serious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of
character and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannot
fail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quoting
him at length.

"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to his
death," says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink,
which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was one
continuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and of
languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels
within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a
fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a
science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I
believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him
within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent,
to delimit the wider development of his genius.

"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to him
they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us.
No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin
or--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In
none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show
itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the
varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even as
penetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and
solitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what the
drinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificial
stimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant,
'Send the other generals some of the same brand.'