Foster

Foster, JOHN, 'the essayist,' was born in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, 17th September 1770. Elder son of a yeoman-weaver, he was trained for the ministry at Brierly Hall and the Baptist College in Bristol, but, after preaching for twenty-five years with very indifferent success to small congregations at Newcastle, Dublin, Chichester, Frome, &c., in 1817 he finally relinquished the pastoral office, to devote himself wholly to literature. His Essays, in a series of Letters (1805), were only four in number—the best known that 'On Decision of Character'—yet they showed him, said Mackintosh, 'to be one of the most profound and eloquent writers that England has produced.' In 1808 Foster married the Miss Maria Snooke to whom they were originally addressed. In 1819 appeared his celebrated Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, in which he urged the necessity of a national system of education. Between 1806 and 1839 he contributed 184 articles to the Eclectic Review, 59 of which were edited by Dr Price in 1844. He died 15th October 1843, at Stapleton, Bristol, his home for twenty-two years. Foster was a man of deep but sombre piety. The shadows that clouded his spirit were due, however, to an inborn melancholy; they had nothing of bigotry or fanaticism. His thinking is massive and original; and at times, when his great imagination rouses itself from sleep, a splendour of illustration breaks over his pages that startles the reader by its beauty and suggestiveness. See his Life and Correspondence, by J. E. Ryland (2 vols. 1846; reprinted in Bohn's Standard Library, 1852).