John Foster : the earliest American engraver and the first Boston printer / by Samuel Abbott Green. Pub. by the Massachusetts Historical Society at the charge of the Waterston Fund, no. 2.

  • Green, Samuel A. (Samuel Abbott), 1830-1918.
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: John Foster : the earliest American engraver and the first Boston printer / by Samuel Abbott Green. Pub. by the Massachusetts Historical Society at the charge of the Waterston Fund, no. 2. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    possession of an interesting volume of twenty early pam- phlets, most of them bearing Cambridge or Boston imprints. Some of the tracts belonged originally to the Reverend William Adams (H. C. 1671), of Dedham, who died in 1685, and others in the collection belonged to his son the Reverend Eliphalet Adams (H. C. 1694), of New London, Connecticut, who had them “Bound in 1701-2.” The volume is of special interest, as it contains a copy of “ The Life and Death of that Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather,” etc. (Cambridge, 1670), which has as a frontispiece this same engraving of Mather; and near the right lower corner, written in Adams’s unmistakable hand, are the words “Johannes Foster sculpsit,” and at the top the name “ Richardus Mather,” — the crown of the head dividing the words. Apparently these inscrip- tions were contemporary, or nearly so, with the pamphlet. Both Foster and Adams were graduates of the college, only four years apart, and they must have known each other well, as the classes then were very small; and I now consider Adams’s record in the matter as final. In 1679 Foster printed one of Adams’s sermons, which fact shows that business relations existed between the two men. Some years ago, in my “Ten Fac-simile Reproductions relating to Various Subjects” (1903), I expressed a different opinion in regard to the handwriting on the cut; but since then I have examined carefully the original writing, while before that I had seen only a photograph of the same. It may be proper to add that this particular likeness of Mather