ought to be thankful that there are plenty of blackberries, for this is the best country I ever saw for getting a stomach, but the worst that I ever saw for getting food. Do the people think we can live by preaching?" They were detained some time at St. Ives, because of the illness of one of their companions; and their lodging was little better than their fare. "All that time," says John, "Mr. Wesley and I lay on the floor: he had my great coat for his pillow, and I had Burkett's Notes on the New Testament for mine. After being here near three weeks, one morning, about three o'clock, Mr. Wesley turned over, and finding me awake, clapped me on the side, saying, Brother Nelson, let us be of good cheer, I have one whole side yet; for the skin is off but on one side.””—vol. ii. pp. 52-54.

There is no question, however, that, in spite of such inconveniences, the life which he was leading was a popular, a wholesome and a highly pleasant one, attended by the admiration and blessings of multitudes, animated by continual changes of scene and society. His character was naturally susceptible of impressions from nature and romantic scenery, and he soon found that such influences operated on the multitude like the pomp and circumstance of Roman worship. The descriptions in Isaac Walton's Angler are not more pleasing, and are certainly less picturesque and striking than many passages in his journal where he describes the tall and shady trees, the majestic hills, the sea-beaten rocks, the ruins and the mountain glens which served him, from time to time, as theatres and temples. There was likewise, occasionally, a moral interest excited of a still loftier kind. With all the enthusiasm and the incidental evil consequences of his system, he might boast of much direct and evident good produced, of many sinners reclaimed, of many ignorant persons enlightened, of many disappointed and broken hearts relieved by the balm of religion.

'A woman, overwhelmed with affliction, went out one night with a determination of throwing herself into the New River. As she was passing the Foundery, she heard the people singing: she stopt, and went in; listened, learnt where to look for consolation and support, and was thereby preserved from suicide.

Wesley had been disappointed of a room at Grimsby, and when the appointed hour for preaching came, the rain prevented him from preaching at the Cross. In the perplexity which this occasioned, a convenient place was offered him by a woman, "which was a sinner." Of this, however, he was ignorant at the time, and the woman listened to him without any apparent emotion. But in the evening he preached eloquently, upon the sins and the faith of her who washed our Lord's feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head; and that discourse, by which the whole congregation were affected, touched her to the heart. She followed him to his lodging, crying out, "O, Sir, what must I do to be saved?" Wesley, who now

understood

66

understood that she had forsaken her husband, and was living in adultery, replied," Escape for your life! Return instantly to your husband!" She said she knew not how to go; she had just heard from him, and he was at Newcastle, above an hundred miles off. Wesley made answer, that he was going for Newcastle himself the next morning; she might go with him, and his companion should take her behind him. It was late in October: she performed the journey under this protection, and in a state of mind which beseemed her condition. During our whole journey," he says, "I scarce observed her to smile; nor did she ever complain of any thing, or appear moved in the least with those trying circumstances which many times occurred in our way. A steady seriousness, or sadness rather, appeared in her whole behaviour and conversation, as became one that felt the burthen of sin, and was groaning after salvation."-" Glory be to the friend of sinners!" he exclaims, when he relates the story. "He hath plucked one more brand out of the fire! Thou poor sinner, thou hast received a prophet in the name of a prophet, and thou art found of Him that sent him." The husband did not turn away the penitent; and her reformation appeared to be sincere and permanent.'-vol. ii. pp. 55-57.

Wesley, though he for several years avowed a strong preference for celibacy, and even recommended it earnestly to his preachers, himself married at a later age than such unious commonly take place at. The connexion was by no means a happy one. His own character was not only fitted for command, but fond of it, and the tone of his letters to his wife is rather that of a schoolmaster addressing a refractory pupil than that of a tender husband to the object of his affections. She, on her side, appears to have loved him passionately, but to have been jealous almost to frenzy of his correspondence with his various female penitents, and, in particular, with a Mrs. Sarah .Ryan, a woman of enthusiastic feelings and considerable talents, to whom, it must be owned, Wesley wrote with a degree of onction, which seems to imply that he was more attached to her than he was himself aware of. After some years of wrath and wretchedness, Mrs. Wesley at length left him, and he coolly notices the event in his private journal with the observation-" Non eam reliqui, non dimisi, non revocabo." From a passage, however, in one of his journals, it would seem that, for a time at least, they were afterwards reconciled; but, at her death, which occurred ten years after, she was certainly separated from him. Few men could be found to whom domestic happiness was less necessary, or by whom it was likely to be less valued. His time and thoughts were continually and fully occupied; he preached twice or thrice every day; he rose, for fifty years together, at four in the morning, and never travelled less, by sea or land, than 4500 miles in a year. Such a man, even if jealousy had been out of the case, was but little calculated for a husband or a father.

From

From this time forward, the history of Wesley's life offers little variety. He proceeded in the same tenour of unvaried and restless activity; divided between his labours as an itinerant preacher, as a voluminous author, almost de omni scibili,' as visitor of a large school, which he had established on his own principles at Kingswood, and of which the discipline was perhaps the sourest and most tyrannical that ever poor children were subjected to, and, above all, as the sole and absolute sovereign of the doctrine, discipline, lives, and consciences of his sect, both in Britain, Ireland, and America. He was, at different periods of his life, considerably annoyed by dissensions among his people; which, however, he for the most part appeased with wonderful tact and sagacity. Antinomianism made several inroads into his societies, and the spirit of schism, once awakened, soon began to display itself in many minor sects, which branched off from his church, or which he himself repelled from it. Notwithstanding the many concessions he made to the Lay Preachers, he neither entirely satisfied them, nor does he appear to have been altogether pleased with his own conduct, inasmuch as while he professed to be convinced by the arguments of Lord King, and in opposition to the tenets of the Church of England, that a bishop and presbyter were originally the same office, he displayed considerable anxiety to get himself ordained a bishop by a Greek who was then in London, and who assumed the name of Bishop of Arcadia.* The Greek, however, knew better than Wesley the canons of the ancient church, and how necessary it was that more than one bishop should be present at such a ceremony.

There were other points in which Wesley was dissatisfied with his people, and in which he shewed some remainder of those feelings of allegiance to the Church of England which he had imbibed from his father and his education at Oxford. We find him exceedingly displeased with one of his meeting-houses because it resembled a Presbyterian Conventicle. An omen, perhaps,' says he, of what it will be when I am gone.' He was uniformly strenuous in his exhortations to remain in the communion of the Church of England; and when, at Deptford, the Methodists were anxious to have divine service in their chapel during church hours,

This poor man, whose name was Erasmus, was unjustly accused of imposture by Toplady and the other enemies of Wesley. The reason they assigned for their suspicions only shewed their own excessive ignorance of the Eastern Church. The certificates of orders which he issued were not in modern but in ancient Greek! If Erasmus had been really an impostor, he would not have acted with so much honesty as he did in refusing to consecrate Wesley. But there are some men who find the same difficulty in conceiving a Bishop without temporalities, as Martin Scriblerus did to conceive the abstract idea of a Lord Mayor. The Maronite Archbishop of Jerusalem was suspected by many people who ought to have known better, in spite of sundry credentials, for no other reason, that we know of, but his want of a coach and four.

he

he declared, that if they carried their intention into effect, they should see his face no more. Yet even this point he was, at last, induced to concede, by the same arguments of expediency, (than which no worse argument can be used for quieting a man's conscience,) to which he had recourse when, in opposition to all his former principles, he admitted Laymen to exercise the office of

ministers.

His political conduct was, on the whole, more consistent. In early life, and following the inclinations of his mother more thau those of his father, he was a Jacobite; and gave offence at Oxford by a political sermon, the memory of which may have mingled itself with the opposition which the Methodists experienced, and contributed to the report which at one time prevailed, that Wesley was a Jesuit in disguise. In his latter days he was still a high tory. He went so far in the American war as to offer his help in raising a regiment for the crown; and wrote a tract to justify the mother country in its right of taxation, which gave so much offence to his American converts that he soon after, if we believe Joseph Nightingale, was disingenuous enough to disavow his previous sentiments, and profess the having forgotten his own pamphlet. He shewed, however, his sagacity in discerning the signs of the times before the French Revolution, and in deducing his expectations of evil from a corrupt and disaffected press. And it has been ever since the honourable distinction of by far the greater number of the preachers in his connexion, that of all the sects there is none which has so clearly given warning, through its usual officers, of the guilt and danger of rebellion. But his busy life was now drawing to a close: though, in his extreme old age, he was blessed with a degree of vigour and vivacity of body and mind which, as he himself, with a pardonable degree of vanity, tells us, made him a wonder to himself and his acquaintance.' 'No one who saw him, even casually,' Mr. Southey tells us, can have forgotten his venerable appearance. His face was remarkably fine; his complexion fresh to the last week of his life; his eye quick and keen and active. When you met him in the street of a crowded city, he attracted notice, not only by his band and cassock, and his long hair, white and bright as silver, but by his pace and manner, both indicating that all his minutes were numbered and that not one was to be lost.' On completing his eighty-third year, he tells us of himself in his journals, I am never tired, (such is the goodness of God,) either with writing, preaching, or travelling. One natural cause, undoubtedly, is my continual exercise and change of air. How the latter contributes to health I know not; but certainly it does.' Other persons, however, perceived his growing weakness before he was

himself

himself aware of it; but the decay was gradual and without suffering, till in the middle of the year 1790, he confessed that though he felt no pain, yet nature was exhausted, and, humanly speaking, would sink more and more, till

'The weary springs of life stand still at last.'

In the following February, he had still strength to write a long letter to America, in which he enjoined those who desired to say any thing to him to lose no opportunity, for time,' he continued, 'has shaken me by the hand, and death is not far behind:' words which his father had used in one of the last letters that he addressed to his sons at Oxford. He died, in fact, peaceably and without pain, in little more than a fortnight afterwards, in the eighty-eighth year of his age and the sixty-fifth of his ministry.

'At the desire of many of his friends, his body was carried into the chapel the day preceding the interment, and there lay in a kind of state becoming the person, dressed in his clerical habit, with gown, cassock, and band; the old clerical cap on his head, a Bible in one hand and a white handkerchief in the other. The face was placid, and the expression which death had fixed upon his venerable features, was that of a serene and heavenly smile. The crowds who flocked to see him were so great, that it was thought prudent, for fear of accidents, to accelerate the funeral, and perform it between five and six in the morning. The intelligence, however, could not be kept entirely secret, and several hundred persons attended at that unusual hour. Mr. Richardson, who performed the service, had been one of his preachers almost thirty years. When he came to that part of the service, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother," his voice changed, and he substituted the word father; and the feeling with which he did this was such, that the congregation who were shedding silent tears, burst at once into loud weeping.'-vol. ii. p. 563.

Charles Wesley had died three years before, leaving behind him the character of a man of accomplished mind, and holy and humble temper; who to an activity little less remarkable than that of his brother, added a taste for poetry and literature superior to that which John displayed; who had more discernment, less credulity, and who was totally free from that lofty spirit of rule and ambition which pervaded every thought and action of the other. Latterly their opinions had differed. Charles saw the evil tendency of some parts of the discipline established among the Methodists. He did not hesitate to say, that he abominated their band-meetings of which he had once approved; and adhering faithfully himself to the church, he regretted the separation which he foresaw, and disapproved of John's conduct in taking steps which manifestly led to it. But the mutual love of the brethren remained the same. Charles

VOL. XXIV. NO. XLVII.

D