degree the attention of even uncultivated minds; and indeed I think I have hardly preached in any other place where they did not engage it somewhat more than they have done here. It cannot be honestly denied, that by the application of a great deal of time and effort, a more obvious and attractive mode of exhibiting religious subjects would be attainable (that is as a habitual strain, for some of my sermons I should perhaps consider as in this respect nearly as much adapted as I could well make them), but I cannot feel the duty of making a laborious effort to change my manner for the sake of attracting persons, to whom, after all, it would be less attractive than the very crudest exhibitions at the Methodist meeting-persons who are no longer in the way for being attracted, and who will, for the most part, never come again in the way;-I cannot feel the duty, unless it were impossible for me to be in any place to which I should be more adapted, and unless I felt it a compulsory duty at all events to preach. . . . . On a deliberate view of the whole case, then, I am impelled to the practical conclusion, I have expressed above, that I must retire from the service within some short time. I am sure you and my other estimable friends will believe me when I say, that so far as my high and grateful regard for them is concerned, I shall execute the determination with very great regret. For a small circle of such friends, and such partial auditors, I cannot look elsewhere. Their value and their kindness will make me willing to protract a few months longer a service which I should otherwise feel the propriety of declining immediately.

“As yet I have no plan with respect to ulterior public employment. That must be left to Providence, and the course of time. In one way and place or another, I will hope to be made of some use to the best cause."

It was about this time that he was invited to take a part in the anniversary of a Bible Society meeting at Kingswood. In his reply, he explained to the respected individual by whom the request was conveyed, the physical debility which of itself would form a valid reason for declining the service, and then added, "After a clear exemption made out on a personal ground, it may seem almost impertinent to make any remark on the general subject. And I shall allow myself but very few words in the way of suggesting, that according to the feeling of the great majority of the persons attending these meetings, there are too many speakers, instead of a scarcity of them, and a far too protracted in

dulgence in making speeches. My own opinion, or taste, in the matter, may perhaps partake of perversity or whim, but I will acknowledge, I utterly loathe and abominate the prevailing spirit and manner of these meetings. From all I have seen of them, they appear to me to be, in a greater degree than they are any. thing else, exhibitions of vanity, cajolery, and ostentation. The ludicrous aping of the forms and ceremonial of the chief legisla tive assemblies,-the rattling and clapping,-the sort of prizespeech making, in which it is often so palpably evident that the speaker's object is just to shine,-the fulsome dealing round of extravagant compliment,—all these give, to say the least, a farcical and operatic cast to the whole concern (in many instances, at least, I have felt this the irresistible impression), and form, in my apprehension, a flagrant abandonment of dignity, sense, and honest truth. That money is obtained, and the popularity of the good cause promoted, every good man must rejoice; but he must lament the necessity, if it be such, that so much of the agency for doing this good should consist in men's helping to inflate one another's vanity, and turning important matters into parading show and exhibition."*

The correspondence in the preceding volume contains intimations of Mr. Foster's wishes to be disengaged from the labors of periodical criticism, and to devote himself to the preparation of works of permanent and independent interest. Whether he would have overcome the aversion to the mental toil involved in authorship (an aversion, reiterated so often in his letters), without some extraneous inducement, may be fairly doubted. The two productions, which, after so long an interval, followed the Essays, were both in consequence of his being solicited to advocate from the pulpit two public institutions. His discourse on Missions was delivered in September, 1818; and his sermon on behalf of the British and Foreign School Society (which he enlarged into his Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance), in the following December. The latter work was published in 1820. In writing to Mr. Hughes, while it was passing through the press, he says, “Thus far I have found more than half the original sentences either actually faulty, or at least admitting of what I thought improvement. The first composition was most tediously slow, and there is many a page, as it now stands, which has cost still more time and labor in the revisal than in the first writing. On the

*To the Rev. Michael Maurice, May 20, 1818.

whole, these last six months about, have been a season of very great labor, and therefore very resolute self-denial,-no one can imagine how much both of one and the other. If in respect to the matter of emolument, it is as poorly repaid as in the case of last year's 'Discourse,' which was also a thing of very great labor, I must even have recourse to the old principle of 'virtue its own reward;' for never was labor, in the lucrative respect, worse remunerated. It is a far easier thing, I warrant, to assume a cajoling tone, and-Why don't you write?'-'We should be glad to see you far oftener in print ;'-' How can you satisfy your conscience not to do more for the public good?'—and stuff like this—a far easier thing than to let go a few shillings when one has done something of the kind referred to. Yet many a person has believed himself administering the sweetest spoonfuls to my vanity by palavering me in this hypocritical strain. I have had a great deal too much politeness to answer, ' Did you purchase what I printed some time since?' I have really let them go off with the double gratification of believing they bubbled me, and knowing they saved their money.

"The expression, ‘if you have succeeded,' in your letter, leads me to observe, that I certainly have succeeded in the main and substantial thing proposed, and professed in the title (of this thing in the press). I have given a broad, true, and strongly delineated picture of the intellectual and moral state of the mass of our people. It was matter of fact, and only required the power of placing in a strong light, and in proper order, what had come, and is at any time coming, within one's own observation. No doubt, I have also been in the habit of catechizing other observers, some of them much more familiar, I confess, than myself, with the classes in question. I am quite sensible there is no great share of what would be called brilliance in this production, I perhaps persuade myself that the subject was most unfavorable for much of that kind, but I am rather confident there is much force and truth of representation. And I shall have and retain a higher respect for my own than for the reader's judgment, if he does not think the style better than that of most of my contemporaries. It has one quality which I must probably be content to perceive, or at least to approve, myself; for I do not expect any critic or reader to take due cognizance of it-namely, that the language is simply and absolutely formed for the thought,-is adapted and flexible to it,— is taken out of the whole mass of the vocabulary of our tongue

just on purpose for the thoughts, and moulded, if I may so speak, to their very shape, with an almost perfect independence and avoidance of all the set, artificial forms of expression,—and yet it is not wild and wanton, but merely natural and free. But my saying this recalls to my remembrance, that an Edinburgh critic (in the Edinburgh Mon'nly Review) did seem to have a kind of clumsy apprehension (in the Discourse,') of the quality which I have chosen to describe as a merit in style; and he had the good taste to take it for a fault, and identified it, if I recollect, with the lawless dashing and affectation of modern would-be-fine writing. But all this is exceedingly foreign to the monitory topics of your letter.

“You are afraid that the production cannot have escaped some of the defilement of radicalism. I may assure you that in one way it is as clear of any such thing as if it had been written by yourself, or Hall, or Cunningham, or my. good old friend Zach. Macauley. It is, I suppose, a sine quâ non of radicalism (how eagerly, for change, this foolish term has been seized upon- . Jacobinism being quite worn out in thirty years' service), an essential, is it not? that there should be a systematic lauding and extolling of the people, a trumpeting of their virtues, wisdom, rights, &c., &c.; whereas, from beginning to end, I exhibit the People as odiously and loathsomely vile, and degraded, and depraved; insomuch, that, while intending it, and knowing it for mere truth, I have yet been sometimes apprehensive of incurring the imputation of having some special spite at the people, some actual revenge, to be wreaked on them in a book, for want of such means of infliction as the Manchester parsons employed, and the Clapham and Battersea parsons approve their having employedas how should they do otherwise than approve, for Vansittart is of the Bible Society, and I think even Castlereagh has speechified for it, and they approved that mode of disciplining the people.

"I exhibit the people as debased, vicious, and abominable; but why have they been suffered to be so, in this, hideous degree? Where has been the grand cause and the wickedness of their being allowed to continue in vile and wretched barbarism from generation to generation? It may be of the nature of radicalism (for it is not yet settled how much that vice comprehends), that in this reference, recurring several times at intervals, I have uttered divers sentences of indignant invective. And how, I wonder, was this to be avoided? In a brief review of the state of the people,

in this powerful, enlightened, Protestant country, the mass of the people are seen, in frightful sameness, from one age to another, sunk in the most barbarous ignorance, with its appropriate de. pravities. Now, was this to be represented as a bare fact, as if it had been a series of unfavorable seasons, as a thing for which there was nowhere any accountableness, a thing which there were no means and no duty of causing to be otherwise? Was the reader to be left to lament, in his simplicity, that there had not, during so many ages, been a strong government in the land, that there had not been a religious establishment, great seminaries of learning, great revenues applicable to the national welfare, a great power of influence of the upper classes (not solely the govern ment) over the lower? No, simple reader, you are to know that there were all these fine things, that these things have been to this hour; but that they have been so much better occupied than about the improvement of the people, that said people have been suffered to continue a moral nuisance on the face of the earth; and yet, all the while, there has been a furious rant about the glory of England. It obstinately will appear to me, that it were infinitely silly for a writer, who is taking a view of the melancholy and horrid fact of the past and present intellectual and moral state of the people, to fancy himself required, by some kind of delicacy or homage to the pride and self-complacency of church-folk, and perhaps great folk, to keep out of sight (even if it were possible) so large and essential a part of his subject, as the grand cause why the dreadful state of things which he exhibits has been what it has. If he were just only making, to a mixed assembly of persons, an appeal for local charity, it would be quite a different affair; he would then have to consult the policy of the moBut this winter's job of mine has been a quite different sort of thing; an attempt to display, in a brief, but somewhat comprehensive manner, in the spirit of a moral censor, combined with something of the office of a historian, a mighty evil, in its existence as a fact, and in its relations of cause and consequence. Now, unless we are forbidden to take such a subject, such a grand matter of fact, that is to say, at last, are forbidden to take any subject otherwise than as clipped down to the part of it which you may exhibit and displease nobody,-unless it is wrong to take such a subject on this large ground, it is plainly impossible for you to withhold the most emphatically condemnatory references to that in the nation, which might and should have prevented its being in

ment.