up engraving, and concentrate his whole attention upon drawing. Following this judicious advice his progress in the art was extremely rapid. His first published drawings appeared in Hall's Ireland, a work illustrated by several artists, and of which Landells executed a large proportion of the engravings. The Illustrated London News, and similar publications, found employment for his pencil for several years, and when what may be called the illustrated book period commenced in 1850, it found his skill in English landscape already ripened to a high degree of perfection. Indeed, it was the extreme beauty and fertility of Mr. Foster's pencil in producing that description of illustrations, which mainly contributed to the rise and development of the illustrated class of books. The number of his works in this field during the last ten years has been immense, and never had artist a more unanimous and a more sustained verdict in his favour from the public. In one year he illustrated as many as thirteen books. To enumerate here the whole of even his best works is impossible; but we cannot help indicating his Cowper's Task, his George Herbert's Poems, his Goldsmith's Poems, his Gray's Elegy, his Graham's Sabbath, and his Wordsworth, as in our judgment the works where his peculiar genius found itself most in its element, and has produced its most delicious and exquisite fruits. He has all along been the darling of the critics. They have found it impossible to carp at a pencil so pure, so sweet, and so true to nature, and which ever speaks not only to the eye, but to the heart. They might as well have carped at alma mater herself—boon nature with her own dear woods, and streams, and fields, and flocks, as at a reflection of her face, so faithful and so faultless. The Athenæum, especially, has all along evinced the warmest and most discriminating appreciation of Mr. Foster's genius. As early as 1852, it remarked upon his "Christmas with the Poets," that without exactly reaching in his compositions and vignettes, the poetical humour of a rural Hogarth, for such may Bewick be called, he shows a quiet truth of observation, and a simple grace in selection, that often remind us of the Newcastle wood-cutter. In 1855 the same critic characterized the illustrations of the Task as "masterly translations of the poet," and added that "the magic of the artist's hand is to the full as potent as that of the poet's pen;" and again, in 1856, when Graham's Sabbath, and the Poets of the Nineteenth Century, were published, he happily observed that "everywhere Mr. Foster is tender, poetical, the very Goldsmith of illustration; but it is in his little nameless vignettes, original and individualized as Bewick's, only more poetical and idyllic, that he puts forth his best strength." "In delicate variety, tenderness, and distance, his works have become a marvel of truth, poetry, and skill." Mr. Foster, however, has not confined himself to the art of drawing on wood. His "Views on the Rhine" were engraved from a series of forty water colour drawings. It was, indeed, inevitable that so deep and true a lover of nature should yearn to reproduce her in all her delightful variety of colour as well as of form and grouping; and Mr. Foster is now a professed water colourist. In 1859 he sent in several pictures to the Society of Painters in water-colours, as a candidate for the much coveted honours of its membership, and in the following year he was elected an Associate. He sent several pictures to the society's exhibitions of 1860, which promise to the artist as great and distinctive an eminence in this new field as in that which he has so long cultivated. Birket Foster will not again appear as a book illustrator. The last book to which he has lent the aid of his pencil is a historical work on the Scottish Reformation, and of the twenty-five illustrations contained in that volume, the last which he executed, was a drawing of the picturesque old church of Perth.—P. L.
FOSTER, Henry, an officer of the royal navy of Britain, was born in 1797 at Woodplumpton in Lancashire. He sailed with Parry on his third voyage of north-western discovery in 1824, and again accompanied him in 1827, in his attempt to reach the north pole. On the return of the latter expedition, Foster was presented with the Copley medal of the Royal Society, in recognition of the services he had rendered to science by his philosophical experiments in the arctic regions, and was promoted from the rank of lieutenant to that of commander. In the following year the services of Foster were transferred to the opposite side of the globe. He sailed from England in 1828 in command of the Chanticleer, on a voyage of scientific research in the arctic seas. After reaching a high southern latitude, and successfully accomplishing the objects of his mission in that direction, he recrossed the southern Atlantic, and proceeded to the isthmus of Panama. Here, after completing his purpose of making certain astronomical observations, he accidentally fell overboard while descending the river Chagres in a canoe, and was drowned. This untimely termination of a promising career occurred on February 5th, 1831, when Foster was only in his thirty-fourth year.—W. H.
FOSTER, James, D.D., a popular preacher of the baptist persuasion, was born at Exeter, September 16, 1697. His early education was conducted at the free school at Exeter, from which he passed to the academy for the education of dissenting ministers in that city, then under the care of Mr. Joseph Hallett, sen. In 1718 he began to preach, but for a long time he continued to command admiration within only a very limited sphere. This may be attributable in some measure to his having imbibed at an early period very lax and unsound views on the subject of the Trinity, and of evangelical truth generally. After preaching to several small congregations in the country, he removed in 1724 to London, having been elected co-pastor with Mr. Joseph Burroughs, of the baptist congregation in Paul's Alley, Barbican. Here he continued for more than twenty years. In 1728 he was engaged in an evening lecture at the Old Jewry, which he continued to the time of his death, and where he acquired such an extraordinary amount of popularity that it became a fashion with the wits and beau monde of the day to crowd to hear him. Even Pope, it is said, was drawn by curiosity to mingle with the throng; at any rate the poet has recorded his sense of the excellence of the preacher in the lines—
" Let modest Foster, if he will, excel
Ten metropolitans in preaching well."
In 1744 Mr. Foster removed from the Barbican to become pastor of the independent congregation at Pinner's Hall, where he continued till the time of his death. When Lord Kilmarnock was under sentence of death for his share in the rebellion of 1745, Mr. Foster was his religious counsellor, and attended him to the scaffold. He afterwards published "An account of the behaviour of the late earl of Kilmarnock," &c., which brought on him some severe censures and no small general obloquy, on account of the unsound religious instruction which he appears to have given to the unfortunate peer. This, however, did not prevent the senatus of Marischal college, Aberdeen, from conferring on him the honorary degree of D.D., which he received in 1748. But his strength had begun to fail, and he never recovered his former vivacity after the publication of his unlucky account of Lord Kilmarnock. He continued to preach till the beginning of 1753, when he was laid aside by a stroke of paralysis, and on the 5th of November of that year he died. He left behind him several works, including four volumes of sermons, a reply to Tindal's Christianity as old as the Creation, and a treatise on natural religion, in two vols. 4to.; but none of them retains the popularity which distinguished their author's spoken addresses.—W. L. A.
FOSTER, John, F.R.S., architect, was born at Liverpool about 1787. His father was an extensive builder in that city, and surveyor to the corporation; and after initiation in his father's office, young Foster entered successively the offices of James and Jeffry Wyatt. Subsequently, along with Mr. Cockerell, he visited Greece, and with him discovered the sculptures of the pediment of the temple of Athene at Ægina. About 1814 Mr. Foster returned to England, and with a brother succeeded to his father's business, but shortly afterwards withdrew from it on being appointed corporation architect and surveyor. For the next twenty years the architecture and public improvements of Liverpool may be said to have owed whatever character they possessed to the taste and genius of Mr. John Foster. In neither of these matters was he in advance of his age, but he was at least on a level with it; and the public buildings erected in Liverpool during these twenty years, whilst they are respectable examples of the art of the time, are perhaps above the average in a constructive point of view. Mr. Foster's principal building is the custom-house, imposing from its vast size, if not altogether satisfactory as a work of art. Kohl, the German traveller, however, pronounced it to be "unquestionably one of the most magnificent pieces of architecture that our age has produced," and compares it favourably with "other colossal piles of modern erection" in Berlin, Munich, and Paris. Among his other works are the churches of St. Michael and St. Luke, the
