so horrid a condition ;-to that economy of government and church of which it was the sole and express business to see to the nation's welfare and improvement, together with that great power of influence, by which the higher ranks (considered not in an official capacity) might have mightily promoted that improvement.

"Generalize yourself,' say you? Why, my good friend, the very mirror and perfection as you are, of what the Clapham highchurch-and-state junto would wish a dissenter and reformist to be, you would have tight work to generalize on the brutal ignorance and barbarism of a parish, for a hundred years running, without a single glance at the ecclesiastical institution established in that parish, and richly fed with its tithes, for the very purpose of taking care of the souls of the people. For myself, I have no such petty concern as to be on good terms with that or any other junto; my business I took to be, to state the fact and the truth, comprehensively and strongly, whomever it might displease or please.

"Yet as to this pleasing and displeasing, you really seem, from so much intercourse and favor with a particular class-the evangelical church-people, the grossest sycophants of power, and defenders of the whole vast system of corruption-to have come to identify them with everything of which the opinion is worth regarding in the land. But do you, indeed, make nothing of all that mental excitement, that augmenting stream of opinion and detestation, and that gradual course of events, which are driving with destructive direction, against that state of things which these devotees to everything established are so fervently worshipping? Do you really, as I suppose they do, think that after a while all this will be quelled and sink into the earth or go off in vapor into the air; to leave, in tranquil permanence, just the order of things which Wilberforce, Vansittart, . . . and the like, make it a good part of their religion to defend? I ask this simply in reference to the point of policy, in a writer's making no scruple of showing himself the enemy of that system, when he is on topics which cannot be treated comprehensively without some kind of reference to the manner in which the presiding power and institutions of the country have affected the matters in question.

"You remonstrate against confining and revolting peculiarities.' Peculiarities? that should imply something in which a man has very few to partake or coincide with him. Think of this! as applied to my opinion, relatively, for instance, to the effect which

the Established Church has had on the knowledge and religion of the mass of the English people for several ages back! or, to my estimate and remarks, as to what one-tenth part of the several thousands of millions sterling which the state has expended in war, during the past century, would have done, if applied to the direct improvement of the people! Revolting peculiarities! What company can you have been keeping ?"

In the autumn of 1819, Foster spent several weeks in an excursion to the most remarkable points of the Devonshire and Cornwall coast. In a letter written to Mr. Hughes, on his way home (dated Ilfracombe, Sept. 21, 1819), he says, "A very loud internal admonition urges my return to the dreaded business of mental and literary task-work. I shall be very glad, however, to have made this long excursion, through scenes which I had very often greatly wished to see, and with no immediate hope; much less could I have any anticipation, that a person whom I had never seen nor heard of, a few months previously, should make me the liberal offer of taking a circuit of five or six hundred miles, entirely at his expense. The offer was made in so perfectly easy and unostentatious a manner, and the course of the tour was so perfectly the thing that I had long wished, that I had not a moment's hesitation, provided my good wife's health would allow my going so far and long from home. The luxury has been very great, of beholding so many scenes of land and sea, and rocks, castles, and other antiquities, under the advantage of constantly favorable weather, good health, and providential protection against all disastrous and even incommodious incidents. If I live to do something more in the way of attempting to instruct the public, I have no doubt this series of beautiful and magnificent visions will contribute now and then something in the way of useful

ornament or illustration."

The Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance was published in 1820, and in the autumn, Mr. Foster began to revise it for a second edition, a task which occupied him for several months. "You will envy the felicities of quill driving," he says, in a letter to Mr. Stokes (March 15, 1821), "when I confess to you, that ever since before I wrote to you, perhaps about the end of October, I have literally been at the very job which I then mentioned I had begun, and which is at this very hour several weeks short of its termination. I have actually been at it without intermis. sion, or leisure to read a newspaper, review or anything else.

And I am quite certain I never underwent the same quantity of hard labor within the same number of weeks together in my whole life. On entering thoroughly into the job, with a determination to work it so that I should never have any more trouble about it, I found it such a business as I had little reckoned upon. My principle of proceeding was to treat no page, sentence, or word, with the smallest ceremony; but to hack, split, twist, prune, pull up by the roots, or practise any other severity on whatever I did not like. The consequence has been alterations to the amount very likely of several thousands. There is no essential change, however, on a large scale; the series of thoughts is the same, but with innumerable modifications of adjustment and expression; and with so many small and, here and there, considerable enlargements, that the Essay on Popular Ignorance has distended itself under the process, and notwithstanding many condensations, from three hundred to four hundred pages. The printing of this is nearly completed; the introductory part of the Missionary Discourse has undergone a similar handling; but the printer having lately, at my remonstrance, very much accelerated his part of the business, I shall be obliged to pass, with very slight operations, over more than the latter half of the said discourse. I must let it take its fortune, on the strength of the rigorous discipline given to all the preceding portion of the volume. It is a sweet luxury, this book-making; for I dare say I could point out scores of sentences each one of which has cost me several hours of the utmost exertion of my mind to put it in the state in which it now stands, after putting it in several other forms, to each one of which I saw some precise objection, which I could, at the time, have very distinctly assigned. And in truth, there are hundreds of them to which I could make objections as they now stand, but I did not know how to hammer them into a better form."

At Michaelmas, 1821, Foster removed from Downend to Stapleton, within three miles of Bristol. To a residence in the city itself he had a most decided dislike, partly on the score of health, and partly from dread of idle morning visitors.

In the following year (1822), he complied with the solicitations. of his friends in Bristol, to deliver a lecture once a fortnight at Broadmead Chapel. It was so arranged as to interfere as little as possible with the services in other places of worship, by which means an audience was formed, which, though not numerous,

contained probably a greater proportion of intelligent and educated persons than most single congregations could have furnished. The preacher was aware, that he was addressing friends, or persons who, from their knowledge of him as an author, felt no ordinary interest in listening to his instructions. He acceded to undertake this service perhaps with greater readiness from having previously formed the intention of publishing a volume of Discourses. "If I can bring myself," he says to Mr. Hughes (April 27, 1821), "some time hence to the business of writing once more, I think the next attempt must be, a volume of Discourses, or Sermons turned Essays, in default of my having done anything of consequence for so long a time in the pulpit." To another friend he says,* ,*“At the beginning of the year I was requested by a sort of association of friends in the city to undertake a lecture (that is to say, a sermon) once a fortnight to a congregation quite miscellaneous, and in the most perfect sense of the word, voluntary. This was much the kind of thing that I could have wished, under my physical incompetence to the usual frequency of what is called stated service-together with my indisposition and consciously deficient adaptedness to it. As to the studious part of the concern, however, this one discourse a fortnight cost me as much labor perhaps as it is usual to bestow on the five or six sermons exacted in the fortnight of a preacher's life. If I shall have competent health for the required labor of composition, I may probably try to put a selection of these discourses into the shape of a printed volume or more, in the course of time.” A few months later, he repeats his intention of publishing, but adds, "It will be most slow and oppressive toil."+

At the end of two years, Mr. Foster found that his state of health would only allow of his delivering a monthly lecture. "I had fully made up my mind," he informs Mr. Hill, "to an entire discontinuance of that service. But after having signified so, I had one evening a 'deputed' party of the Bristol friends here, to persuade me to the contrary; to persuade, as the first object, a continuance as before, once a fortnight; and failing of that, in the next place, to continue the service at least once a month; to which latter appointment I was not able to refuse acceding. And therefore, for this year, so it is to be. You ask whether the end was better than the beginning.' If simply the last discourse be the point of the question, I think I may answer in the affirma*July 3, 1822. †To Mr. Hill, Nov., 1822.

tive. I had a splendid subject-the three Methodists of Babylon in the fiery furnace;' and perhaps I thought, and perhaps some of the auditors thought, that I did it tolerable justice. This was no appropriate Chistmas subject; but I began by briefly 'showing cause' why no special regard was due to the day."* On Mr. Hall's settling in Bristol he at once relinquished this engagement. "I have made an end of lecturing," he tells Mr. Stokes; "it had been, from the first movement of the question of Hall's coming, my determination to do so, in that event; such a service appearing to me altogether superfluous, and even bordering on impertinent. I shall now have very little preaching ever, probably, any more ;" and shall apply myself, as well as I can, to the mode of intellectual operation, of which the results may extend much further and last much longer."+

Mr. Foster's pen, however, even before the termination of the Lectures, had not been wholly unemployed for the public. Not to mention his contributions to the Eclectic Review, it was during this period that he wrote a theological essay which, in point of direct religious utility, has been surpassed by none of his writings. -his Introduction to Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion. "Between two and three years since, at least," he informs Mr. Sheppard," I promised Mr. Collins, of Glasgow, to write a piece or two for his reprints of some of the valuable older religious books, of which he has already republished a considerable number, with, in each instance, a prefixed essay by one or other of our contemporary manufacturers of composition. Not without some reluctance on my part, he fixed Doddridge's Rise and Progress on me. I was soon to write the introductory essay (or whatever such a nondescript kind of thing ought to be called), and he would soon print the book. He did his part with a despatch not at all pleasing to me, and actually the whole large edition has been lying as dead stock in the warehouse for two years, in default of my task being performed. Again and again he has written, and I have been too much ashamed even to answer his letters, though expressed in the most mild and friendly spirit. Bad health, to which I find that mental labor is just poison (to use a Scotch adverb), has been in alliance with my horror of composition-and so the procrastination has gone on, one six

* To Mr. Hill, January 26, 1824. To Mr. Sheppard, May 10, 1825.

†To Mr. Stokes, Jan. 3, 1826.