Green. If the change in the condition of what we name the interest, shall at all correspond to such a change of place, a happy season will come at last. . . . . What a long history of depression! dating from and including my own temporary occupation there. I am too conscious of my own great deficiency in my duty there, to have anything to say of my many successors; in all reason and candor, I ought, and am most ready, to believe that none of them has been equally deficient.

This self-accusatory recollection put aside, how many images belonging to those times arise in my memory! Your estimable parents it were superfluous even to name, or your sister. . . . . . There was Meathdwelling, Montpelier, the scenes of the vicinity, the park, the barracks, the school-room on (was it not?) Arran Quay; the numberless talks among us on numberless subjects, yourself a prompt and very shrewd interlocutor. There were the "Sons of Brutus," watched, they were told after they had ceased to meet, by Major Sirr, and among them the intelligent Green, master of some parish school (on second thought, I am not sure he was one of them, or, I should say, us).

. . . . Perhaps it is probable that I, having an insulated remembrance -a retrospect enclosed and secluded as it were, within a section of time severed from the before and after-may have a more marked and distinct ideal vision than you; since, living on, permanently, the same ground, you would partly lose the things of that time in their sequel, seeing many of them gradually and insensibly changing and passing away, by a process that had no one great chasm to separate off the former stage, as one scene remaining alone in your memory. As to some other things (localities and objects not subject to change), having continued habitually familiar to you, they are, to you, simply, if I may so express it, what they are, and not what they stand pictured exclusively in the remembrance— remembrance that lays the scene in a far-off time.

I have still to confess, and am somewhat vexed at it, the total want of power in my mind to make one person of you two, the boy whom I so vividly remember, and the middle-aged man, whom I had the surprise and pleasure of seeing one day here. I even doubt whether, if I were to pass weeks and months daily with you, I should be able to make anything like a complete personal identification. I do believe the John Purser, of far towards forty years since, would be continually coming in upon me as if he must be, or have been, somebody else than the person I was actually seeing and conversing with. It would, no doubt, be partly the same with respect to Mrs. Purser, of whom I retain a distinct image, though my being so much less familiar with her at that time, might somewhat lessen this insuperable sense of doubleness. The experiment, at any rate, would, to me, be very curious and interesting.

. . . My dear friend, the retrospect over which I have been glancing, pensively as a prevailing sentiment, seems to carry us rather afar on a track which we can tread no more; but how reduced to nothing is the distance in comparison of the stupendous prospect! While called to be

grateful for all that a good Providence has done for us in the past, and to implore pardon in the name of our Lord, for everything which we had cause to wish had been differently done on our part, we are solemnly admonished to be looking forward, with increasing seriousness, to the grand Futurity. Whatever may be our appointed remaining time on earth, we are sure it is little enough for a due preparation to go safely and happily forward into that eternal Hereafter...

CXCIX. TO MRS. STOKES.

Bourton, Oct. 7, 1836.

MY DEAR MADAM, . . . . In this house and vicinity there are many things to remind me of the past. I have not in my mind a strongly associating principle. There are certain temporary, involuntary, and apparently casual moods of feeling, which, in whatever place they may occur, revive the images and sentiments of the past more vividly than they would be brought back by the mere force of objects and places associated with those retrospective interests. Still, there are here objects, apartments, garden-walks, with which an interesting and pensive memory is inseparably connected. They tell me of one inestimable being, united with me here, here separated from me, and now, here or elsewhere, with me no more on earth. I often imagine what it would have been, and would be, to have her with me still. But when I consider what a drooping, suffering life was appointed to her, during the latter part of her presence with me, and what I am confident she has gained by the change, the regret for my loss is greatly countervailed by the delight of thinking of her felicity; of the surpassing superiority of what she has enjoyed, and is enjoying, over all she could have experienced in this mortal state, even had it been much more propitious to her than it could have been, under the circumstances of frail and shattered health, and a painful oversusceptibility of mind. To rejoin her at length is my earnest desire for her daughters and myself. As to them, I am exceedingly far from indulging any gratifying anticipations with respect to this life. I have uniformly a melancholy idea of the destiny of women, considering how many kinds of danger, and how much of the grievances and sufferings of life there are often in their allotment. How I marvel at the thoughtless pleasure of parents, in seeing their children grow up, and dreaming about their future prospects! I often say, what is become of their eyes or any of their senses, while there is the actual world around them, to tell them what is the very possible destiny in this life, to say nothing of another, of the young creatures, about whom they have so many thoughtlessly sanguine fancies! I will hope better things for these girls; but I never dream such dreams, and never did.

Worcester, also, had its reminiscences. What a lapse of years since the first time that I experienced there the cordial friendship, of which I

have had so many gratifying proofs, in the long subsequent interval; and since the first of our little social travelling adventures, which were to be followed by our delightful excursions in North Wales. More, much more than the third part of life, taken at its long reckoning of "three score years and ten," gone away, since that point of our mortal sojourn! How many events, changes, mercies, admonitions, in this long period! Would that the improvements, of the most important order, had corresponded to this great sum of the motives, and aids, and progressively louder calls to that improvement. My own reflections are deeply accusatory. I often think, what insupportable melancholy would oppress and overwhelm me, if there were not the grand resource of the one allsufficient Sacrifice offered for sin. At the same time, let us, each and all, entreat the Divine assistance, that whatever remainder of time is reserved for us, may be so improved as to be greatly the best part of a life which is so rapidly hastening to its termination. I remain, dear madam,

Yours, with cordial and grateful regard,

and ever friendly wish,

J. FOSTER.

CC. TO J. WADE, ESQ.

December 21, 1836.

. . . But what base, worthless wretches those fellows are. It is really grievous and surprising, that never once can a sober, honest man be found that will do just the very moderate duty that you require. It makes one sometimes almost ashamed of one's democracy, to have so many glaring proofs of the utterly unprincipled character of so large a portion of what are called "the lower orders,” in a nation so vaunted for "enlightened," "civilized," "Christian," and all that. One is amazed to hear any intelligent advocate of the "popular rights," stickling for "universal suffrage." Think of such fellows as you have to do with, being qualified to have a vote in the choice of legislators!!

CCI. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL.

February 18, 1837.

We, of this little family, are not duly thankful to the protect ing Providence for having all escaped, while multitudes in the city and its neighborhood have been visited, and very many, as I hear, fatally. At this instant I see through the window the top of a mourning coach, following a hearse. Strange and sad consideration! that prevailing sickness and death are the desired, welcomed (?) means of life, gain, prosperity, to a portion of the fellow-mortals of the sufferers and victims,

Doctors, druggists, and undertakers, are flourishing on this calamity, like gay flowers about the graves in a church-yard.

The disastrous and, one thinks, unprecedented season does at length give some wavering and reluctant signs of change. The change has not been waited for by the intimations of spring, in snow-drops and crocuses. Welcome are they once more, though they seem to tell me, most pointedly, how short a time since their tribe was here before, and therefore with what appalling velocity life is running off.

Your guess is true that I have been (though not violently against my will) very nearly a prisoner, during the past months. As to "company," dinner-parties, tea-visits, they have been, with very small exceptions, out of the question. I have been under peremptory medical inhibition to be out in the night air. A cough, first occasioned by the old cause, the miserable heating and subsequent chilling from the wet clothes in summer, and renewed at intervals down into the foggy autumn, produced at last an effect which I was forced to regard as somewhat serious-an effusion, not large (and not repeated) of blood, from, Dr. Stenson told me, the windpipe, and together with prescriptions, enjoined me to keep within the house, and to avoid-one thing and another-as especially preaching, an infrequent, indeed, but now and then occurring exercise. I have been tolerably, though (except on the last point) not punctiliously obsequious, have had no return of the ominous symptom, and have very little cough, but find myself far more liable to its return, from a very slight cold-taking, than a person sound in the affected part would be. As to public and parliamentary affairs, you complain that we are to have the same old battled business over again. But how else can any good be gained against the obstinate resisters of all improvement? As O'Connell was lately telling them in Ireland, it is only by keeping at it, by persisting, reiterating, hammering, that an effectual impression can be made on the public mind, and through that, on the hostile obstinacy, or sluggish indifference of those on whom immediately the business depends. Some parts of that business are of an importance and an urgency quite portentous. Think of the condition of Ireland, in the event of the frustration of the measures in its favor-such a frustration as should not leave any hope of success within a near and assured prospect. Those who can coolly look at, and hazard, the probable consequences, must be either villains or madmen.

CCII. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL.

Stapleton, April 15, 1837.

You are hardly unaware that there is something a little fallacious in your mood of thinking and feeling about activity in public affairs. If all well-principled and able men were to indulge that mood, the great interests of the community would go desperately to corruption

and ruin. Just think, for want of the requisite number, activity, and co-operation of such men, what a condition those interests have been in, for a long succession of years, up to the commencement of the recent national rousing. A vast hell of wars; bad legislation; profligacy in all administration; all correction of old rotten institutions resisted; total indifference to the uneducated, barbarous condition of the people; every kind of corruption practised with impunity, under protection of a monopoly of power; hatred, almost or wholly to the length of persecution, of those who have dared to expose the iniquities and preach reform. Has it not struck you, over and over again, that every part of the system, on coming at last under resolute investigation, has turned out worse than all previous opinion or suspicion had surmised? Now are good men to be told that all this is no concern of theirs, and on the plea of not involving themselves in the turmoil of worldly and political affairs, quietly and piously to let it all go on, from bad to worse; to leave it all in the same profligate hands,-till Providence shall work a miracle for its reformation? It is but slight rebuke that you will incur for one particular in your avowal, that you care "far more about my poor Catherine and John, than for either king or country, church or state;" but when you say the same thing of what constitutes the collective community, with their immense collective interests, do you forget that there are unnumbered thousands of other Johns and Catherines, to be affected for good or evil, in numberless ways, by the beneficial or injurious operation of the national system? If all had acted on the principle of caring little about any but their own, we should have had no public spirited men; no patriots; no magnanimous vindicators of the rights of the oppressed; none who, while their own families were the first in their regard, yet felt indignant that myriads of other families were the worse, in various ways and degrees, for a corrupt and vicious management of the concerns of the community. The crisis of the affairs of this country, balancing and wavering between the growing impulse toward improvements of incalculable value, and the powerful, obstinate resistance made by the old corrupt system-a crisis including the perfectly tremendous state and possibilities of Ireland, and involving the interests of perhaps a million of families there, are not, methinks, matters which any of us should deem insignificant in comparison with our own domestic interests. Unless a vast number and combination of men, while maintaining all due regard for what they respectively have at home, will yet take a zealous and untiring concern in these public affairs, designs of immense utility will be frustrated, and there will inevitably be a long course of agitation, danger, and disaster. So ends my sermon, and most

likely with the same effect as too many other sermons. . . . .

CCIII. TO J. PURSER, JR., ESQ.

MY DEAR SIR,

Stapleton, May 30, 1837.

Many of my recollections of early life have