THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 175
five-and-thirty years ago he had paid a good deal of attention to the bio-
graphies of Warner and the Forsters, having been commissioned to prepare
a new edition of the Planter Woodfordienses, which was, however, never
published. There is a considerable amount of material available for
their biographies. He had visited "Harts,'' where he was shown several
water-colour drawings—the work, perhaps, of Warner's heiress, Kitty
Warner—showing the garden as Warner made it. At Idsworth the late
Sir Jervoise Jervoise had shown him portraits of Richard Warner, of his
brother Robert and of Bishop Burnet, the godfather of their eldest brother
John; but, alas, damp had removed the labels of the two former portraits,
and no one now knew which old gentleman in short wig and flowery waist-
coat was the Woodford botanist. The Warners held property in Clerkenwell,
where their name is still attached to a street. In 1730 Richard, then
seventeen, entered Wadham College, Oxford, to which at his death he
bequeathed many of his books and collections. In 1748 Warner received
a visit at "Harts" from Peter Kalm, the pupil of Linnaeus; though all the
English portion of Kalm's travels was omitted from the English transla-
tion by John Reinhold Forster, and thus remained unpublished here
until Mr. Joseph Lucas's book appeared in 1892. It is interesting to re-
member that Warner took Kalm to see Peter Collinson's garden at Peckham
and to visit Philip Miller and the aged Sir Hans Sloane at Chelsea, and that
Linnaeus himself would have named the Cape Jasmine that Warner first
flowered after our local botanist, but for the latter modestly declining
the honour, on which it became Gardenia, Though the Planter Wood-
fordii uses, printed in 1771, is his best known work, Warner did a great deal
of other literary work. He was long engaged in preparing a new edition
of Shakespere, which he abandoned in favour of Steevens, and he left two
manuscript glossaries of the poet, one in twenty octavo and the other in
fifty-one quarto volumes, now in the British Museum. He also translated
the larger part of Plautus for a revised edition and continuation of Bonnell
Thornton's, which he published between 1769 and 1774.
The Plantae originated in an annual herborization of the Apothecaries'
Company on the Forest, when Warner was accustomed to entertain them
and it is dedicated to the Court of Assistants of the Company. Though
an interesting list, is it not free from blunders, and the Additions printed
in 1784 far exceed those left in manuscript by Warner in his own copy,
now at Wadham.
Of the Forster family we know many details from the Recueil de mavie
and Epistolarium Forsterianum of that remarkable eccentric, Thomas
Ignatius Maria Forster, son of Thomas Furly Forster. It would seem
probable that each of the three brothers had a copy of the Planter, though
Thomas's has not yet turned up. Edward's copy, now the property of
Dr. Daydon Jackson, he exhibited on the table. It is interleaved, has
Edward Forster's autograph dated 1784 on the fly-leaf, the Additions bound
up with it, the Index of Latin names added in manuscript, together with a
transcript of Warner's additions from the copy at Wadham which Thomas
does not appear to have seen, and many manuscript notes in Edward's
well-known handwriting, some of which are partial transcript of entries
in Benjamin Forster's copy which Mr. Thompson exhibits to-day.
Though his brother Benjamin's notes and specimens are, no doubt, as