The death of Mr. Vere Foster on Friday, the 21st,
at Belfast, at the age of eighty-one, removes a figure who devoted a long life to works of unobtrusive but genuine philanthropy. The son of an Ambassador, he passed from Eton and Christ Church into the diplomatic service, but a visit to Ireland in the year of the famine induced him to sacrifice professional alvancement to a career of practical benevolence. The two great works of his life were those of facilitating Irish emigration and improving the premises of Irish national schools. He travelled three times across the Atlantic as a steerage passenger with a view to securing better accommodation for the emigrants, and from first to last assisted out of his own resources no fewer than twenty-five thousand Irish girls in their journey to America. In regard to the schools, his benevolence took the form of replacing mud or flagged floors by wooden boards. Few men have achieved so much on an income which, we believe, was no larger than that of the head of a Government Department. His best known work was that which grew out of Lord Palmerston's crusade against illegible official handwriting, and this established a third claim on the gratitude of the public in general and editors in particular. • '
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