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.