THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 
175 
five-and-thirty y ears ago he had paid a good deal cf attention to the bio¬ 
graphies of Warner and the Forsters, having been commissioned to prepare 
a new edition of the Plantes Woodfordienses, which was, however, never 
published. There is a considerable amount of material available fo r 
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 theWoodford 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tion by John Reinhold Forster, and thus remained unpublished here 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 Plantes Wood¬ 
fordienses, 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 Plantes 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 Forsteriam.m 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 Plantes, 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 A dditions 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. 
