Mr. John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith, of Dickens, of
Landor, of Swift, and the author of some works of much merit and research on the Puritan period of English history, died on Tuesday at his house in Palace Gate, Kensington, at the age of sixty-four. He was, in early years, a journalist, having been at one time a constant contributor to the Examiner, and at another, for about a year, the editor of the Daily News, but latterly his literary work had been chiefly of a higher kind, while the duties of a Commissioner in Lunacy occupied his hours of routine work till he resigned that office a year or two ago. Ho was a careful and an eminently sensible writer, who knew how to make biography thoroughly readable, though he could hardly com- mand the delicate touch of the highest literary art. His life of Goldsmith is a fascinating book, and yet not all that such a subject, treated by one saturated with the love of Goldsmith's genius, might have made it. The higher biography requires for its perfection at least a few threads of poetic feeling, and this, with all his abilities, was apparently wanting in Mr. Forster, who knew well, however, when he could not portray his subjects to his own satisfaction, how to let his subjects portray themselves.
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