secondly, for utility-beneficent influence, even when I do not feel sentiment or complacency. For a middle state of feeling between these two (the acquaintance feeling) I have no faculty." "One is not one's genuine self; one does not disclose all one's self to those with whom one has no intimate sympathy. One is therefore several successive, and apparently different, characters, according to the gradation of the faculties and qualities of those one associates with. I am like one of those boxes I have seen, enclosing several other boxes of similar form, though lessening size. The person with whom I have least congeniality sees only the outermost; another person has something more interesting in his character, he sees the next box; another sees still an inner one; but the friend of my heart alone, with whom I have a full sympathy, sees disclosed the innermost of all. The colors of these successive boxes may vary; my various characters may have various aspects, and so the several judgments formed of me by different persons may be various, even to contradiction, yet each be apparently true."+

In the formation of his political opinions, Foster pursued, as far as his immediate connexions were concerned, a solitary course. His estimable tutor, Dr. Fawcett, had a settled reverence for the existing order of things, and a dread of innovation; while his younger friends were of temperaments better fitted to cool down his enthusiasm, than to render it more intense by the addition of their own. Perhaps the germ of his anti-aristocratical principles might have been discovered in the youthful indignation with which he reprobated the grasping selfishness of the landowners in his neighborhood. He usually finished his invectives by saying, "I would rather starve than receive anything at their hands." The anticipations of a general political amelioration which the French Revolution excited in so many ardent and philanthropic spirits, made him a decided republican. But though he "never ceased to regard royalty, and all its gaudy paraphernalia, as a sad satire on the human race,"‡ his attachment to republicanism underwent some modification in the course of years. A deeper insight into human nature made him less sanguine of the beneficial working of any political system; he looked more to indivi

† No. 607.

* No. 673. Letter to John Purser, Esq., Feb. 22, 1842. "Not however," Mr. F. adds, "that I am a violent republican. No form of government will be practically good, as long as the nations to be governed are in a controversy, by their vices and irreligion, with the supreme Governor."

dual efforts to education in the most comprehensive sense, and to the efficacy of Christian principles in the renovation of mankind. "While the nature of man is corrupt," he remarks in his essay on the Epithet Romantic, "it will pervert even the very schemes and operations by which the world would be improved, though their first principles were pure as heaven; and revolutions, great discoveries, augmented science, and new forms of polity will become in effect what may be denominated, the sublime mechanics of depravity."

CHAPTER III.

CHICHESTER-BATTERSEA-DOWNEND-LITERARY PURSUITS-ESSAY

ON THE GREATNESS OF MAN-JOURNAL-LETTERS ON THE METROPOLIS.

1797-1803.

EARLY in 1797 Mr. Foster was invited to become the minister of a General Baptist church at Chichester. He remained there about two years and a half, and applied himself with greater earnestness than at any former period to his ministerial duties; usually preaching three times on the Sunday, and in various ways striving to promote the piety and general improvement of the congregation. But though treated with much personal kindness, he met with little encouragement to prosecute his labors. A spirit of religious indifference seems to have pervaded the society; frequent deaths and removals reduced its numbers, and not long after his departure it became extinct. The chapel has since been only occasionally used by other denominations. Of Foster's hearers but few now survive who were then of an age to retain a recollection of his person and habits. A walk in the vicinity of the town is still known by his name; but his most favorite resort for meditation was the chapel, where the well-worn bricks of the aisles still exhibit the vestiges of his solitary pacings to and fro by moonlight.

That no proposals to take the pastoral office were made to Mr. Foster, either at Dublin or Newcastle, will not appear surprising to the readers of the correspondence, in which he lays open his character and views with so much ingenuousness. His recluse habits, his peculiar style of preaching, less adapted, probably, than at any subsequent period to popular or useful effect, and especially the fluctuating, unconfirmed state of his own mind, all these circumstances would conspire, with his latitudinarian opinion respecting churches, to render it unlikely that, though he would always secure the admiration and attachment of a select few, the general suffrage would be in his favor; or if it were, that he would accede to its decision.

It is, however, most interesting to mark his gradual advance, morally and intellectually, under a process of severe self-discipline, and, above all, the increasing intensity of his religious convictions. The disclosures made in his letters from Chichester and Battersea of the interior sentiments of his heart, the profound regrets, the earnest resolves, and the fervent aspirations after "perfection as it shines beauteous as heaven; and, alas! as remote," present an era in his spiritual life which no Christian mind can contemplate without the deepest sympathy.

It would be unpardonable not to notice the inestimable benefit derived by Foster from his friendship with Mr. Hughes; and it increases not a little the debt of gratitude due from the Christian community to that excellent man, that though his own authorship was limited to a few fugitive productions, and his sphere of duty was one of action rather than of meditation, he performed the noble office of stimulating the exertions and cherishing the piety of one of the most original and influential religious writers of his age.

From some passages in these letters it will be seen that Foster began very early the cultivation of his conversational powers, instead of leaving this invaluable instrument of social pleasure and improvement to the casual excitement of circumstances. The result was such as might be expected from a mind which was receiving constant accessions from observation and reflection. No one could be on terms of familiar intercourse with Foster, without being struck with his affluence of thought and imagery, and the readiness with which the most insignificant object or incident was taken as a kind of nucleus, on which was rapidly formed an assemblage of original remarks. There was scarcely any subject (except the purely scientific or philological) on which it was not enough simply to touch, and immediately the stream would gush forth.

But to return to the narrative. About Midsummer, 1799, Mr. Foster left Chichester, and resided for a time with Mr. Hughes, at Battersea. He explains the nature of his engagements in a letter to his friend Mrs. Mant, with whom he resided at Chichester. "In one way or another," he says,* "I have been rather busy most of the time since I came hither. Many evenings I have spent in interesting company. I have preached several of the sab

*To Mrs. Mant, July 23, 1799.

baths, and made a journey of perhaps forty miles in the country to preach to heathens, at one place, in a sort of coal-hole; and to plain good saints at another, in a little shop. I stood behind the counter, and some of the candles hanging above touched my wig. I should extremely like to preach in this style every evening in the week. This was not a casual adventure of my own; there has been for some time past a regular plan, which they call a mission, in which a considerable number of preachers are employed to go round the country to obscure places, where the gospel scarcely ever went before, to endeavor to establish a kind of religious posts. For two weeks I have been engaged, and shall remain so for some time, in another piece of business, of which I had no expectation when I left you. The Company who made some time since an establishment at Sierra Leone in Africa, have brought to England twenty black boys to receive European improvements, in order to be sent back when they are come to be men, to attempt enlightening the heathen nations of Africa. They have been placed in a house at Battersea, for the present, till some kind of regular and permanent establishment shall be formed; and I have been requested, and have agreed, to take the care of them for a few months. You may then fancy me sitting in a master's chair, with a look of consequence, encircled with twenty-one black visages, pronouncing commands, asking questions, and graciously administering instructions-a most monstrous wise man compared with my pupils. Most of them have been several years instructed in a school at Sierra Leone before they came, and consequently speak English perfectly well. Their ages are chiefly from nine or ten to fifteen or sixteen. The domestic manager is an aged black woman, with her daughter. The elder is a singularly pious and happy woman. She has been in different parts of the world, has undergone severe trials, but professes to have felt, and evid-ntly now feels, a degree of devout resignation and serenity most rarely to be met with. Just at present I have found it most convenient to board with her and her daughter, a girl of about, I should suppose, twenty."

Writing again to the same friend, December 31, 1799, he says, "I am just about the end of my engagement with the Africans, with whom I had at first no expectation of continuing half so long. My successor is one of my own most particular friends, with whom I spent several years in Yorkshire. The places where we were born are not more than half a mile from each other. I shall now