special demands of his mission made him prevailingly the friend of the friendless and the comforter of the lowly. In this aspect of his work, his imitation of Christ was pre-eminent, in that his labour of love was specially consecrated "to seek and to save that which was lost."

But we anticipate, and must glance at the boy Wesley, and the circumstances which proved the Campus Martius, to train him for his lifelong conflict "with the rulers of the darkness of this world, with spiritual wickedness in high places."

Close bordering on the winding Trent, in one of the richest portions of Lincolnshire, is the parish and manor of Epworth, the church standing upon an elevation reached by a gentle ascent about four miles from the river, but shaded from view by a shoulder of the hill. Right well do we remember our pilgrimage to that memorable spot four short years ago; our readers may divine the day by consulting their almanacks for the birthday of our gracious Queen, in the year of our Lord 1848. This occasion, as we are loyalists to the very core of our nature, we never fail to observe as a holiday, we and all our house. The heavens smiled propitiously on our purpose, for never did a brighter spring sun pour gladness into the heart than that which shone upon us as we crept blithely along the road that gradually swept up from the ferry. Our sensations we will not attempt to describe, as we paced the pathway of the quiet old country town, where the first relic we picked up was the characteristic one of a torn page of the New Testament. Enthusiasm upon paper is vapid as the lees of wine; it wants the first element of enthusiasm

-life. The imagination of our readers must therefore supply the want of graphic power in our pen. Suffice it to say, that it was with more than common emotion we looked upon the font where the man, whose genius made the celebrity of the place, had been baptized; upon the communion table where Wesley had often officiated, yet whence he had been rudely repulsed by an intemperate and ungrateful priest, who had owed his all to the Wesleys; on the tombstone of his father, which on that occasion and subsequently served the itinerant John for a pulpit, from which he addressed weeping multitudes in the churchyard; on the withered sycamore, beneath whose shade he must have played; and, finally, through the courtesy of the rector, the Hon. and Rev. Charles Dundas, on the parsonage, now scarcely recognizable for the same from the improvement it has received at the hand of wealth, guided by the eye of taste, though old Jeffrey's room still retains much of its ghostliness. The day that revealed to us all these and sundry memorabilities, is one to be noted with chalk in our calendar.

The lower ground of the isle of Axholme, in the midst of which Epworth stands, had from time immemorial, been subject to almost constant submersion from the river, and was little better than a Mere, the title Leland gives it in his "Itinerary." Its value, however, was so obvious to the eyes of both natives and foreigners, that a charter to drain this whole country side was given to Cornelius Vermuyden in the time of the Stuarts; and the thing was done, to the rescue of a considerable part of the king's chase from the dominion of the lawless waters, and to the

increase of the arable and pasture land of the neighbourhood to the extent of many thousand acres of “ a fine rich brown loam, than which there is none more fertile in England." To this parish the father of our hero was presented in the year 1693, as a reward for his merits in defending from the press the Revolution of 1688. The living was of inconsiderable amount, under £200 per annum, but by no means contemptible to a waiter upon Providence, whose clerical income had never before averaged £50 per year, and was the more agreeable as it promised to lead to something better, since the ground of his present advancement was the recognition in high places of the opportune loyalty of the literary parson. Here, with a regularly increasing family, without any corresponding increase of stipend, the exemplary rector laboured for ten years ere the birth of his son John, "contending with low wants and lofty will," with the dislike and opposition of his unruly parishioners, with his own chafed tempers and disappointed expectations, with serious inroads upon his income by fire and flood, and with the drag-chain of a poverty that pressed upon the means of subsistence, and which his literary labours availed little to lighten. Few things are more impressive than the peep he gives us into his domestic history in his half jocular half serious defence from the ungenerous charges of his elder brother Matthew, that he had not turned his resources to such good account for his family as he might have done. He calls his letter "John O'Style's apology against the imputation of his ill husbandry."

After some preliminary matter, he thus proceeds: "When he first walked to Oxford, he had in cash £2 5s.

"He lived there till he took his bachelor's degree, without any preferment or assistance except one crown.

"By God's blessing on his own industry, he brought to London £10 15s.

"When he came to London he got deacon's orders and a cure, for which he had £28 in one year; in which year for his board, ordination and habit, he was indebted £30, which he afterwards paid.

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Then he went to sea, where he had for one year £70, not paid till two years after his return.

"He then got a curacy of £30 per annum, for two years, and by his own industry he made it £60 per annum.

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"He married, and had a son, and he and his wife and child boarded for some years in or near London, without running into debt.

"He then had a living given him in the country, let for £50 per annum, where he had five children more; in which time, and while he lived in London, he wrote a book* which he dedicated to Queen Mary, who gave him a living in the country [Epworth], valued at £200 per annum, where he remained for nearly forty years, and wherein his numerous offspring amounted with the former to nineteen children.

"Half of his parsonage-house was first burnt, which he rebuilt; some time after, the whole was burnt to the ground, which he rebuilt from the foundations, and it cost him above £400, besides the furniture, none of which was saved; and he was forced to renew it.

"Some years after, he got a little living [Wroote], adjoining to his former, the profits of which very little more than defrayed the expenses of serving it, and sometimes hardly so much, his whole tithe having been in a manner swept away by inundations, for which the parishioners had a brief; though he thought it not decent for himself to be joined with them in it.

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'Many years he has been employed in composing a large book,† whereby he hopes that he may be of some benefit to the world, and in a degree amend his own fortunes. By + Dissertations on Job.

*The Life of Christ.

C

sticking so close to his work, he has broke a pretty strong constitution, and fallen into the palsy and gout. Besides, he has had sickness in his family, for the most of the years since he was married.

"His greater living seldom cleared more than five score pounds per annum, out of which he allowed £20 a year to a person who married one of his daughters. Could we on the whole fix the balance, it would easily appear whether he has been an ill husband, or careless and idle, and taken no care of his family.

Let all this be balanced, and then a guess may easily be made of his sorry management. He can struggle with the world, but not with Providence; nor can he resist sickness, fires, and inundations."

The defence is able and satisfactory, and our sympathies gather round the "busy bee" whose active industry and zeal could not shield his hive from spoliation and misfortune, while many a contemporary drone surfeited in abundance, and wore out a useless life in luxury, self-indulgence and criminal ease. Ere his son John, the future father of Methodism, had completed his third year, the rector of Epworth was in gaol for debt. The exasperation of party, which he took no means to allay, but rather chafed and provoked-for he gloried in his "church and state politics," being "sufficiently elevated" *brought down upon him the unmanly vengeance of his creditors, and they spited their political opponent by throwing him into prison. This affliction brought him friends, who succeeded in procuring his release after an incarceration of some months, but neither enlarged his resources nor increased his prudence. He seems to have been a stern if a faithful pastor.

* John O'Style's Dissertations.