his health and spirits had given way in the struggle-as to which, though he seems to have had the firm support of the better part of the public, including such men as Burke and Reynolds, the very audiences of his own theatre had been, or had seemed to be, divided in opinion. He thus resolved to withdraw, at least for a time, from the effects of the storm, let his theatre to Colman, and after making his last appearance there in May, 1777, set forth in October on a journey to France, But at Dover he fell sick on the day after his arrival there, and after a few hours died (October 21st). His epitaph in St. Mary's Church at Dover (written by his faithful treasurer Jewel) records that he had a hand " open as day for melting charity." His resting-place in Westminster Abbey is without any memorial; nor indeed is it the actor's usual lot to receive from posterity any recognition which the contemporaries whom he has delighted have denied to him.

Foote's chief power as an actor must clearly have lain in his extraordinary gift of mimicry, which extended, as the best kind of mimicry always does, to the mental and moral, as well as the mere outward and physical peculiarities of the personages whose likeness he assumed. He must have possessed a wonderful flexibility of voice, though his tones are said to have been harsh when his voice was not disguised, and an incomparable readiness for rapidly assuming characters, both in his entertainments and in his comedies, where he occasionally "doubled" parts. The excellent "patter" of some of his plays, such as The Liar and The Cozeners, must have greatly depended for its effect upon rapidity of delivery. In person he seems to have been by nature ill-qualified for light comedy parts, being rather short and stout, and coarse featured; but the humor with which he overflowed is said to have found full expression in the irresistible sparkle of his eyes.

As a dramatic author, although he displays certain distinctive characteristics of indisputable brilliancy, he can only be assigned nition of comedy to "an exact representation of the peculiar a subordinate rank. He was himself anxious to limit the defiformed; a faithful imitation of singular absurdities, particular manners of that people among whom it happens to be perfollies, which are openly produced, as criminals are publicly punished, for the correction of individuals and as an example to the whole community." This he regarded as the utile, or

useful purpose, of comedy; the dulce he conceived to be "the fable, the construction, machinery, conduct, plot, and incidents of the piece." For part at least of this view (advanced by him in the spirited and scholarly "Letter" in which he replied, "to the Reverend Author of the Remarks, Critical and Christian,' on The Minor") he rather loftily appealed to classical authority. But he failed to point out the relation between the utile and the dulce, and to remember the indispensableness of the latter to the comic drama under its primary aspect as a species of art. His comic genius was particularly happy in discovering and reproducing characters deserving of ridicule; for "affectation," he says (in the introduction to The Minor, where he appears in person), "I take to be the true comic object;" but he failed in putting them to true artistic use. That he not only took his chief characters from real life, but closely modelled them on well-known living men and women, was not in himself an artistic sin, though it may have been a practice of doubtful social expediency, as it certainly involved considerable personal risk. Nor was the novelty of this absolute, but rather one of degree and quantity; other comic dramatists before and after him have done the same thing, though probably no other has ever gone so far in this course, or has pursued it so persistently. The public delighted in his "dd fine originals," because it recognized them as copies; and he was himself proud that he had taken them from real persons, instead of their being "vamped from antiquated plays, pilfered from the French farces, or the baseless beings of the poet's brain." But the real excellence of Foote's comic characters lies in the fact that, besides being incomparably ludicrous types of manners, many of them remain admirable comic types of general human nature. Sir Gregory Gazette. and his imbecile appetite for news; Lady Pentweazel, and her preposterous vanity in her superannuated charms; Mr. Cadwallader, and his view of the advantages of public schools (where children may "make acquaintances that may hereafter be useful to them; for between you and I, as to what they learn there, does not signify twopence"); Major Sturgeon and Jerry Sneak; Sir Thomas Lofty, Sir Luke Limp, Mrs. Mechlin, and a score or two of other characters, are excellent comic figures in themselves, whatever their origin; and many of the vices and weaknesses exposed by Foote's vigorous satire will remain the perennial subjects of comic treatment so long as a stage exists. The real defect of his plays lies in the abnormal weakness of their construction, in the absolute contempt which the great majority of them show for the invention or conduct of a plot, and in the unwarrantable subordination of the interest of the action to the exhibition of particular characters. In a good play, whether it be tragedy or comedy, the characters are developed out of and by means of the action; but of this there is little trace in Foote. His characters are ready-made, and the action is only incidental to them. With the exception of The Liar (which Foote pretended to have taken from Lope de Vega, but which was really founded on Steele's adaptation of Corneille's Le Menteur), and perhaps of The Bankrupt, there is hardly one of Foote's "comedies" in which the conception and conduct of the action rise above the exigences of the merest farce. Not that sentimental scenes and even sentimental characters are wanting, that virtue is not occasionally in distress, or fails to vindicate itself triumphantly from the semblance of vice; but these familiar procedures are as incapable of exciting real interest as the ordinary course of a farcical action is in itself calculated to produce more than the most transitory amusement. In his earlier plays Foote constantly resorts to the most hackneyed device of farce-a disguise-which helps on the progress of a slender fable for which nobody cares to a close which every body foresees. Of course Foote must have been well aware of the defect under which his rapidly manufactured productions labored; he knew that if he might sneer at "genteel comedy" as suited to the dramatists of the servants' hall, and pronounce the arts of the drama at the great houses to be "directed by the genius of insipidity," he, like the little theatre where he held sway, was looked upon as "an eccentric, a mere summer fly."

His merits as a comic dramatist are not, however, obscured by his incontestable defects. He was inexhaustible in the devising of comic scenes of genuine farce, in which the humor and wit of the dialogue are on a level with the general excellence of the conception. An oration of "old masters," an election of a suburban mayor, an examination at the College of Physicians, a newspaper conclave where paragraphs are concocted and reputations massacred-all these and other equally happy scenes are brought before the mere reader with unfailing vividness. And everywhere the comic dialogue is instinct with spirit and vigor, and the comic characters are true to themselves with a buoyancy which at once raises them above the level of mere theatrical conventionalism. Foote professed to despise the mere caricaturing of national peculiarities as such, and generally used dialect as a mere additional coloring; he was, however, too wide awake to the demands of his public not to treat France and Frenchmen as fair game, and perhaps there is nothing coarser in his plays than his constant appeal to national patriotic prejudice. His satire against those everlasting victims

of English comedy and farce, the Englishman in Paris and the Englishman returned from Paris, was doubtless well warranted; and he was not slow to point out the fact-which Englishmen are wont to conceal when they come home from their travels-that they are nowhere more addicted to the society of their countrymen than abroad. In general, the purposes of Foote's social satire are excellent, and the abuses against which it is directed are those which it required courage to attack. The tone of his morality is healthy, and his language, though not aiming at refinement, is remarkably free from intentional grossness. Like all professed humorists, he made occasional mistakes; but he, too, was on the right side in the warfare against the pretentiousness of Cant and the effrontery of Vice, the two master evils of the age and the society in which he lived.

The following is a list of Foote's farces or "comedies," as he calls them, mostly in three, some in two acts, which remain in print. The date of production, and the character originally performed by Foote, are added to the title of each :

The Knights (1748-Hartop, who assumes the character of Sir Penurious Trifle); Taste (1752); The Englishman in Paris (1753-Young Buck); The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756-Sir Charles Buck); The Author (1757-Cadwallader); The Minor (1760-Smirk and Mrs. Cole); The Liar (1760); The Orators (1762-Lecturer); The Mayor of Garratt (1763Major Sturgeon); The Patron (1764-Sir Thomas Lofty and Sir Peter Peppercorn); The Commissary (1765-Mr. Zac. Fungus); The Devil upon Two Sticks (1768-Devil); The Lame Lover (1770-Sir Luke Limp); The Maid of Bath (1771—Mr. Flint); The Nabob (1772-Sir Matthew Mite); The Bankrupt (1773Sir Robert Riscounter); The Cozeners (1774-Mr. Aircastle); A Trip to Calais; The Capuchin (1776-O'Donnovan). Foote's biography may be read in W. ("Conversation") Cooke's Memoirs of Samuel Foote (3 vols., 1805), which contain a large collection of his good things and of anecdotes concerning him, besides two of his previously unpublished occasional pieces (with the act of the Diversions in a later form already mentioned), and an admixture of extraneous matter. From this source seems to have been mainly taken the biographical information in the rather grandiloquent essay on Foote prefixed to "Jon Bee's" useful edition of Foote's Works (3 vols., 1830). But few readers will care to go further than to the essay on Foote, reprinted with additions, from the Quarterly Review, in the late Mr. Forster's Biographical Essays; and none can fare better than those who turn to this delightful and discriminating study of a man of real though peculiar genius. (A. W. W.)

FOPPA, VINCENZO, a painter, was born in Brescia soon after 1400, and died there in 1492. He settled in Milan towards 1425, and was the head of a school of painting which subsisted up to the advent of Leonardo da Vinci. His contemporary reputation was very considerable, his merit in perspective and foreshortening being recognized especially. Among his noted works are a fresco in the Brera Gallery, Milan, the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian; aCrucifix in the Carrara Gallery, Bergamo, executed in 1455; the Trinity, in the church of S. Pietro in Oliveto, Brescia; and other paintings in the same city.

FORAMINIFERA. This designation is part of that given by D'Orbigny in 1825 to an order of animals forming minute calcareous shells (found recent in shore-sand, and fossil in various Tertiary Limestones), for the most part many-chambered, and often bearing a strong resemblance in form (fig. 1) to those of Nautilus Orthoceras, and other chambered Cephalopods,-his (supposed) Cephalopoda foraminifera being distinguished from the (real) Cephalopoda sipunculifera (Nautilus and its allies) by the want of the "siphon" which passes from chamber to chamber in the latter, and its replacement in the former by mere "foramina" in the dividing septa. And it seems to have been the applicability of this term Foraminifera to the shells thus characterized which has caused it to be retained as their ordinary designation, notwithstanding that the knowledge since acquired of the animals that form these shells necessitates the removal of the group from the elevated position assigned to it by D'Orbigny, to nearly the lowest grade of the whole animal series. It was by the admirable observations upon living Foraminifera published by Dujardin, in 1835, that attention was first drawn to the existence of a type of animals more simple than any previously known,their bodies consisting entirely of an apparently homogeneous semi-fluid substance, to which he gave the name sarcode;" and this substance projecting itself through apertures of the shell into indeterminate ramifying extensions (which he termed pseudopodia), capable of being retracted and fused again (so to speak) into the general mass of the body. Regarding these animals as a section of the

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