has been in the north, and as some of your intelligent friends probably are in London.

The gross stupidity, together with the desperate, reckless impiety, manifested in some of the pieces they are circulating, seem to preclude all hope of doing them any good. The thing seems like a moral epidemic, breathed from hell, destined to be permitted for a time to sweep a portion of the people to destruction, in defiance of all remedial interference. They are a doomed race, and their destiny will be accomplished. Still it is right that means should be tried, if it were merely that good men should evince their own fidelity to the good cause, fulfilling a duty which is such independently of any calculation of results.

Unless I had been in a condition to render the small requested contribution of aid, it will seem a cheap and thankless kind of benevolence for me to say that I greatly applaud and admire the system of operations in which you are so meritoriously concerned. It is, however, a true though valueless tribute. I am, dear sir,

Yours, very respectfully,

J. FOSTER.

CCXXVIII. TO J. COTTLE, ESQ.

Stapleton, Tuesday, January, 1842. MY DEAR SIR,-I am not pleased with myself for not having, long since, sent a line of grateful acknowledgment to you and Mrs. Hare, for one kind favor following another. I am afraid an extra lazy habit will have been superinduced by several weeks of lying nearly all the time in bed. If I had had any urgent business or vocation I should not have been allowed to delay till within a few days back the practice of rising soon after breakfast. In making any trial of myself, in any way of exertion, I suppose the proof of my not having risen yet to the accustomed level would be a failure of strength. Otherwise I feel nearly what we denominate well. . . . . All about me have been most assiduously kind; and friend's daughter, who has been with us all the while, and can read on interminably without physical injury or uneasiness (which my girls cannot), has read through I know not how many volumes to me.

In returning toward the accustomed mode of life, the question will be how soon to leave the confinement to one warm room for the other parts of the house,—and the open air without the house. The winter is an untoward season for such experiment-the latter experiment. But while I am writing "winter," a warm splendid sunshine is falling over my table and room, giving a pleasing intimation of spring not very far off.

66

How many returning springs you and I have seen, how few more, at the very utmost, shall we stay to see! There is a land where, in a much higher sense, everlasting spring abides, and never-withering flowers." May almighty grace work and refine our souls to a fitness for that happy region of our Father and our Redeemer's kingdom.

This time of confinement has been to me one of very serious exercise of mind. A deep sense of guilt has attended the review of life,-a life so very, very imperfectly devoted to our great Master's service. So much lukewarmness, so little zealous service, so much indolent self-indulgence. I have profoundly felt how sad and hopeless a condition but for that blessed and all-sufficient resource, the atonement, accomplished by Him who offered himself without spot to God.--I cannot comprchend the fortitude with which, under a rejection of this our only hope, a conscious sinner can dare to look forward to hereafter. I have been highly gratified to hear favorable accounts of your health, as being in some respects, especially your eyes, better than in past years. How little, at some seasons, did you anticipate staying so long in this world. Wise is the Sovereign appointment, for those who stay, and-for those who go. My thoughts are often pensively turning on the enumeration of those may call my co-evals, and many of them of long acquaintance, who have been called away within a very few years. An old and much valued friend at Worcester, from whose funeral I returned little more than in time to attend that of our estimable Mr. Hare. Since then, your excellent sister,-Mr. Coles of Bourton, known and esteemed almost forty years, Mr. Addington,-lately in Scotland, the worthy Mr. Dove, -and now, last of all, and so unexpectedly, Mr. Roberts.

I

CCXXIX. TO THE REV. T. GRINFIELD, M.A.

Stapleton, February 19, 1842.

MY DEAR SIR,-I have cause to be highly gratified by the friendly manœuvre devised to put me in possession of the view of Snowdon. It is less faded than your description had led me to surmise. There appears to be no obliteration of even the finest lines, not even those slight ones, denominated interlines, traced between the stronger cuts of the graver. . . . I add this print with great pleasure, both for its own and the friendly giver's sake, to my accumulation of Woollett's, numbering to about fifty, and including very nearly all his engravings. I need not say that this has been the consequence of mousing for them during a good many years,—watching and catching the occurrence of any of them, within my very narrow local sphere of such opportunities. The superlative excellence of Woollett's workmanship seemed to warrant this sort of avarice.

But for this, and the other large accumulations, how many times I have called myself a fool!—money expended, to an excess beyond all sober prudence in a person of my limited means-liability to damage, from careless handling, mildew, &c., &c. . . . . I thank you for this well-engraved portrait of Wilson. I have not seen it before. I have a good portrait of Woollett, to place it beside. Never were two artists more fortunate in each other.

CCXXX. TO JOHN PURSER, ESQ.

Stapleton, Feb. 22: 1842. ... When it is considered that the object (in theory) of government is the prevention and castigation of iniquity, it is striking and melancholy to see how much of that very iniquity may go into the manner of constituting and administering that same government. For example, the recent Dublin election. There cannot be one right-thinking, virtuous man in England whose blood has not almost boiled at the account of the complicated villainies of that business. . . . . But that we have a parliament, for a very large part of it, got together very much by the same sort of means, one should be confident that so vile a job will be flung

over.....

. . . . In my retired life here I see extremely few persons who are under the full excitement of the present great national interests, because I see very few persons of any sort; but intelligence of the wide and deep agitation pours in through every channel; would it might become such an earthquake as to overturn and prostrate the hateful domination with which the nation is cursed. The aristocratic ascendency care nothing for the destitution and misery under which so vast a number of human beings are sinking to the dust, literally to the grave; their own selfish advantages held fast while they see the national resources fast draining away; and the last power of effrontery asserting that their monopoly is not at all, or only in a trifling degree, the cause of that ruin of commerce which is depriving hundreds of thousands of the means of exercising their industry in order to live, and millions of the means of living otherwise than in the most abject penury.

We are not now, like the ancient Jews, living under a dispensation of special Providence, manifested often in speedy vindictive visitation on oppressors of the poor; but one can hardly help thinking that some strong mark of the divine judgment will yet fall, in this life, on at least the chiefs in this iniquity. And in such an event, very slowly will compassion be drawn toward any calamity that may be inflicted on them. “They shall have judgment without mercy who have showed no mercy.” The case with them is, not only that they are rolling and rioting in wealth and luxury, while a vast multitude are sinking to the lowest depth of penury and misery, but that they obstinately and scornfully maintain, as a chief expedient for that wealth and luxury, the very thing which is a chief cause of that deep and wide, and still widening misery. Ireland has heretofore been the first in our thoughts and references as a scene of popular wretchedness; but now the most immediate and engrossing spectacle glares upon us in England. Yet I have not forgotten M. De Beaumont's description of Ireland, and estimate of its odious and incorrigible aristocracy.

What a contrast to the moral aspect of Ireland, is its natural scenery, so abundant and various in all that is beautiful and grand. We have

been reading with great pleasure (as to this latter view of the country), the successive numbers of Mr. and Mrs. Hall's traverse of your island; a pleasure, suffering, as in all such cases, the drawback of considering the difference between reading and actually seeing. A few, very few of the remarkable places, indeed, I have the remembrance of having seen -as the Hill of Howth, the Dargle, the Glen of the Downs, the Devil's Glen; and the general appearance of the Wicklow mountains. You may perhaps hardly recollect to have heard that once your excellent father, H. Strahan, and myself, made an excursion on foot to some of those romantic places, with an exertion of bodily strength how far beyond anything I could perform now.

"natural

I hope you do not yet feel a very marked decline in this same force,” though the troop of stout fellows and fine girls around you or belonging to you, may, if there were no other memento, remind you that the green age is far gone away. One can very seldom congratulate, without much deduction and reserve, the father of a numerous grown up and nearly grown up family. Yours appears to be the remarkable and felicitous case in which there needs no such reserve, and most cordially do I rejoice with you that it is so.

For at least fifty years, I have never been confined to bed for a single day, till within the last two months, during the greater part of which I have been confined to a room, and for a considerable number of days, nearly to bed, by a cold and cough of a very severe and obstinate kind. I have now nearly regained my usual health, and am only waiting for a warm day to venture out of the house, just such a day as I have never forgotten, a first of January in Dublin, in I wonder what far off year of the time for ever gone, I walked on the quays in a warm delightful sunshine.

I may guess that neither you nor Mrs. P. are much in the habit of "taking walks," for walking's sake. If you ever do so, which of the two has the advantage in point of physical strength? How much I should like to be the third in an amble by the grand canal—or on any other path or ground. . .

CCXXXI. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL.

Stapleton, May, 1842.

Another house, which I have frequented many years, is finally closed against me. You have heard mention of Mr. Wade, near the Hotwells, Coleridge's friend. I attended his funeral on Monday morning. He had been as well as usual a fortnight before, but walked a great deal on one of the hottest days, sometimes with his hat off as he often did. The consequence was a severe illness, which the medical man (whom he would not for several days admit) pronounced from the time he saw him, fatal. For nearly a week I heard nothing of it. And when I went to see him, he was evidently near death, which took place

two or three days after. He was in a state of stupor, and unable to speak. I thought he recognized me just for a moment; as indicated by a slight transient smile. I do not remember how or when I became acquainted with him, many years since. I had always found him extremely kind and hospitable. For years I had dined with him about once a month, usually in the company of Roberts, to whom he had been a faithful friend, and an attendant on his ministry. A few months before his death he made me a present of a very splendid set of engravings which had cost him thirty pounds. His age was eighty-one. He was not a literary nor properly speaking an intellectual man; it having been from mere generous good-will to a man floating loose on society, that he had, some forty years since, put his house and purse at the free service of Coleridge, and partly his associates. He was wholly a man of business all his life, till he retired about a dozen years since. He left considerable property, which goes chiefly to relations who cared but little about him. He did not make formally what we denominate a profession of religion, but there were favorable indications in the manner in which he expressed himself in his illness. I am not quite self-satisfied, for not having sometimes more expressly introduced religion in our conversations. They turned most on that various knowledge of the world, which his long and diversified experience of it supplied. On his strict uniform integrity, I never heard a syllable of imputation or doubt. Reckoning up lately, I found him to be the eleventh individual of old acquaintance carried off within the last three years and a half, several of them beyond my own age, the others not many years short of it, so that there remain actually but three or four of you that are about my co-evals. .... Emphatically admonition upon admonition to prepare for the removal. .

CCXXXII. TO THE REV. DR HARRIS.

Stapleton, September 13, 1842. MY DEAR SIR,-In apology for so long a delay in acknowledging your valuable and elegant present of "The Great Commission," I have to plead, partly as an effect of the intense heat, and partly as a consequence of a debilitating indisposition, a state of my eyes extremely inconvenient for reading and writing. Certainly I ought to have immediately informed you of the safe conveyance of the book, leaving it to a future time to take the liberty of making any slight observations, if there should occur to me any such as I could think at all worth your attention. But I indolently let myself be assured that you would not suspect any failure in the con

veyance.

I only say what I have said to every one with whom I have spoken of the book, when I express my admiration of the eloquence, the comprehension, the inexhaustible invention, the power of turning to account both invention and knowledge, and the energy and general precision of language.