Among his works may be mentioned—The Three Graces, and La Vierge de la légende, after Raphael; La Vierge au bas-relief, after Leonardo da Vinci; Francis I. and Charles V., after Gros; St Cecilia, after Paul Delaroche; Albert Dürer and Henry IV., after Porbus; Wellington, after Gérard; and Queen Victoria, after Winterhalter....
FORSTER, Johann Georg Adam (1754-1794), an eminent German naturalist and writer on scientific subjects, was born at Nassenhuben, a small village near Dantzic, in November 1754. His father, Johann Reinhold Forster, a man of great scientific attainments but an intractable temper, was at that time pastor of the place; the family are said to have been of Scotch extraction. In 1765 the elder Forster was commissioned by the empress Catherine to inspect the Russian colonies in the province of Saratov, which gave his son an opportunity of acquiring the Russian language and the elements of a scientific education. After a few years the father quarrelled with the Russian Government, and suddenly embraced the resolution of proceeding to England, where he obtained a professorship of natural history and the modern languages at the famous nonconformist academy at Warrington. His violent temper soon compelled him to resign this appointment, and for two years he and his sou earned a precarious livelihood by translations in London,—a practical education, however, exceedingly useful to the younger Forster, who became a thorough master of English, and acquired many of the ideas which chiefly influenced his subsequent life. At length the turning point in his career came in the shape of an invitation for him and his father to accompany Captain Cook in his third voyage round the world. Such an expedition was admirably calculated to call forth Forster’s peculiar powers. He attained no remarkable distinction as an original discoverer or investigator, but his insight into nature was accurate and penetrating; he conceived of her as a living whole, and reproduces her vitality in his animated pages. His account of Cook’s voyage is almost the first example of the glowing yet faithful description of natural phenomena which has since made a knowledge of them the common property of the educated world,—a prelude to Humboldt, as Humboldt to Darwin and Wallace. The publication of this great work was, however, impeded for some time by differences with the Admiralty, during which Forster proceeded to the Continent to obtain an appointment for his father as professor at Cassel, and found to his surprise that it was conferred upon himself. The elder Forster, however, was soon provided for elsewhere, being appointed professor of natural history at Halle. At Cassel Forster formed an intimate friendship with the great anatomist Soemmerring, and about the same time made the acquaintance of Jacobi, who inspired him with a mystical spirit from which he subsequently emancipated himself. These were the days of secret societies, masonic lodges, and conventions of illuminati. Forster was for a long time deeply implicated in their proceedings, the purpose of which remains obscure. The want of books and scientific apparatus at Cassel induced him to resort frequently to Göttingen, where he betrothed himself to Therese Heyne, the daughter of the illustrious philologist, a clever and cultivated but heartless woman, who became the evil genius of his life. To be able to marry he accepted (1784) a professorship at the university of Wilna, where he found himself greatly misplaced. The penury and barbarism of Polish circumstances are graphically described in his and his wife’s letters of this period. After a few years’ residence at Wilna he resigned his appointment to participate in a scientific expedition projected by the Russian Government, and upon the relinquishment of this undertaking became librarian to the elector of Mayence. In 1790 he published his travels in the Netherlands, with special reference to the art of the country—a work displaying the same power of exposition in aesthetic matters as he had previously shown in the description of the aspects of nature. This was his last work. The principality of Mayence was now involved in the vortex of the French Revolution, and Forster unhappily suffered himself to be drawn into a position incompatible either with fidelity to. his master the elector, or allegiance to his country. With his liberal sympathies and deficiency in political insight, he might be excused for welcoming the French as deliverers, but in promoting the actual incorporation of Mayence with France, he justly incurred the execration of patriotic Germans, notwithstanding the unquestionable purity of his intentions. Domestic sorrows were added to public calamities: Forster found himself not only deserted by his wife but deprived of his children. It is difficult to determine whether his apparent resignation should be ascribed to romantic self-sacrifice or to the apathy of an exhausted spirit. The situation was nearly the same as that of George Sand’s Jacques, and the catastrophe not very dissimilar. Forster died suddenly and opportunely, January 1794, in Paris, whither he had gone as deputy from Mayence in the worst days of the Reign of Terror. His personal character was most amiable; he was high-minded, disinterested, ingenuous to a fault; but he was weak, impulsive, ill-starred throughout his life, and totally unequal to the difficult circumstances in which he ultimately found himself. As an author he stands very high; he is almost the first and almost the best of that valuable class of writers who have made science and art familiar by representing them in their essential spirit, unencumbered with technical details. Schlegel remarks that no other German prose writer carries his reader so far, leaving him not merely enriched with positive knowledge but animated with the passion for further progress; that the books of no other such writer convey so lively an impression of having been composed outside the study in the free air; and that no other is animated by so constant a sense of the infinite perfectibility of human nature.
Forster’s writings have been frequently collected. The most important have been mentioned above, but there are numerous minor essays of great value and artistic completeness. His correspondence with his friend Soemmerring has been recently published by Hettner, and is full of interest. The biography by Moleschott is very agreeably written, but is rather a delineation of a typical naturalist than of the actual man, and its account of Forster's Íiolitical career is vitiated by the writer’s own deficiency in patriotic eeling. The other side of the question is presented with unnecessary asperity in Klein’s George Forster in Mayence. There are excellent critical estimates by Schlegel and Gervinus, the latter prefixed to the seventh volume of Forster’s writings.
FORSTER, John (1812-1876), an English historian, biographer, journalist, and critic, was born April 2, 1812, at Newcastle, where his father, a member of the Unitarian Church, followed the occupation of a butcher. He was well grounded in classics and mathematics at the grammarschool of his native town, and gave early promise of future distinction. After a brief residence at Cambridge he removed in 1828 to London, where he attended law classes in connexion with the recently founded university, but devoted himself chiefly to literary pursuits. The earlier productions of his pen were contributed to various liberal papers, particularly to The True Sun, The Morning Chronicle, and The Examiner, ks> literary and dramatic critic for the last-named journal, he from the outset showed much conscientiousness, discrimination, and tact, and the influence of his powerful individuality soon made itself strongly felt. He had not long passed his twentieth year when the publication of his Lives of Eminent British Statesmen began. This work, originally undertaken for Lardner’s Cyclopaedia, and published separately in 1840 under the title of The Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England, with a Treatise on the Popular Progress in English History, was immediately recognized as a work of great interest and value, entitling its author to high literary rank. Thenceforward he was a prominent figure in that distinguished circle of literary men which included such names as Bulwer, Talfourd, Fonblanque, Landor, Carlyle, Dickens. In 1843 he was called to the bar by the benchers of the Inner Temple; but while highly valuing this honourable connexion with the legal profession, ho never became or sought to become a practising lawyer. His energies were mainly devoted to laborious historical investigations, while relaxation was sought chiefly in lighter forms of literary activity. For some years he edited the Foreign Quarterly Bevieτo∙, in 1846, on the retirement of Charles Dickens, he took charge for almost a year of the Daily News·, in 1847, on the resignation of Albany Fonblanque, he became editor of the Examiner, and this post he retained till 1856. From 1836 onwards he contributed to the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Foreign Quarterly Reviews a variety of articles, some of which were republished in two volumes of Biographical and Historical Essays in 1858. In 1848 appeared his Life of Oliver Goldsmith, which, especially as revised and improved in a second edition (1854), has taken an acknowledged place as one of the most admirably executed biographies to be found in the whole range of English literature. Continuing his original researches into English history at the period of the Revolution, he published in 1860 two volumes, respectively entitled Arrest of the Five Members by Charles I.— A Chapter of English History rewritten, and The Debates on the Grand Remonstrance, with an Introductory Essay on English Freedom. These were followed by his Biography of Sir John Eliot, published in 1864, an elaborate and finished picture from one of his earlier studies for the Lives of the Statesmen. In 1868 appeared his biography of his friend Walter Savage Landor. For several years he had been collecting materials for a life of Swift, but his studies in this direction were for a time suspended in consequence of the death of Charles Dickens, with whom he had long been on terms of intimate friendship. The first volume of Forster’s Life of Dickens appeared in 1871, and the work was completed in 1874. Towards the close of 1875 the first volume of his Life of Swift was published; and he had made some progress in the preparation of the second, when he was seized with an illness of which he died on the 1st of February 1876. He lies buried in Kensal-Green Cemetery, where a just and discriminative inscription tells that he was “noted in private life for the robustness of his character and the warmth of his affections; for his ceaseless industry in literature and business, and the lavish services which, in the midst of his crowded life, he rendered to his friends; for his keen appreciation of every species of excellence, and the generosity of his judgments on books and men.” In 1855 Forster had been appointed secretary to the Lunacy Commission, and for some years after 1861 he held the office of a commissioner in lunacy. In 1860 he received the honorary degree of LL.D, from the university of Edinburgh. His valuable collection’of manuscripts, along with his books and pictures, was bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum.
