remonstrances he wrote a singularly clever and elaborate paper, in June 1827, entitled ‘A Few Thoughts in Vindication of the Stage.’ On 2 May 1828 a play of his in two acts, called ‘Charles at Tunbridge, or the Cavalier of Wildinghurst,’ was performed at the Newcastle Theatre, written ‘expressly,’ as ‘by a gentleman of Newcastle,’ for the benefit of Mr. Thomas Stuart. Forster's success at school induced his uncle John to send him to Cambridge in October 1828, but within a month he decided to move on to London. By his uncle's help he was at once sent to the newly founded University College, and entered as a law student at the Inner Temple on 10 Nov. 1828. His instructor in English law at University College was Professor Andrew Amos [q. v.] Among his fellow-students and fast friends for life were James Emerson Tennent [q. v.] and James Whiteside [q. v.] In the January number of the ‘Newcastle Magazine’ for 1829 a paper of Forster's appeared (his earliest contribution to the periodicals) entitled ‘Remarks on two of the Annuals.’ In that year he first made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, of whom he afterwards wrote: ‘He influenced all my modes of thought at the outset of my life.’ As early as March 1830 he projected a life of Cromwell. He was already studying in the chambers of Thomas Chitty [q. v.] In 1832 Forster became the dramatic critic on the ‘True Sun.’ He became a valued acquaintance of Charles Lamb; in 1831 Lamb had written to him: ‘If you have lost a little portion of my good will, it is that you do not come and see me oftener.’ In December 1832 both Lamb and Leigh Hunt were contributing to a series of weekly essays which Moxon had just then commenced under Forster's direction, called ‘The Reflector,’ of which a few numbers only were published. In 1833 Forster was writing busily on the ‘True Sun,’ the ‘Courier,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ and the ‘Examiner.’ Albany Fonblanque [q. v.], who had just become editor, appointed Forster the chief critic on the ‘Examiner,’ both of literature and the drama. In 1834, being then twenty-two years of age, he moved into his thenceforth well-known chambers at 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1836 he published in ‘Lardner's Cyclopædia’ the first of the five volumes of his ‘Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth,’ including those of Sir John Eliot and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. Vol. ii., containing those of Pym and Hampden, appeared in 1837; vol. iii., giving those of Vane and Marten, in 1838; vols. iv. and v., completing the work in 1839, being devoted to the life of Oliver Cromwell. While engaged in the composition of this work he was betrothed to the then popular poetess, L. E. L[andon]. An estrangement, however, took place between them, and in 1838 Miss Landon married George Maclean. Forster for two years, 1842 and 1843, edited the ‘Foreign Quarterly Review,’ where his papers on the Greek philosophers bore evidence of scholarship. On 27 Jan. 1843 he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. Besides writing in Douglas Jerrold's ‘Shilling Magazine’ ‘A History for Young England,’ Forster in 1845 contributed to the ‘Edinburgh Review’ two masterly articles on ‘Charles Churchill’ and ‘Daniel Defoe.’ His intimate personal friends by that time included some of the most intellectually distinguished of his contemporaries, and on 20 Sept. 1845 Forster, in association with several of these, began to take part in a series of amateur theatricals, which for ten years enjoyed a certain celebrity. As Ford in the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ as Kitely in ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ as Ernani in Victor Hugo's drama so entitled, he took part in the ‘splendid strolling’ which, under the lead of Dickens and Lytton, was intended to promote, among other objects, the establishment of the Guild of Literature and Art. On 9 Feb. 1845 Forster was installed editor of the ‘Daily News,’ in succession to Dickens, but resigned the post in October. In 1847 he assumed the editorship of the ‘Examiner,’ succeeding Albany Fonblanque, and held the post for nine years. He was now rewriting, for the twelfth time, his unpublished life of Goldsmith. In 1848 it appeared in one volume, as ‘The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith.’ Daintily illustrated by his friends Maclise, Stanfield, Leech, Doyle, and Hamerton, it won instant popularity. Six years afterwards Forster expanded the work into two volumes, with the enlarged title of the ‘Life and Times’ of Goldsmith. In this, as in more than one later instance, he marred the original outline by his greater elaboration, overcrowding his canvas with Goldsmith's contemporaries. When the first draft of the work was in preparation, Dickens humorously said of him that ‘nobody could bribe Forster’ unless it was with a ‘new fact’ for his life of Goldsmith. He contributed to the ‘Quarterly Review,’ in September 1854, a brilliant paper on Samuel Foote, and in March 1855 a sympathetic monograph on Sir Richard Steele. At the end of 1855 he was appointed secretary to the commissioners of lunacy, with an income of 800l. a year. He withdrew at once from the editorial chair of the ‘Examiner,’ for which he never afterwards wrote a line, devoting his leisure from that time forward exclusively to literature. On the appearance of Guizot's ‘History of the
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/23
