Note 32 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

Epilogue to the Satires, i. 131. Dr. James Foster, the Nonconformist preacher. Johnson mentions 'the reputation which he had gained by his proper delivery.' Works, viii. 384. In The Conversations of Northcote, p. 88, it is stated that 'Foster first became popular from the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke stopping in the porch of his chapel in the Old Jewry out of a shower of rain: and thinking he might as well hear what was going on he went in, and was so well pleased that he sent all the great folks to hear him, and he was run after as much as Irving has been in our time.' Dr. T. Campbell (Diary, p. 34) recorded in 1775, that 'when Mrs. Thrale quoted something from Foster's Sermons, Johnson flew in a passion, and said that Foster was a man of mean ability, and of no original thinking.' Gibbon (Misc. Works, v. 300) wrote of Foster:—'Wonderful! a divine preferring reason to faith, and more afraid of vice than of heresy.'