of the age, I am gratified to think to what an extraordinary length the sovereign Disposer of our allotment on earth has protracted your life and eminent usefulness. It is very pleasing to hear, that you have experienced a considerable alleviation of infirmity and illness. Deeply grateful as you must be, for having been appointed so long to prosecute with success, so important an employment, you will wait, with calm acquiescence and cheerful anticipation, the hour when the great Master shall call his servant to his presence and her eternal reward. I am, dear madam,

With the highest respect and regard,

Your friend and servant,

J. FOSTER.

CXCI. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL.

May 21, 1835.

I HAVE to confess, I am far too much your fellow-sinner in the matter of being too much occupied with politics; and I feel somewhat of the bad effect which you complain of. At the same time, as the affairs of the nation and the world, at this period, are prodigiously important to the interests (and not exclusively the temporal ones) of a very large portion of mankind, one makes out for one's self a partial justification. The point is, how and where to adjust the limitation that ought to be imposed by higher interests, while one looks at the momentous crisis for good or evil, at which the course of time, and we may say of Providence, has now arrived. But these newspapers-these newspapers! to think how nearly they constitute my whole reading! I am mortified at it, and want to see and resolve how to mend. At any rate, I am not sorry for the non-appearance here of that "Watchman." There was evidently a very competent ability; but I was disgusted with the spirit, the servility, the time-serving, the practical disavowal, if not expressly in words, of the principles, but for the assertion of which, by nobler spirits, Methodism itself would never have enjoyed such immunity and privilege. The last number you sent, having dilated with high complacency on the complete establishment in power of Sir R. Peel, and the gradual subsidence into impotence and insignificance of the factious opposition to him, I was a little curious to see what would be said just about ten or twelve days after, of the fall of the idol, on whose "honored brow" (that was the phrase) the national approbation and the crown of enduring power had descended and planted themselves. But, of course, it would be described as one of the "awful and inscrutable dispensations of Providence,” inscrutable except as vindictive, it being methodistically certain, that in no other way than as a national judgment for our sins, Providence would permit the recovered ascendency of a party who are intent on abating the pestilent nuisance of the Irish church.

CXCII. TO H. HORSFALL, ESQ.

June 27, 1835.

MY DEAR OLD FRIEND,- .

What should this letter say? What

should it be an answer to? What should be taken for granted in it? I may well ask myself such questions, since I have under my hand a letter from you, dated-exactly eleven years back.

... But to think of the long tract of years since our last personal communication! That was at a time when we might, with tolerable propriety, be called young men; whereas now, I dare say, I am denominated among my acquaintance, “old Foster ;" and I was particularly struck with Mr. Hamilton's expression-" Old Mr. Horsfall!" "Old !” I thought that sound very strange; my image of him is that of a young man. But I soon recollected myself, and thought, what should he be else (and, at the same time, what should I be else?) since between thirty and forty years have intervened between the present time and the time on which my memory is resting? There was the additional consideration, that in your case there is a younger man of the same name. I have no son to require or suggest that note of distinction. He that might have been the cause of such a distinction, has been nine years in the grave.

What changes in the world, in our native place, in ourselves, since the time we were familiarly associated! I wonder in what manner and degree you are changed, in every respect, of personal appearance, of habits, character, opinions, dispositions. As to the visible exterior, we doubtless might pass each other without the slightest recognition, the least hint of feeling that we had ever seen each other before. You would be never the wiser on the matter for a portrait which I see you mention in your letter to have seen, if it were the one which I just recollect to have seen in some magazine which I chanced to open in some house where I had occasion to call. There could be no authority for putting it there; and it appeared to me a paltry imitation, with very little likeness, of a larger engraving, made from a drawing, for which I very reluctantly, at the request of some friends hereabouts, consented to sit to a painter here, which drawing was very true to the subject about a dozen (or perhaps more) years since.

ence.

But as to character, feelings, opinions, perhaps I may not be far wrong in presuming, that an uniform tenor of life, in an unchanged locality of residence, has prevented any other great change than what is inevitable from the effect of passing through so long a course of time and experiAs to myself, I can hardly tell whether I am much like what the young man was or not. In truth, I have a strangely imperfect recollection of what I was in early life; nor could I, whatever effort I might deliberately make, draw out any clear account of what progressive time, though through a life of few incidents, and little change of external circumstances, has wrought upon me. Indeed, I should have difficulty

enough to describe what I am now. The thing I have the strongest impression of is, that I am far different from what I wish I were; that my improvement, through so long a life, has been miserably deficient ; that, in the review, I have a profound conviction of the need of pardoning mercy over it all; and that I earnestly hope the remainder of life, of whatever duration, may be much more faithfully devoted to the great purpose of preparing for another--that mysterious, unveiled, and awful nereafter, on which both of us shall make the grand experiment, at no very distant time at the farthest.

. . . You, I believe, rather frequently preach, and I hope you will long be able to do so; though in your letter, so long since, you call yourself an "old man," too old to journey hither; and I think I am too old to journey your distance northward. And what should I find if I did, in all the circuit with which I was acquainted? Perhaps five or six, at most, surviving of my ancient coevals! Happy, those of them who are gone, whither may the God of all grace prepare us to follow them! know not whether I should superscribe you Reverend. I thank no one for so designating me.

I

CXCIII.

TO JOHN EASTHOPE, ESQ.

November 20, 1835.

MY DEAR FRIEND,—

The Morning Chronicle has shown a signal and progressive improvement in execution,-in clearness, force, point, happy illustration, range of allusion, and--quantity.

There is one thing I should have been disposed to make a remark on now and then, if I had been sitting quietly with you as at Cheltenham, or walking as at Malvern,—I mean, the mode, sometimes, of referring to the Catholic (i. e. popish) religion;—a slight tinge of that which makes the antithesis to the Rodens, O'Sullivans, & Co.-something like an implication, or negative admission at the least, that popery is not so bad a thing, that it is a religion of charity as well as any protestant mode of religion-something that seems to assert or assume that those furious and mischievous declaimers are in the wrong in toto, in their reprobation of popery itself, as well as their violence of temper and language, and perhaps the base principle and motive of some of them. Now surely we are not coming round to a virtual disavowal of the reformation, by a discovery at last that popery is not a most execrable and pernicious imposture, a deadly corruption of Christianity, and a system essentially intolerant, tyrannical, and malignant. No doubt it has, as a practical system, come under some degree of compelled modification in countries where liberty and knowledge have acquired the ascendant. But let it not take the credit of that. It is in itself (as indeed itself avows) unchangable. Let these compelling influences (which it has always done all it could to resist) have the credit, and not popery itself, of whatever mitigation has practically taken place. The modern Catholics, in this country,

such as the late Butier and Eustace, the present Murray, O'Connell, &c., are protesting against the imputation to them and their church, of the persecuting spirit and the noxious principles. They, and their religion too, are all charity, candor, and benevolence-if you will believe them. But I cannot believe them. How should I, while they at the same time avow and swear a firm fidelity to a church which by the unalterable laws of its institute makes intolerance--the extirpation of heretics-a duty? When they come talking or canting in this strain, I would say to them, Your church, your sovereign authority, to which, on peril of your souls, you must maintain an inviolable fidelity,-has it ever revoked its sanguinary decrees and injunctions ?—but indeed the very idea is foolish, since an infallible and unalterable authority cannot revoke its decrees. I would say, Do you disown the grand and final standard of your church, the Council of Trent? Answer, like honest, plain-spoken men, Yes, or No; and don't be playing fast and loose with us. If you say No, it is then in vain for you to pretend to charity, liberality and all that; in vain that you charge us with bigotry, and injustice in imputing to you the odious principles which are essentially inherent in your institution. If you say, Yes, and yet profess to adhere firmly to your church, what becomes of your fidelity, your consistency, your honesty? If you can thus, just as it serves your purpose, be off and on with your adored church—your very religion itself—how can we depend on your integrity in anything else? What, at this rate, really are your principles, and what is your unalterable, infallible church? Do not falter and mystify; but either explicitly declare that you abjure the intolerant and murderous maxims which that church binds you to maintain, and thus bravely incur its anathema, or distinctly avow that you maintain those maxims,--and then we shall know on what ground to meet you, and on what terms to give you that toleration which you virtually tell us you could not in conscience grant to us, if, as in Italy or Spain, you were powerful enough to withhold it. Tell us you approve that exercise of the church authority under which, in Italy, &c., a man (not having the rights and exemptions of a foreigner) could not publicly avow himself a Protestant but at the cost of his property, liberty, and probably his life. This would be honestly telling us that if only you had the power you would do the same here and everywhere.-It is only on this sanguinary and exterminating, but essential, principle of the Romish church that I am commenting. As to the many fooleries and corruptions of what may be called simply religious doctrine and institution, let them pass, as not directly interfering with the civil peace of society. Between these, however, and the bloody maxims of the popish church, the O'Sullivans, Boytons, &c., are furnished with weapons which, vilely as they use them, there is no getting out of their hands. And little less to be condemned than their fanaticism on the one hand, is, on the other, that sort of cant liberalism, now in vogue in some of our journals and speech-makings, which deprecates all zeal against popery, assuming, by implication at least, that one mode

of religion is just as good as another, that is, that none of them has any real basis in truth and divine authority. . . . .

There has been expressed a great deal of contempt for the handle made by the fanatics of Dens's Theology; and some of the Irish Catholic prelacy have affected to consider that as but a sort of obsolete thing, and to wonder it should have been brought from some musty recess against them. Now it did, I recollect, appear to me, that the Bishop of Exeter, in one of his speeches, decisively saddled those ecclesiastics with that book, as a work authorized by them both formerly and at the present time. Those Irish Catholics have been most infamously treated, all along, by the government and the Protestant ascendency; but at the same time their leading ecclesiastics are evasive, equivocating, disingenuous men-not to use a harsher epithet.

CXCIV. TO B. STOKES, ESQ.

Stapleton, March 24, 1836.

MY DEAR SIR,-. . I feel a very significant intimation of old age in extreme reluctance to any journeying and visiting movement, even when it is to see persons and things that I cannot but be gratified to see. . . . . One thing is, that I have grown into a great reluctance to meet strangers-strangers of any order whatever. I acknowledged this to E., who kindly said, "Then we will have no strangers beyond one or two, whom I am sure you will be pleased to see." As to seeing, beyond seeing him and family, and seeing you, the object is, to see London. I was amused by his telling me, in one of his letters, that I should be as quiet and retired as I pleased, have country air, &c., while my object was, not to be retired at all, and to take in as little as I could help, of country air. What I should be after, would be in the thick of the town every day-in perfect contrast to the seclusion and rural scene and air at Stapleton. . . . The British Museum will be a very chief objec with me; especially the apartment entirely occupied by engravings. My taste has been in that way, to an unfortunate excess, and there may there be inspected innumerable fine and rare things hardly to be seen (at least, by me) anywhere else. It is too likely I shall want several days, chiefly in that enormous assemblage of art and nature. Amidst such spectacles, however, it is a great grievance, and partly a shame, to me, to be so destitute as I am, of scientific knowledge. I can only gaze and admire in a mere outside way,-just so far as the things are a show to the sight. It is now too late in life for me to aim at any other than the most superficial knowledge.

CXCV. TO JOHN EASTHOPE, ESQ.

Stapleton, April 8, 1836.

The special and duplicate paper

instantly explained its