"When I wrote to you last, I believe I told you I had completed a task of authorship, on which I had been employed a year or two before. What a fool I was, even so lately as when I told you this. I had, it is true, written more than enough for a considerable volume, but I had not begun to revise and correct it in order to write it for the press. When I began this work, and had proceeded a little way, I found I had a job on my hands, with a vengeance. To my astonishment and vexation, I found there was not a paragraph, and scarcely a sentence, that did not want mending, and sometimes that whole pages could not be mended, but must be burnt, and something new written in their stead. This was often a most irksome and toilsome business, much more so than the first writing. On the whole, I verily believe the revision and new modelling of the job has cost quite as much mental exertion as the original writing of it. In this business I have been employed ever since the time that I wrote to you, and that was last summer, till very lately. This exercise has, however, been a most excellent lesson in composition, so that I shall in the next instance do better the first time, and therefore never have again such a long and irksome task. This task is finished a little while since, and I am now presenting myself to the public."

In about four months, a second edition of the Essays was called for. Of the labor of preparing for it, Mr. Foster gives the following interesting account.

"I have been excessively busy this, and many past days. If you ask, Busy about what? I answer, Mending and botching up bad sentences, paragraphs, and pages. That book that I published had at least five thousand faults; and two or three thousand I have felt it necessary to try and mend. Many of them I have certainly mended; but perhaps in some places I have made new faults in trying to correct the old. The book will be in substance the very same; but very many pages, and a multitude of single sentences will be very different. Many sentences are left out, and many others put into so different a form, that they will not appear the same, even as to the idea. One great advantage I believe will be, that there will be much fewer obscure passages; you will feel that you understand more clearly than in reading the first edition. When I began correcting, I intended to alter but little, as I was not completely aware that great alterations were necessary, and as I did not wish any proprietor of the first edition to feel as if it were gone out of date in consequence of the new one; but when I went in earnest into the examination, I was confounded by meeting such an immense crowd of faults. I found that I must dismiss all delicacy respecting the first edition, and alter everything without ceremony. A great many needless words, and some that were too fine, have been sent about their business. Many long sentences are made shorter; many imperfect arguments are made fuller and clearer. The pages will have somewhat more thought, and somewhat less show. Several figures are dismissed. The connection of thought is made somewhat more close and clear. There will not, however, be any such effect produced as to lead any reader to guess

This labor is not yet finished,

at the degree of labor which it has cost. nor will be, for at least a month. I shall have hard work every day for so long. About that time I expect the printing to be finished ;-it is advanced a considerable way into the second volume."

"I have been very industrious, but I did not know when I had finished the two first essays what a task I had yet on my hands. When I came to the fourth essay, which is much longer and more important (as far as the word important can apply to any of them) than the others, I found it requisite to write the first part of it anew, and at five times the length; besides, the whole business is inconceivably tedious. I have often passed the whole day about two or three sentences, and could only determine to do more to-morrow; but I could not help myself; it was no affair of will. I have been so assiduous that I have hardly had one walk, except the journeys to Downend, for these several months; and though I have been necessitated, often against my inclination, to make visits in the town, I have put off a number of persons from time to time with saying, 'Certainly, sir, I intend myself the pleasure of calling on you very shortly.' Everything was wrong in these two essays; there were scarcely three pardonable sentences together. This has given me a mingled feeling of being pleased and mortified; mortified that the first operations of thought were so incorrect, but pleased that I could clearly see and often mend the faults. The latter essays will exhibit more of the work of understanding, and more of what will please or displease as matter of opinion. As to how soon they will be finished I am afraid to pledge myself, after my past experience of the utter impossibility of moving fast; but as I have only about half a dozen sheets to transcribe, with very slight corrections, I cannot be many days; I am afraid somewhat more than a week, but surely I think not two."

This laborious preparation to appear before the public stands in striking contrast with the flippant haste of many writers of infinitely smaller ability than Mr. Foster. Such an example, at the same time administers a rebuke to the masses of ephemeral literature which are produced every day, and reveals the secret of literary immortality. Jonah's gourd, which came up in a night, perished in a night. The light woods of exuberant growth are commonly of little value and soon perish. The oak, which has spread its roots downward and abroad, slowly but securely, during successive centuries, sees the ages roll away, while its foliage still waxes green with every spring-time, and its branches stretch themselves unharmed to the tempestous winds and the sharp cold of unnumbered winters; and after it has yielded to the woodman's axe, its heavy timbers for ages more furnish a secure dwelling for man, or are wrought into vessels for

the transportation of wealth and life from clime to clime. If a production costs an author little labor, it is not surprising that it is quickly laid aside by the reader.

The previous account of the severe labor to which Mr. Foster subjected himself in the revision of his Essays for the press, scarcely permits us to suspect him of being an indolent man. He complains of himself, however, habitually, as indolent to the last degree. The two things can only be reconciled by supposing that his keen idea of perfection and desire for it, in a literary as well as benevolent point of view, operated as a ruling passion, overpowering every other consideration, and prompting him to undertake even that which was against nature, as if with a spontaneous will, and of a ready mind.

It was, perhaps, under the influence of this spirit that when he was in the ministry, Mr. Foster often put off his preparation for the pulpit till the last moment. Thus in a journal written at Dublin in 1793, he remarks, under date of Sunday night,-"I hold in recollection the first sensation that I felt on awaking about 7 o'clock, and I see something guilty connected with it. It quickly struck me-I have to preach to-day,' and the thought was unpleasing. It ought not to be thus. In part, the reason was, I suppose, that I had not yet begun to form either of my sermons. I sat up in bed awhile, and caught some very considerable ideas. Ascended the pulpit at the usual time. My text, and Pilate said,-What is truth?" My mind, fertile and expansive. After it, went to see a respectable friend, confined at home. . . . Had just an hour to study my afternoon sermon.' At an earlier period, while he was a student at Bristol, he writes to a friend,—“ Probably there never was a more indolent student at this or any other academy. I know but very little more of learning or any thing else than when I left you. I have been a trifler all my life to this hour. When I shall reform, God only knows! I am constantly wishing and intending it. But my wishes and intentions have thus far displayed, in a striking degree, the imbecility of human nature. To-morrow is still the time when this unhappy system of conduct shall be rectified."

At a much later period (August, 1816), still under the influence of the same troublesome propensity, he writes to his mother

"I have no power of getting fast forward in any literary task; it costs me far more labor than any other mortal who has been in the habit so long. My taskmaster complains constantly and heavily of my slowness and delay. Part of which is, indeed, I confess, owing to indolence. I have probably said before, what is always unhappily true, that I have the most extreme and invariable repugnance to all literary labor of every kind, and almost all mental labor. It is the literal truth, that I never, in the course of the whole year, take the pen, for a paragraph or a letter, but as an act of force on myself. When I have a thing of this kind to do, I linger hours and hours often before I can resolutely set about it; and days and weeks, if it is some task more than ordinary. About finding proper words, and putting them in proper places, I have more difficulty than it could have been supposed possible any one should have, after having had to work among them so long; but the grand difficulty is a downright scarcity of matter,plainly, the difficulty of finding any thing to say. My inventive faculties are exactly like the powers of a snail; and in addition, my memory is an inconceivably miserable one."

It was under the influence of the same principle that when he was solicited to write an introductory essay to Doddridge's Rise and Progress, the bookseller was obliged to let his work lie in sheets, two full years after the printing was completed, waiting for Mr. Foster's dissertation.

But the apparent dilatoriness of Mr. Foster may have arisen less from a sluggish spirit, than from the extreme labor of composition. He had attained the most acute discrimination; he had trained his thoughts to extreme exactness; he earnestly desired by the most polished diction to communicate, in a luminous and striking manner, every minute shade of thought; he was dissatisfied with any form of expression in the least measure indefinite; hence he was incompetent to write under the impulse of a torrent of feeling, rapidly. He could not turn off his work at a heat. The productions which he had refined and corrected to the last degree, after an inconsiderable interval he attacked again,-as in the case of his Essays, and still he found something remaining for the exercise of the knife. The labor lima was a process with which he was never done. And all this was not from mere ambition. He was not anxious to make fine sounding sentences and elegant paragraphs. His words every where seem subordinate to the sentiment, and the polishing of his speech only a necessary result of the increased delicacy of his shades of thought. His principal 38*

VOL. XI.NO. XLIII.

production-his Essays-has obtained a commanding position among the lasting monuments of thought and the elements of human improvement. It is undoubtedly destined to an honorable and useful immortality. We have no reason, therefore, to regret the maturity to which it has been brought, nor the time, the care and the pains bestowed upon it.

Mr. Foster, however, represents himself as "slow-beyond all comparison slow,"-even when he made his utmost efforts in the business of composition. And the labor of revision was as slow and as tedious as the labor of the original composition. We have already given his own statement of the labor bestowed on the Essays. We subjoin two more extracts, which give an account of his preparation of the Dissertation on Popular Ignorance for the press, and of his revision of the same for a second edition. In writing to his friend, Mr. Hughes, 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 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."

6

"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 intermission, or leisure to read a newspaper, review or any thing 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 to four hundred pages. The printing of this is