of the multitudinous, overwhelming vastness of the creation. What a world of imagery, suggestions, mysteries!" That was his own exclamation, and you have illustrated it. But, again, I say, how strangely this creature of massive and grotesque formation must have appeared among the small persons, with whom it was his destiny to live and move! How a Broadmead elder, or deacon, would have stared, if he had ascended an old church-tower with Foster, and listened to his moralising:

"Examined the decaying stone-work; thought again of the lapse of ages; appearance of sedate indifference to all things, which these ancient structures wear to my imagination, which cannot see them long without personifying them. Thickets of moss on the stone. Noticed with surprise a species of vegetation on the surface of several plates of iron. Observed with an emotion of pleasure the scar of thunder on one of the turrets. Sublime and enviable office, if such there be, of the angels who wield the thunder and lightning!"

I have not the slightest fault to find with your remarks on Foster, so far as they go; but you will not be displeased to receive a word or two, by way of P.S. to your own elaborate performance. If you like what I have done, and make use of it, I borrow the words of a distinguished person to say, that I don't want any such aristocratic reward as a piece of plate, with two griffins sprawling upon it; I shall be contented with two post-office orders, filled up to the widest capacity of those pleasing forms of correspondence; merely reminding you to write my Christian names (you know how many) at full length, in failure of which her majesty's representatives are inexorable.

You recollect that the editor of Foster's memoir has appended some notices of him as a companion, by one who knew him well, Mr. John Shepherd. You have referred to these; they are not copious, but some are interesting, as the remark on Southey, then sinking in melancholy decay. "No doubt his mind was worn out by the toil of building up many books, as if there were a want, a famine of books." Foster

admired and acknowledged Southey's wonderful power of poetic description, and the idiomatic strength of his language, which made the reader exult in the capabilities of the English tongue; but he disapproved of the laureate's political changes, and is reported to have declined an interview when Southey visited Bristol for the last time in 1838. Alas! soon after the night descended upon the enchanter, the poet was no more; the limbs moved, but the intellect had perished, henceforth never to be seen by the admiring eye, except in the triumphant procession of critical applause, his cheek flushing, like the Arvalan of his own story, beneath "the crimson canopy." Mr. Shepherd, then-whose allusion to Southey had drawn me from the straight roadfurnishes a very meagre account of Foster within-doors. He does not give us the man. This want has been in some degree supplied by a book recently published;* not indeed of much authority or importance, but apparently written by a person who wishes to tell what he knows, and who knows one or two things worth telling. Undoubtedly, as Goldsmith says by the lips of his cognoscento, the portrait might have been better, if the painter had taken more pains; but such as it is, it is welcome. It has, morcover, the merit of being short, which the otherwise judicious editor of Foster's Correspondence has overlooked. should have remembered the observation of his friend, that the subordinate economy of life does not require to be detailed. We do not I want a chronicle of coats. "As well might a man, of whom I inquire the dimensions, the internal divisions, and the use of some remarkable building, begin to tell me how much wood was employed in the scaffolding, where the mortar was prepared, or how often it rained while the work was proceeding." But here is Foster himself, in pen and-ink:

He

"There are two entrance- ways to Broadmead Chapel, the principal one in the street from which the building takes its name, and the other facing St James's churchyard. If any person had taken his stand near the latter on any Sunday morning, during the palmy days of Hall's

pastorate, he might have seen approaching, shortly before the appointed hour for commencing the service, a man tall, and somewhat stoutly built, with a very decided stoop in the shoulders, his chin half buried in a thick white cravat, and his figure sheltered by an old and enormous-sized green gingham umbrella. This, of course, supposes the weather to be rainy; but whether wet or dry, sunny or cloudy, whenever Robert Hall was to preach, assuredly that slovenly-looking man would make his appearance at the back door of Broadmead meeting-house. If you looked on that part of his face not concealed by his hat, which nearly rested on his eyebrows, nor enveloped in his neckkerchief, you might see a countenance of a profoundly meditative cast. On he would go, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, as he ascended the gallery-stairs, and stole quietly to a secluded pew, at the left hand of the preacher, which he loved, because there he was, to a great degree, sheltered from observation.

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During the few years which immediately preceded his death, he preached very seldom in Bristol; but on the occasion of a new chapel being opened in Thrissell Street, he was with very great difficulty prevailed upon to deliver the morning discourse. We went to hear him, and on arriving at the chapel, found it densely crowded in every part, the au dience seeming to consist chiefly of clergymen and Dissenting ministers, who had been attracted by the extraordinary talents of the Essayist. After a hymn had been sung, he ascended the pulpit; and as we were situated directly in front of him, we had a favourable opportunity for observation. Not one of the published portraits give any thing like an idea of Foster; the one by Branwhite resembles him when he was younger; but as we saw him, we should not have recognised in it any traces of the original. Mr. Foster's face was large, and the features massive; the forehead was very high, and pyramidal in shape, being broadest at its lower portion. His head was covered by a very evident curly wig, which one might at a glance discover was not of the most fashionable manufacture. A large pair of silver spectacles, with circular glasses almost as big as penny-pieces, nearly concealed two dark, small eyes, which glistened brightly beneath a couple of shaggy eyebrows; the face was ploughed with deep lines, and the forehead furrowed all over with wrinkles of thought; around his neck was a dingy white cravat, and his coat was ill-fitting, and of a rusty black. Altogether he was the most slovenly-looking man we ever saw in a pulpit. After he had given out his text in a mumbling,

gurgling, husky noise, he commenced somewhat in this way: Now, I dare say some of you will think I am going to preach a very odd sermon from such an odd text.' Then he went on, gradually enlisting the attention of his hearers, whilst he described in magnificent language the idol-temples of the East. Soon his congregation were wrapped in wonder and delight, as they listened to his gorgeous descriptions, and we do not think that one individual present stirred hand or foot until his glowing discourse came to an end.

"A friend from Sheffield had invited us to accompany him to Mr. Foster's residence. It was in the summer time, and on a calm, bright evening we drove up to his door at Stapleton. The house looked gloomy outside, and when we entered one of the front parlours, the deep shade caused by the trees, and, we believe, a boundary wall, caused the apart ment to wear a sombre appearance. On the tables and chairs lay, in admirable confusion, proof impressions of engravings, and costly volumes, of a character which plainly enough indicated the fine taste of their possessor. After we had been a few minutes in the apartment, Mr. Foster entered it. He was, as usual, very carelessly attired, wearing an old blue coat, with bright brass buttons, which hung baggingly about his large frame, and a pair of corduroy breeches and top boots. The old brown curly wig, and the pair of large circular spectacles, added not a little to the singularity of his appearance. His manners were rather forbidding, but they formed no key to his character, which, it is said, was characterised by simple honesty in his purposes, and straightforwardness in his movements. He invited us to remain and take tea, and two ladies soon after. wards joined us. His conversation was what might be characterised as odd ; certainly it was not brilliant. His eye was the most piercing, with the single excep tion of Mr. Beckford, which I ever saw; it fairly looked into one, and there was no escaping from its scrutiny. He never smiled, and an indescribable gloom seemed to belong to his character. After tea he rose from the table, and putting on an old grey frock coat, invited us to walk with him in his garden; there a spirit of almost cheerfulness seemed to animate him; every now and then he would draw from his pocket a common round snuff-box, gently tap its lid, and pause for awhile, glancing keenly over his huge spectacles, and then giving utterance to some casual observation."

This is pleasing enough,-almost warm, indeed, with a tinge of the

Boswellian gossip. The same volume contains some outlines of Foster's most famous and admired friend, Robert Hall; but most of them are venerable from their age and labours, having been copied from page to page, till they are nearly worn out. The following is one of the best. Hall's mouth was prodigious, and he was conscious of the peculiarity. Upon one occasion a minister, in the course of family prayers, besought the Lord to open the mouth of Hall wider than ever, in reference to a sermon he was going to preach. When they rose from their knees, Hall said, "Well, sir, why did you pray that my mouth might be opened wider? It could n't well be done, sir, unless it was slit from ear to ear!"

Hall and Foster are the two clevations on the dead level of Baptist dissent. Foster always acknowledged Hall's supremacy in the pulpit with generous self-abandonment. When he was appointed to the pastoral charge of Broadmead, Foster immediately relinquished his own week-day lecture. "Now Jupiter is come, I can try it no more." But in all the beauties of intellectual taste, and especially in a vivid sense of nature, we look upon Foster as immeasurably superior to Hall, who might complain of Cambridge and its treeless scenery, but who never describes nature with the fine instinct of poetic feeling. His images have a manufactured look. Thus speaking of infidelity," Sudden in its rise and impetuous in its progress, it resembles a mountain-torrent, which is loud, filthy, and desolating; but being fed by no perennial spring, is soon drained off and disappears." Who does not perceive that the second epithet is out of its place? Compare with it a casual remark of Foster, suggested also by observation of nature: "I wish a character as decisive as that of a lion or a tiger, and an impetus towards the important objects of my choice as forcible as theirs towards prey and hostility; wish to have an extensive atmosphere

of consciousness; a soul which can mingle with every element in every form; which, like the Eolian harp, arrests even the vagrant winds, and makes them music."

I think, also, that while Hall combines more, Foster invents more; he seems to have possessed, in a rare degree, the power he ascribed to some unknown preacher, of tumbling down massy fragments of originality, that not only made the stagnant stream of men's thoughts to foam and flash, but crushed many creeping things small buzzing objections, slimy worldlinesses in their way.

Hall shines, Foster glows; one has a wider surface of lustre, the other fiercer blazes in the midst of blackness and smoke. The light of Foster, if we may so speak, seemed to come from a remoter flame. He has pointed out the difference in his friend: "He was less given than other men of genius to visionary modes of thought; musings exempt from all regulation; that fascination of the mysterious, captivating by the very circumstance of eluding; that fearful adventuring on the dark, the unknown, the awful; those thoughts that wander through eternity." Hall was satisfied with pointing out the burning walls of space, Foster was perpetually striving to overleap them. In one respect Hall distanced competition,-in the artistic accomplishments of literature; he had intuitively what his friend rarely obtained without painful labour - - a graceful harmony of style. His words fall into their places without drill. In Foster there is a constant bustle and waver of the line; it seems as if a dozen giants were driving to the front, and could not find places when they reached it. His conceptions are often surprisingly vivid and original; but his hand does not second his imagination. We think of Milton the poet, staggering and stammering into the pamphleteer. An obvious parallel occurs in the remarks of Hall and Foster on the necessity of educating the lower classes. Read the following passages :

FOSTER

"A large portion of what he is accustomed to see presents itself to him in' the character of boundary and prohibi. tion; on every hand there is something to warn him what he must not do. There are high walls, and gates, and fences, and brinks of torrents, and precipices; in short, an order of things on all sides, signifying to him, with more or less of menace, Thus far and no farther. And be is, in a general way, obsequious to this arrangement. We do not ordinarily expect to see him carelessly transgressing the most decided of the artificial boundaries, or daring across those dreadful ones of nature. But nearly destitute of the faculty to perceive (as in coming in contact with something charged with the element of lightning) the awful interceptive lines of the other arrangement which he is in the midst of, as a subject of the laws of God, we see with what insensibility he can pass through those prohibitory significations of the Almighty will, which are to devout men as lines streaming with an infinitely more formidable than material fire. And if we look into his future course, proceeding under so fatal a deficiency, the consequence fore. seen is, that those lines of divine interdiction which he has not conscience to perceive as meant to deter him, he will seem as if he had acquired, through a perverted will, a recognition of in another quality, as temptations to attract him." -On Popular Ignornnce, p. iii. 14th edition.

HALL.

"These are the only expedients that can be adopted, for forming a sound and virtuous populace; and if there be any truth in the figure by which society is compared to a pyramid, it is on them its stability chiefly depends; the elaborate ornament at the top will be a wretched compensation for the want of solidity in the lower part of the structure. These are not the times in which it is safe for a nation to repose on the lap of ignorance. If there ever was a season when public tranquillity was ensured by the absence of knowledge, that season is past. The convulsed state of the world will not permit unthinking stupidity to sleep, without being appalled by phantoms, and shaken by terrors, to which reason, which defines her objects and limits her apprehension, by the reality of things, is a stranger. Every thing in the condition of mankind announces the approach of some great crisis, for which nothing can prepare us but the diffusion of knowledge, probity, and the fear of the Lord. While the world is impelled with such violence in opposite directions; while a spirit of giddiness and revolt is shed upon the nations, and the seeds of mutation are so thickly sown, the improvement of the people will be our grand security; in the neglect of which the politeness, the refinement, and the knowledge accumulated in the higher orders, weak and unprotected, will be exposed to imminent danger, and perish like a garland in the grasp of popular fury."-Advantages of Knowledge to the Lower Classes.

emanation in yonder temple of truth and virtue! But, alas! all along as he goes towards it, he advances through an avenue formed by a long line of tempters and demons on each side, all prompt to touch him with their conductors, and draw this divine electric element with which he is charged away."

it the name of a liquid thing, yet it is not incontinent to bound itself as liquid things are, but hath in it a most restraining and powerful abstinence to start back, and globe itself upward from the mixture of every ungenerous and unbeseeming motion, or any soil wherewith it may peril to stain itself."-Of Church Govern

ment.

Here one word whispers the name of the garden from whence the balmy spoil was taken; the image of youth globing itself upward from every impurity is extremely beautiful, and was scarcely likely to arise to two different minds. Doubtless, Foster brought away something from Milton, except his harshness and obscurity. Who could linger long amid that Egyptian architecture of style, without feeling a solemn shade gather over the thoughts? There every thing is huge, sombre, and often repulsive. Fierce republicanisms lie embalmed beneath those lowering pyramids of words; grotesque mummies, with which so many precious jewels of fancy are entombed; rich rewards to the patient explorer among the burial-places of departed kings!

You might, if your inclination had led you in that direction, have pointed out several heads of comparison between Coleridge and Foster. The preacher saw the poet at Bristol, a city which Southey called the most ancient, most beautiful, and most interesting in England. Certainly its venerable streets have witnessed a strange confluence of bright streams of genius. There Chatterton forged upon antiquity, and Wesley founded Methodism, and Hall illuminated

Nonconformism, and Coleridge talked as never man talked in this cold nineteenth century, and Southey himself saw visions and dreamed dreams. Nor should Foster be forgotten among those horses of the sun, who have run their race upon earth. No man lauded more earnestly the old man eloquent; his mind of vast comprehension and minute perception; opulent in multifarious knowledge; sympathetic with every thing pure and sublime; yet having the splendour of his genius clouded over by a malignant spell, that embittered his life and wounded his reputation. Foster, perhaps, did not recognise his own resemblance to Coleridge; but it may be traced in his mode of expression, as well as of thought. He wanted Addison to do for his essays what Hume or Stewart would have performed for the philosophy of his contemporary. But the chief likeness is seen in the wild and unearthly tendencies of the imagination; in the passion which Johnson reprehends in Collins, of slumbering by Elysian water-falls, or gazing upon magic palaces. Compare Foster's reflections on reading some passages of Paradise Lost, with Coleridge's hymn before sunrise in the vale of Chamouni. Is not the same poetic character discernible in both?

"I have been reading some of Milton's amazing descriptions of spirits, of their manner of life, their powers, their bound. less liberty, and the scenes which they inhabit or traverse; and my wonted enthusiasm kindled high. I almost wished for death, and considered with great admiration what that life and what those strange regions really were, into which death will turn the spirit free. I cannot wonder, and can easily pardon, that this intense and sublime curiosity

COLERIDGE.

"But thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air, and dark, substantial, black,

An ebon mass,methinks thou piercest it As with a wedge! But when I look again,

It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity!