blind school, St. John's market—a covered area nearly two acres in extent, and of its kind still one of the finest in England—and the railway station in Lime Street. On the passing of the municipal reform act, Mr. Foster resigned his civic appointments on a pension, and withdrew into private life. He died August 21, 1846.—J. T—e.
FOSTER, John, an English clergyman, born at Windsor in 1731. While still very young he went to Eton, where he studied Greek under Mr. Plumtree, and Hebrew under Dr. Burton, then vice-provost of that institution. He early gave promise of great abilities and superior scholarship. He prosecuted his studies at Eton until the year 1748, when he was elected to King's college, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1751-52. He afterwards returned to Eton in the capacity of assistant to Dr. Bernard, whom he succeeded in the head mastership on the 25th October, 1765. Having resigned this situation, he was appointed to a canonry in Windsor cathedral, on the death of Dr. Sumner, in 1772. He died in September, 1773. He published "An essay on the different nature of accent and quantity," &c., 1762, 8vo—second edition, 1820; and "Enarratio et comparatio doctrinarum moralium Epicuri et Stoicorum.—W. A. B.
FOSTER, John, born at Halifax in 1770; died in 1843. This eminent writer has been called "The Essayist;" a designation which came to be applied to him incidentally, from the title of the work which gave him his position in the literary world. Foster's essays are in truth the careful, and, it might be said, the laborious outpouring of a profound mind which, in a very high degree, was self-prompted and originative, as well as rich and copious, and thoroughly compact. Essayist he may still be called, if we take into account those multifarious utterances of his literary opinions and of his tastes, which were embodied, in a course of years, in his contributions to a critical work—the Eclectic Review. The incidents of Foster's life were such only as are the most usual in the history of a literary man, and of a christian minister among the dissenters. His father was a small farmer, and a weaver also, residing within the parish of Halifax—a devout religious man, and member of the Baptist communion. He was well read in puritan literature, and superior in intelligence to most of his class. John, the eldest son of this family—who was never a boy—had from childhood been haunted by a consciousness of powers of thought that were not understood either by himself or by those around him. He felt himself, at the age of twelve, "an insulated being;" modest he was and bashful, and awkward, and misinterpreted; and so it was that his habits of feeling were fixed in an attitude of contrariety, and his mood became that of constitutional pensiveness, or even gloom. He "recoiled," as he says, "from human beings, into a cold interior retirement," where he felt as if "dissociated from the whole creation." Here we find the key to the cast of Foster's mind, as it appears in the pervading colour of his opinions on all sorts of subjects. His "antipathies" were very strong—strong far beyond the ordinary intensity of mere prejudice; nevertheless they were not—so he assures us—of a "malicious" kind. His mind was of that order that is liable to be tyrannized over by terrors of the imagination. He became the subject—almost the victim, of uncontrollable impressions of vastness and sublimity, and of pain, and of sadness; moreover he was vehemently resentful of wrong, and of oppression, and of cruelty. His emotions of this kind gave great force to the utterance of his opinions; especially to such of them as touched upon the political or ecclesiastical questions of the day, and upon the character and conduct of public men; which indeed often savoured of an excessive acerbity. Like so many men who have been highly distinguished in after-life, John Foster's earliest years were spent in the drudgery of mechanical labour at the loom. Yet during all that time his mind was intensely working out its own development, and was in course to ripen those faculties which ripen best in the ferment of their own heat. At the age of seventeen he became a member of a Baptist church, of which a worthy and intelligent man. Dr. Fawcett, was the pastor, and under whose guidance he was led to devote himself to the christian ministry; entering himself as a student at Brearley Hall. A fellow-student there was William Ward, the eminent Serampore missionary, oriental scholar, and translator of the scriptures. At this place he pursued his studies with assiduity for three years. Thence, in 1791, he removed to the Bristol Baptist academy, and there completed these studies, so far as to qualify him—as was believed—for undertaking the responsibilities of the pastoral office in a small sphere. His first engagement in this way was at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where, however, he remained little more than three months. Thence, in 1793, he went to Dublin, and thence to Cork—nowhere acceptable as a preacher to the class of persons he was destined to address. It was in Ireland, which at that time was in a state of extreme political agitation, that he became associated with some of the most violent of the Irish democrats; but from whose views he receded in his riper years. Experiments in teaching, and in lecturing, and in preaching, which were none of them successful, ended in his settling for a short time at Chichester, as a minister of a Baptist church; and here he applied himself with a more steadfast assiduity than before to the discharge of ministerial duties. In 1799 he gave up this engagement, and resided for some time at Battersea with his friend, the Rev. Joseph Hughes, where he employed himself in the care and instruction of some negro youths, lately imported from Sierra Leone. From Battersea he removed in 1800 to Downend, near Bristol, again taking charge of a small congregation. It was about this time that he became acquainted with a lady of great intelligence and of amiable disposition, who, a few years later, became his wife, and to whom his "Essays," in the form of "Letters to a Friend," were addressed. It was about this time also that he first gained introduction to intelligent and accomplished persons beyond the narrow limits of his own religious denomination.
Foster's next removal was to Frome, Somersetshire, again becoming minister of a small congregation in that town. This charge he soon relinquished on the plea of a malady which affected his utterance. It was here that his happy marriage took place; and here too that his literary existence had its commencement, in the publication of the "Essays," and in his engagement as a constant contributor to a then recently-established work—the Eclectic Review. He had then attained his thirty-eighth year; his mind had become fully matured, and his cast of opinion on all subjects was fixed. The ordinary incidents of domestic life—the birth and death of children, and various removals—diversified a course which had become that of an assiduous and retired literary man. His death occurred at Stapleton, October 15th, 1843, when he had entered his seventy-third year. Foster's published writings are—"Essays in a Series of Letters to a Friend;" "Discourse on Missions;" "An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance; and a Discourse on the Communication of Christianity to the people of India;" "Essay, Introductory to Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion;" "Critical Essays," contributed to the Eclectic Review. These works have severally run through many editions, and have taken a permanent place in our literature.
Foster does not fall into a place in any recognized class of writers. His was not a mind that finds its compeers; his culture was self-culture, chiefly; his style, as a writer, is absolutely his own; he followed no master; he has been followed by no imitators, or by none of repute. At the moment of his first appearance there were many readers prepared to accept his guidance, and these willing minds he took in charge; he brought them out as a class of minds having affinity with his own; and these he led on with power, and to their own high delight and advantage, in the path of deep meditative reflection. Not properly is this great writer spoken of as philosophic; much less was his turn scientific; nor, in any ordinary sense of the term, was his mode of thinking theological, or simply scriptural; yet religious it was in the fullest sense, and most decisively christian. We say his style was absolutely his own—elaborate in a high degree, but at the same time singularly inartificial and opposed to whatever is conventional. With Foster, elaboration was not, as it is with ordinary writers, a process of polishing and trimming, and of setting things off to the best advantage; nor was it an appending of decorations, or a splicing on of clever after-thoughts. It was a process analogous to that of a severe chemical analysis, in the course of which every element that is foreign to the one which it is proposed to bring out, is cast forth; it was a method of "exhaustions," as mathematicians would say, rather than of accumulations. A method of this sort might imply, as it did, an apparently encumbered structure of paragraphs; but this was because, in the writer's view, his precise meaning could not be conveyed in any more brief mode; he must mention, and exclude, whatever was foreign to his purpose. Thought had gone deeper than language could follow it
