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.

...

faded, and they never had the captivation and complacency which some men seem to feel. But the sojourn in Dublin is often revived in my memory with peculiar distinctness, and a pleasing though pensive interest. In the time and scene thus recalled, you, as in your early juvenility, are a conspicuous figure. I have a very marked image of your appearance and looks-of which I dare say you yourself have retained no image at all, no more than I have of mine, as at that or an earlier stage of life. Can you shape anything like a defined conception of what were your prevailing feelings, notions, tastes, aspirations, at that time?

What an immensity of things have passed over, and away from, every earthly scene in this interval of forty years! You say that in Dublin I should "find much to revive old recollections." I almost doubt it. A few localities excepted, there must be so complete a sweep from the stage, that the things for recollection to hold by are gone. There cannot be the lingering remainders to recall what was. As to the living world, it would be just wholly new, not connected with the preceding, by retaining still some portion of it, to verify the relationship, to show it to be in continuity and succession. Why, there is not probably one single human being, besides yourself and your wife, that would be, or could be made, an object of my recollection. One other there would have been, it seems, very recently. My eye was very strongly arrested by the name of Mrs. Butler. How well I remember her! What then, she has lived throughout this wide interval, approaching to half a century, and having not been a young person at its so remote commencement! She would have been one of the diminutive number of the vital threads of connection (if I may so express it) between the existing generation and that which has vanished. But the feeling at sight of her would have been something like what should say, "Why are you lingering here, belonging so plainly as you do to the great company that is departed ?"

The class of us the most advanced in age are for the most part so blended and implicated with the next in order, and the next after that, that it requires some thought to detach ourselves so as to see plainly where we stand. We are apt to be looking too much around us, and behind us, to observe how near we are to the brink. If even I, at the age of nearly sixty-seven, and much apart from society and worldly concerns, need continual admonitions about this, you, at a dozen or more years behind me, and so closely surrounded by numerous and diversified family interests, with business in additino, will be very apt to need every monitory intimation how much of life is gone, and how fast the remainder is going.

For myself I have recently had some extra and ominous hints, or rather very direct warnings. A succession of colds and coughs, within the last year or two, added to a relaxation of the throat, which twenty or more years since disabled me for regular preaching, has had the effect of leaving me liable to an effusion of blood, from the rupture of some vessel adjacent to the throat. This has occurred several times within the last half year, the worst instance of it being within the last few days. I am not advised that this involves or indicates "immediate danger" (that is the

phrase you know), but that it imperatively speaks the necessity of greai caution, medical assistance, the avoidance" for the present" (another of the phrases), of all considerable exertion in the way of speaking, and a total, final interdict on preaching.

You speak of "grey hairs and some debility of action." Quite in the natural course; and you will lay your account with an increase (perhaps in an increasing ratio) of these significant intimations. Yet I hope you will yet long (but in how modified sense of that word!) retain a compe. tence of strength and health for much useful activity, combined with a considerable degree of the enjoyment of life;-still with a constant recollection, that it is an introduction, and is verging continually and fast toward a solemn junction with that to which it is the introduction. And what will that be? Oh the mystery of that great Hereafter!

I congratulate you sincerely on the pleasure and every other advantage caused you by an excellent wife and- eight descendants! You would show me, you say, six sons;-but I should be frightened;-nay, what is to ensure me against actual danger? Six young Irishmen,—and Irishmen being such as you describe them, that is to say, of "ferocious disposition," needing strong coercion for the safety of those who have to do with them. Assuredly I should not dare to confront those redoubtable six one moment sooner or longer than you were present, and indeed Mrs. P. in addition, in order to secure the mitigating, lenient effect of female influence. With this and a few other provisos I should enter your house (castle) with very great interest, and by the time I was certain of safely, should stay some time there, and thereabout, with very great pleasure. I thank you sincerely for your kind invitation. I have never quite sur rendered the idea and the hope of revisiting Dublin; but I am become to a strange degree a sort of local fixture; not having, for instance, till last summer, reached so far as London for sixteen years. And now the recent indications as to health tend to throw doubtfulness on all projects and prospects.

Everybody in his right senses here deplores the state of Ireland, and abhors that Ascendency which has hitherto been its plague, and has yet a formidable power to irustrate the endeavors at a better policy. Our government is in a strangely anomalous and perilous position. There will be a long protracted and mortal conflict.

I have just heard of the death of Mrs. Osborn of Cork, for whom, as Ann Richards, I had a great partiality. I have regretted to understand that she was a confirmed Socinian; greatly regretted it; for it does appear to me a tremendous hazard to go into the other world in that character. The exclusion from Christianity of that which a Socinian rejects would reduce me instantly to black despair. . .