great domestic bereavement, and the removal of Hall and Ander. son, so soon to be followed by that of Hughes, was prolonged by another similar event, one not involving, it is true, a dissolution of intimate friendship or even of long acquaintance, but yet fitted, from the juncture at which it happened, and the interesting character and position of the individual, to excite no ordinary emo. tion. "The most remarkable thing of late," Foster says, in a letter to Mr. Hill (Oct. 8, 1833), "is the visit, so soon to end in the death, in the house behind our garden, of the Rajah Rammohunroy (the title of Rajah, of no very defined import, was conferred on him by the king of Delhi, the remaining shadow of the great Mogul). I had entertained a strong prépossession against him, had no wish to see him, but could not avoid it, when he was come to the house of our young landlady, Miss Castle.

My prejudice could not hold out half an hour after being in his company. He was a very pleasing and interesting man; intelligent, and largely informed, I need not say-but unaffected, friendly, and, in the best sense of the word, polite. I passed two evenings in his company, only, however, as an unit in large parties; the latter time, however, in particular and direct conversation with him, concerning some of the doctrines of the Indian philosophers, the political, civil, and moral state of the Hindoos. In the former instance, when the after-dinner company consisted of Dr. Carpenter, and sundry other doctors and gentlemen, churchmen and dissenters, he was led a little into his own religious history and present opinions. He avowed his general belief in Christianity as attested by miracles (of which I had understood that he made very light some ten or a dozen years since), but said that the internal evidence had had by much the greatest force on his mind. In so very heterogeneous a company, there was no going into any very specific particulars. Carpenter, in whose company I have since dined at Dr. Prichard's, very confidently claims him as one of the " modern Unitarian " school.

It may be that he was finally near about in agreement with that school, but I do not believe that they have any exact knowledge of his opinions. ... Here he went to several churches, and to hear Jay on a week-day at Bridge Street, as well as sometimes to Lewin's Mead, where the family in which he was visiting constantly attend. There is, or a few days since there was, a great perplexity how to dispose of his remains.*

"The knowledge that the Rajah had, 'n various ways, manifested soli

He had signified his wish not to be committed to any ecclesiasti cal burying-ground, but, if it might be so managed, deposited in some quiet corner of the profane earth. His principal London friend (a Mr. Hare from India) thinks it the most desirable that he were conveyed to India. During the greater part of his short illness (it was an affection of the brain), he was in a state of such torpor as to be incapable of any communication. Dr. Prichard, who attended him during the latter days, says, he did not utter, while he was with him, ten distinct sentences. As far as I have heard there was nothing said to indicate the state of his mind. There were actions (of his hands, &c.) which his own attendants said were the usual ones which accompanied his devotional exercises. To me, and several of our order of friends, who were, the latter evening to which I have referred (at Mrs. Cox's) in such close and interesting conversation with him, then apparently in perfect health, but then within hardly two days of the commencement of his fatal illness, it was emphatically striking, nine or ten days after, to think of him as no longer in our world. This event, together with the almost sudden removal of Anderson (and if my old friend from youth, Hughes, be not already gone, he is on the very last brink of life), seem to press on me, with a tangible presence, as it were, of the other world. And then where is she that was with me so lately? so lately-for it is amazing how rapidly thirteen months have passed away— where is she? and where is, my dear friend, your beloved companion that was-but that will be again? May Heaven prepare us to meet them ere-while, with ecstatic joy-joy to them, as well as to us; for with rapturous emotion, they will welcome, when they arrive, those whom they have left behind!". .

citude to preserve his caste with a view both to his usefulness and to the security of his property, and the belief that it might be endangered if he were buried among other dead, or with Christian rites, operated to prevent the interment of his remains in any of the usual cemeteries. Besides this, the rajah had repeatedly expressed the wish, that in case of his dying in England, a small piece of freehold ground might be purchased for his burying place, and a cottage be built on it for the gratuitous residence of some respectable poor person to take charge of it. Every difficulty, however, was removed by the offer of Miss Castle. to appropriate to the object a beautifully adapted spot, in a shrubbery near her lawn under some fine elms. There this revered and beloved person was interred on the 18th of October, about two P.M. The coffin was borne on men's shoulders, without a pall, and deposited in the grave, without any ritual, and in silence. Those who followed him to the grave, and sorrowed there, were his son and two native servants, the members of the families of Stapleton-grove and Bedford-square, the guardians of Miss Castle, and two of her nearest relatives, Mr. Estlin, Mr. Foster and Dr. Jerrard, together with several ladies," &c.-Dr. Carpenter's Discourse, Appendix, p. 122.

The Serampore controversy, in addition to his domestic concerns, so fully absorbed Foster's attention, that for nearly nine years he prepared nothing for the press, with the exception of the "Observations on Mr. Hall as a Preacher," and a new edition (the ninth) of the Essays, after subjecting them to a final revision at the suggestion of Mr. Anderson, "the acute literary friend" alluded to in the preface; besides two letters on the Church and the Voluntary Principle, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle, Oct. 2 and 3, 1834; and three letters on the Ballot in the same Journal, April 24, 25, and 27, 1835.

In 1837, when the Eclectic Review passed into the hands of its present editor, Foster allowed his name to stand in the list of contributors, but without pledging himself to more than an occasional article. In writing to Dr. Price (Feb. 24, 1837), he says, "Not one of the Oxford Tracts has come in my way. There is a dozen of the men named in your muster-roll, much more qualified than I am, to take account of such a business. But has considerable secthat little knot of Papists any such hold on any tion of the 'religious public,' as fairly to call for a dissenting proclamation against them? In so recluse a life, I have very little information about the dimensions in which any religious or church peculiarity stands before the public. I very rarely see any of the contemporary publications of any kind, in books or periodi cals, with the exception of the two leading Quarterly Reviews..... I am sorry to be making this sort of pleading off. I did, however, when you were here, represent (I think very expressly) that I could not engage myself for more than a very inconsiderable and unfrequent quantum of service. If I can, or rather could, do anything in the composition way, there are some tasks for a more permanent purpose which I ought to attempt; am mortified to have, from year to year, left untouched, partly from the miserable laboriousness to me of any sort of composi tion, and partly from a haunting consciousness of incompetence.

and

"As to reading, why one can read little else than the newspapers just at present. I do not know whereabouts, on the thermometer, you may be in political concerns; if high, you will have exulted at the division in the House of Commons, which I have but just now seen in the Morning Chronicle.* To say

*Lord F. Egerton's motion, for the abolition instead of the amendment of the Irish Municipal Corporations, which, after three nights' debate, was rejected by 322 to 242.

DEATH OF HIS BROTHER AND MR. FAWCETT.

145

hat the present crisis is most portentous, is no common-place extravagance of phrase; for evidently the consequences will, ere long, be dreadful, if, by the resistance of the execrable tory and church faction, the measures in favor of Ireland shall continue to be frustrated."

*

Within the period to which this part of the memoir relates, Foster was deprived of his only brother, and of one of his few early associates. "As to companions and friends of early times," he says, "they have almost all left the world. My only brother (the only one who lived to maturity) died some months since, my junior by several years. I had not seen him for more than thirty years, having never, during all that time, revisited my native place in Yorkshire. Now I probably never shall; for the only other person, with whom I had maintained any communication, Mr. Fawcett (son of Dr. Fawcett, my old tutor), a friend of my youth, of about the same age, and a very valuable man, lately went the way of all the earth. The unlooked-for intelligence did cause me a very pensive feeling; it broke the last link of my connection with the scenes and society of my early life; all would be strange and foreign to me if I were to go thither now; very few persons alive with whom I was ever in any sense acquainted; perhaps not one with whom it would not be mutually a difficult effort to retrace anything in person that either had ever seen before. The very localities, I am told by one who has rather lately been there, are strangely transformed: -roads turned; woods cut down; free open tracts occupied and built upon; romantic glens, where had so many solitary rambles along by their wild brooks, profaned, as I should then have called it, if I could have anticipated such a change, by manufactories, and the swarming, noisy activity of a population of a temperament infinitely alien from reflective, pensive, and imaginative musings.

"It is in vain to wonder-on supposition those scenes had not become changed, and that I were now to revisit them, and wander alone a number of hours in one or another of them-how I should feel now in comparison (if I had remembrance enough to make the comparison) with the feelings of those times. But how emphatic would the consciousness be, that though they were the same, I was prodigiously changed! Though the feelings of the early time might have often been pensive, tinged with a degree * To the Rev. Josiah Hill, Feb. 22, 1838.

of melancholy, still there was the vital substratum, so to call it, of youth and anticipation. An interval of more than forty years makes all the difference between the morning of life and its evening; the mind, in the one position, occupied with imagination, conjecture, possibilities, resolutions, hopes ;—in the other, looking back to see that visionary speculation reduced to the hu. mility of an experience and reality, in which there is much to regret and much for self-reproach; and looking forward to behold, in near approach, another future, of how different an aspect from that presented to the youthful spirit! Here, my friend, we stand, yourself at no great distance behind me. What a solemn and mighty difference it is, that whereas we then beheld LIFE be. fore us, we now behold DEATH. Oh, what cause for earnest care, and strife, and supplication to heaven; that when the moment comes, which every moment is bringing nearer, that we shall have passed that portentous shade, and behold the amazing prospect beyond it opening upon us, it may present itself under the light of the divine mercy, beaming upon us from Him who has the keys of death and the invisible world."

LETTERS.

CLXX. TO THE REV. THOMAS COLES.

Bourton, September 13, 1832.

MY DEAR SIR,-In addressing to you a few lines in relation to the mournful scene in which we are to be indebted to your kindness on Saturday, I entreat you to let me fully assure myself I will not feel as if I were assuming to prescribe to you in your ministerial character, while I just take the liberty of saying what are the feelings and wishes of all the family party, and emphatically my own. These wishes would be that the service might be brief, and with the least possible of any personal references.

I am perfectly sure that the dear deceased would have earnestly deprecated any marked reference to her; and as to the survivors, all of them, and myself especially-I need not say you can perfectly understand that it is a sorrow that seeks privacy, that earnestly shrinks from public gaze and curiosity.

But for the consideration of what is conventionally regarded as due on such an occasion, my own preference-I may say infinite preference