A quarter of a century was the time that Charles II. occupied the throne of Great Britain. His reign was a continued scene of royal perfidy and sensual dissipation. He was a deceiver, a despot, and a defiler. He was the slave of women, and his court was the school of vice. For five-and-twenty years he played the hypocrite, by professing himself an orthodox Protestant, when, all the while, he was, in fact, an infidel. In all the relations of life, public and private, he was unprincipled, profligate, false, vicious, and corrupt; whilst, from the example of his debauched and licentious court, public morals contracted a taint which it required little less than a century to obliterate, and which for a time wholly paralysed the character of the nation.^[28] He had good talents, and in society was kind, familiar, communicative; but he was indolent, negligent of the interests of the nation, careless of its glory, averse to its religion, jealous of its liberty, lavish of its treasure, and sparing only of its blood. It has been remarked of him, and with some amount of reason, that he never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one. He had enormous vices, without the tincture of any virtue to correct them. He died in 1685, begging forgiveness of his neglected queen, blessing his bastard children, asking for kindness to be shown to his mistresses, and receiving from a popish priest the Romish communion, extreme unction, and a popish pardon.^[29]

The Duke of York succeeded his brother Charles II. to the throne, under the title of James II., in the spring of 1685. On the very first Sunday after his accession he went to mass with all the ensigns of royalty. While he was a subject, James was in the habit of hearing mass, with closed doors, in a small oratory which had been fitted up for his popish wife; but now that he was king, he ordered the doors to be thrown wide open, so that all who came to pay him homage might see the superstitious ceremonial. Soon, also, a new pulpit was erected in the palace, and, during Lent, sermons were preached there by popish divines, to the great disgust of zealous Protestants.

One of the first acts of James was to throw open the prisons of England, and to set at liberty thousands of Dissenters and Papists, who had been enduring a horrible captivity for conscience’ sake.

Two months after James’s coronation, the Earl of Argyle and the Duke of Monmouth, by previous concert, invaded Scotland and England with a small force from Holland; the former to re-establish the Covenant, and the latter to secure the Protestant religion, and to deliver the country from the tyranny of its enthroned monarch. Argyle sent the fiery cross from hill to hill in Scotland, and from clan to clan, until he got 2500 Highlanders to join him. In a few days he was betrayed by his guides, and was made a prisoner. His hands were tied behind him, and, with his head bare, and the headsman marching before him, he was carried to his old cell in Edinburgh Castle, and, on June 30, was beheaded. Monmouth, in England, met with a much more general welcome than Argyle found in Scotland. All classes of the people welcomed him as a deliverer sent from heaven. The poor rent the air with their joyful acclamations, and the rich opened their houses and supplied his army with meat and drink. His path was strewn with flowers; and windows, as he passed through towns, were crowded with ladies waving their handkerchiefs. On the 20th of June, at Taunton, he took the title of king; but, after marching through several parts of the West of England, his army was scattered, and he was ignominiously captured in a ditch, disguised as a peasant, with a few peas in his pocket, and himself half buried among ferns and nettles. With almost abject meanness, he implored pardon at the hands of James his uncle, but without effect, for, fifteen days after Argyle was beheaded in Edinburgh, Monmouth was decapitated on Tower Hill.

Immediately after Monmouth’s death, Judge Jeffreys was sent to hold his “bloody assizes” in the west. His first victim was Mrs Lisle, widow of one of the Commonwealth judges. The charge against her was that of giving shelter to two of Monmouth’s fugitives. For this, Jeffreys sentenced her to be burnt alive, and further ordered that the sentence should be executed on the very day that his foul mouth uttered it. The clergy of Winchester promptly interfered; three days’ respite were wrung from the hard-hearted judge; and the venerable matron was beheaded instead of being burnt. From Winchester this brutal being went to Dorchester, on the same murderous business. Here the court, by order of Jeffreys, was hung with scarlet; more than three hundred persons were waiting to be tried; two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death, but only about eighty were hanged, the rest being imprisoned, severely whipped, or transported. Those that were transported were sold as slaves; and the bodies of those that were hanged were cut into quarters, and stuck up on gibbets. For this bloody work, and while he was yet at Dorchester, Jeffreys was rewarded and encouraged by his applauding and grateful sovereign, who raised him from the seat of Lord Chief-Justice to that of Lord Chancellor. Jeffreys, blushing with his new honours, now went from Dorchester to Exeter, where another red list of two hundred and forty-three prisoners was laid before him, most of whom in a few days were hanged, drawn, and quartered. At Taunton, nearly eleven hundred prisoners were arraigned for high treason. Ten hundred and forty confessed themselves guilty; only six ventured to put themselves on trial; and two hundred and thirty-nine, at the very least, were executed with astounding rapidity. To spread the terror more widely, these executions took place in not fewer than thirty-six different towns and villages. The dripping heads and gory limbs of the deceased were fixed in the most conspicuous places,—in the streets, by the highways, over town halls, and over the very churches. At every spot where two roads met, in every market-place, and on the green of every village that had furnished Monmouth with men, ironed corpses clattered in the wind, or heads and quarters of human beings, stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the passing traveller sick with horror. The country, for a stretch of sixty miles, from Bristol to Exeter, was studded with a new and terrible sort of sign-posts, adorned with the mangled bodies of its slaughtered inhabitants. The wretched Jeffreys boasted, when he returned to London, that in his “bloody campaign” he had hanged more men than all the judges of England had hanged since the time of William the Conqueror.

All these murderous proceedings of Judge Jeffreys had the approbation of King James, and he continued to be one of the king’s principal advisers in all the oppressions and arbitrary measures of his despotic reign. Four years after his legalised massacres in the West of England, Jeffreys wished to steal away to a foreign country, there to hide himself and his ill-gotten wealth from the detestation of mankind; but before he could fulfil his purpose, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. The rabble gathered before his deserted mansion, and read on the door, with shouts of laughter, the bills which announced the sale of his property. Even delicate women, who had tears for highwaymen and housebreakers, breathed nothing but vengeance against him. The street poets portioned out all his joints with cannibal ferocity, and computed how many pounds of steaks might be cut from his well-fattened carcase. He was exhorted to hang himself with his garters, and to cut his throat with his razor. His spirit, as mean in adversity as it had been insolent and inhuman in prosperity, sunk under the load of public abhorrence. His constitution, originally bad and much impaired by drunkenness, was completely broken by distress and by anxiety. He was tortured by a cruel internal disease, which baffled the doctors’ skill. One—only one solace was left to him—brandy. Disease, assisted by strong drink and by misery, did its work with great rapidity. The poor wretch dwindled, in a few weeks, from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton; and on the 10th of April 1689, he died at the early age of forty-one.^[30]

But to return. It is a striking coincidence, that about the time when Judge Jeffreys was holding his “bloody assizes” in the West of England, King Louis of France was revoking the tolerant edict of Nantes, and driving thousands of his Huguenot subjects to England and other lands of exile. Other curious and important events happened in James’s short reign, which our space permits to be only mentioned. For instance, Dryden, the greatest writer of the day, turned Catholic, perhaps to please the royal Papist sitting on the throne; but Jeffreys refused to do so, on the ground that, when he was in Africa, he promised the Emperor of Morocco that, if he ever changed his religion, he would become a Turk. Another pro-papistical act was this,—King James, asserting a repealing power over all laws and Acts of Parliament, took upon himself not only to dismiss Protestants from the highest civil and military offices, but to put Papists into their places. He likewise gave the revenues of the Church in Ireland, to a great extent, to popish bishops and priests, and not merely permitted, but commanded them to wear their canonicals in public. He cashiered four thousand Protestant soldiers, stripped them of their uniforms, and left them to wander hungry and half-naked through the land; their officers, for the most part, retiring into Holland, and rallying round the Prince of Orange there.

All this excited anxiety, and, at length, the pulpits, even of High Churchmen, and despite the dogma of passive obedience, began to resound with warnings and denunciations. James now suspended Compton, Bishop of London; attempted to convert his daughter, the Princess Anne, to the popish religion; and tried to deprive his daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange, of her right to the succession. He endeavoured to obtain the control of the public seminaries, schools, and colleges; and to appoint Papists to be their officers. Four popish bishops were publicly consecrated in the Chapel Royal,—were sent to their dioceses with the titles of vicars apostolical; their pastoral letters being also licensed, printed, and dispersed throughout the kingdom. James likewise issued letters mandatory to the bishops of England, prohibiting the clergy to preach upon points of controversy, and establishing an ecclesiastical commission with more power than had been possessed by the abominable court over which Laud presided.

At the beginning of 1687, a declaration of indulgence was issued by proclamation at Edinburgh, “We, by our sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power, do hereby give and grant our royal toleration. We allow and tolerate the moderate Presbyterians to meet in their private houses, and to hear such ministers as have been, or are willing to accept of our indulgence, but they are not to build meeting-houses, but to exercise in houses. We tolerate Quakers to meet in their form in any place, or places, appointed for their worship: and we, by our sovereign authority, suspend, stop, and disable, all laws or Acts of Parliament made or executed against any of our Roman Catholic subjects, so that they shall be free to exercise their religion and to enjoy all; but they are to exercise in houses or chapels: and we cass, annul, and discharge all oaths by which our subjects are disabled from holding offices.”^[31]

On the 4th of April, 1687, “a declaration for liberty of conscience,” came out in the Gazette, by which all the penal laws against Protestant Nonconformists, as well as Catholics, were to be suspended. The declaration gave leave to all men to meet and serve God after their own manner, publicly as well as privately; it denounced the royal displeasure, and the vengeance of the laws against all who should disturb any religious worship; and it granted a free pardon to all the king’s loving subjects from penalties, forfeitures, and disabilities incurred on account of religion and the penal laws.

About the same time, King James went to Oxford, and, in the exercise of his popish inclinations and despotic principles, made the disgraceful exhibition of himself, in Magdalen College, which was witnessed by Samuel Wesley, and which is related in Chapter IV.

Twelve months after, on April 27, 1688, he published another declaration of indulgence, in substance the same as the two above mentioned; but which went a step farther, for not only was the declaration published, but all the clergy were commanded to read it in their churches. This was the spark that set fire to the train, which had been accumulating for many months.

National patience was exhausted. These indulgences were right enough in principle; but there were two great objections to their being published. First, it was a most unconstitutional and outrageous stretch of royal authority to pretend, “by virtue of our sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power,” to “suspend, stop, and disable laws and Acts of Parliament,” without parliamentary consent. And, secondly, it was well known that, in publishing these unconstitutional declarations, James was not actuated with the least wish to do justice to Protestant Nonconformists; but chiefly, if not exclusively, desired the toleration of his own sect, the Papists; and hoped that this might be a preparatory step to the triumphant establishment of the Popish Church. James’s conduct in Scotland, where he had hacked to pieces so many Protestants, could not be forgotten, but spoke far more loudly than the hollow-hearted language of his indulgent declarations; besides, the loud denunciations of James’s Lord Chancellor, the bloodthirsty Jeffreys, against all Protestant Dissenters as king-haters, rebels, and republicans, were still ringing in the nation’s ears. The people remembered that, within the last three years, the great and good Richard Baxter, had been committed to the King’s Bench Prison on the charge of printing his paraphrase of the New Testament; and had been brought to trial, before Jeffreys, at Westminster, at the very time that Titus Oates was standing in the pillory in the New Palace Yard; Jeffreys gleefully exclaiming at the moment, “If Baxter stood on the other side of Oates’s pillory, I would say two of the greatest rogues and rascals in the kingdom stood there.” The people remembered that the insulted Baxter, for his alleged offence, had been fined five hundred marks, and had been ordered to lie in prison until the fine was paid; besides being bound to good behaviour for seven years. They were not able to forget, that, in the very year before the first declaration was issued, the Protestant Dissenters had again and again had their private religious meetings, which they had dared to hold, disturbed and broken up, both in town and country, by the myrmidons of King James’s government; and that Sir John Hartop, and some others, at Stoke Newington, had had distresses levied for the payment of a fine of about £700.^[32] For James to pretend friendship to Protestant Dissenters, in the face of such facts, was a piece of hypocrisy, which none but a royal simpleton, afflicted with a little mind, and blinded by prejudice, would have attempted to impose upon the credulity of intelligent and religious men.

Never, not even under the tyranny of Laud, had the condition of the Dissenters been so deplorable as it was under James. Never had spies been so actively employed in detecting congregations; and never had magistrates, grand-jurors, rectors, and churchwardens been so much on the alert. It was impossible for the sectaries to pray together without precautions such as are employed by coiners and receivers of stolen goods. Places of worship had to be frequently changed. Worship had to be performed, sometimes just before the break of day, and sometimes at dead of night. Round the building where the little flock was gathered together, sentinels were placed to give the alarm if a stranger drew near. The minister, in disguise, was introduced through the garden and the back yard. In some houses, there were trap doors, through which, in case of danger, he might descend. No psalm was sung; and many contrivances were used to prevent the voice of the preacher, in his moments of fervour, from being heard outside. And yet, with all this care, several opulent gentlemen in the suburbs of London were accused of holding conventicles, and distresses were levied to the amount of many thousand pounds. Dissenting ministers, however blameless in life, however eminent for learning and abilities, could not venture to walk the streets for fear of outrages, encouraged by those whose duty it was to preserve the peace. Some divines of great fame were in prison; others, crushed with oppression, had quitted the kingdom; and great numbers, who had been accustomed to frequent conventicles, repaired to the parish church.^[33]

What was the result? James commanded that the declaration, published on the 27th of April 1688, should be read by all the clergy in their churches, in and about London, on the 20th and 27th of May; and in all the rest of England and Wales on the 3d and 10th of June following. The bishops^[34] were commanded to be vigilant in enforcing the royal order, and those who refused to read were to be prosecuted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The 20th of May arrived; but only seven, out of a hundred clergymen in London read the declaration, and even they read with fear and trembling, being groaned at by their congregations. On the 27th of May the signs of obedience were not more numerous; and a newly-appointed reader at the Chapel Royal was so much agitated that he was not able to read the declaration so as to be heard. On the 3d and 10th of June, the mass of the clergy in the provinces and in Wales, were quite as disobedient as those in the capital. It is said that, at the time, there were more than ten thousand clergy in the kingdom, and yet not more than two hundred complied with the royal will.

And here we must pause, for the purpose of spoiling a very interesting story respecting Samuel Wesley. The Rev. Henry Moore relates that Samuel Wesley was strongly solicited by the friends of King James II. to support the measures of the court in favour of Popery, with a promise of preferment, if he would comply with the king’s desire. But when the time came for reading the king’s declaration, he most firmly refused; and though surrounded by courtiers, soldiers, and informers, he preached a bold and pointed discourse against it from Daniel iii. 17, 18: “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” Unfortunately this heroic story is untrue. As we shall see shortly, Samuel Wesley was not ordained a deacon until two months after the declaration was commanded to be read, and therefore, at the time, was not authorised to preach, either from such a text, or from any text at all; nor was he in a position either to read or to refuse to read the king’s declaration.

The story has been repeated by Southey, by Macaulay, by Dr Smith, by Dr Stevens, and by many other of the leading historians of the age; but, as just shown, it is utterly without foundation. Henry Moore’s mistake was a simple and easy one. He attributes to Samuel Wesley a fact which belongs to the Rev. John Berry, A.M., vicar of Watton, in Norfolk, the father-in-law of Samuel Wesley, jun. The latter, in a “poem upon a clergyman lately deceased,” published in 1731, delineates the character of Mr Berry; and the poem, in substance, contains the story, which has so long and so often been improperly applied to Samuel Wesley, sen.:—

We are not sure that even this was intended to be considered as the description of a fact actually occurring in the history of the poet’s father-in-law. It might be nothing more than a poetical and general description of the position taken by the ten thousand clergy, who refused to read King James’s declaration. Anyhow, for the reason already mentioned, it could not be true of Samuel Wesley, sen. No doubt Samuel Wesley was as brave a man as ever lived; and had he been placed in the circumstances, stated by Henry Moore, he would have had sufficient courage to act as it is alleged he did. He regarded King James as a tyrant; and his views of the king’s declaration may be fairly gathered from the following question and answer in the Athenian Oracle:—^[36]

“Ques. What think you of the liberty of conscience granted in the late reign? Was it procured by the Catholics out of any design, or purely for the good and peace of the subjects?

“Ans. It is contrary to reason to believe that any true and zealous Papist can be for liberty of conscience, it being a fundamental of their religion, that all who differ from them in matters of faith are heretics, and ought to be destroyed. And, as it is natural for every persuasion to plead for liberty when they are denied it, and cannot have the freedom to serve God in their own method, so likewise, experience teaches us, that if the wheel turns, these very men which abhorred persecution, are no sooner in power but immediately endeavour by force to bring others to a compliance with what they profess. And if we find this error amongst the mildest and most charitable persuasions, we dare confidently affirm it would not have been otherwise with Roman Catholics, since they look upon the converting of heretics to be no small meritorious work.”

But leaving the ten thousand clergymen who refused to read King James’s declaration, and also abstaining from any further notice of the apochryphal story concerning Samuel Wesley’s bravery, we must now return to the declaration itself.

James commanded this royal manifesto to be read in churches, and charged the bishops to take care that his mandate was obeyed. Two days before the time when the declaration was to be first read, six of the bishops met the primate, Sancroft, at his palace at Lambeth; and there, with the assent of the ex-minister Lord Clarendon, and of Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Patrick, Tennison, Grove, and Sherlock, esteemed the best preachers and writers in the Church, it was privately resolved that a petition, prepared by Sancroft, should be forthwith presented to his Majesty. The petition, which was delivered on the evening of the same day, humbly showed that the objection of the clergy to read the declaration did not arise from their want of obedience to the king, nor yet from any want of tenderness to Dissenters; but because the declaration was founded upon a dispensing power in the king, which had often been declared illegal in parliament. James read the petition, and coolly folded it up, and then, with disdain and anger, said, “This is a great surprise to me. This is a standard of rebellion.” The bishops protested against such an interpretation. James kept muttering, “Is this what I have deserved from the Church of England? I will remember you who have signed this paper. I will be obeyed.” On the morrow, as he was on his way to mass, he met the Bishop of St David’s. “My lord,” cried he, “your brethren have presented the most seditious paper that was ever penned. It is a trumpet of rebellion.”

Three weeks after, the seven bishops were summoned before the Privy Council, to answer a charge of high misdemeanour, and were committed to the Tower. They were conveyed from Whitehall by water, and were followed by the tears and prayers of thousands. Both banks of the Thames were lined with multitudes, who fell on their knees, beseeching God to protect the sufferers for religion and liberty. The very soldiers in the Tower acted as mourners; and even the Nonconformists, who had felt all the bitterness of Episcopal persecution, sent a deputation of ten of their ministers to wait upon, and condole with the prisoners. Twenty-eight peers were ready to bail them; and messages were brought over from Holland, assuring them of the sympathy of the Prince and Princess of Orange.

A week later, on the 15th of June, they were brought before the King’s Bench, by a writ of habeas corpus. An immense concourse of people received them on the bank of the river, and followed them to Westminster Hall, the greater part falling upon their knees, wishing them happiness, and asking their blessing. Within the court, the bishops found the peers who offered to be their sureties, and a crowd of gentlemen attached to their interests. They were charged with a seditious libel. They pleaded “Not Guilty.” The trial was then postponed for a fortnight.

At the expiration of that time, the bishops again entered Westminster Hall, surrounded by lords and gentlemen, and followed by prayers and blessings. The trial began at nine o’clock in the morning. At seven in the evening, the jury retired to consider their verdict, and were locked up all night. At nine next morning, they returned the verdict “Not Guilty.” The noblemen, gentlemen, and people within the court raised a loud huzza. This was echoed back by a louder huzza from those without. As the bishops passed to the river side, there was a lane of people, all on their knees, to beg their benediction. Sixty earls and lords were present, joining in the jubilations of the people. At night London was lighted from end to end with blazing bonfires, all the church bells were ringing, and the Pope was burned in effigy before the windows of the royal palace. The excitement was amazing. James’s popish and despotic reign was doomed. The royally-applauded atrocities of Judge Jeffreys, which made the land a shambles, and turned the law itself into the bloodiest of tyrannies, awoke only groans and muttered curses; but the imprisonment of seven bishops at once brought about a revolution.

Meanwhile, in the same month that the trial of the bishops took place, the queen was delivered of a fine healthy boy. The Lord Mayor of London was commanded to provide bonfires and other public rejoicings; but there were no bonfires now except for persecuted bishops, and the alleged birth of a prince, instead of being honoured, was pronounced to be a gross imposture.

The Protestants, Tories as well as Whigs, turned to the Prince of Orange as their only hope, and an invitation was sent to him to come from Holland, with an armed force, to call in question the legitimacy of the pretended new born prince, and to redress the grievances of the nation. Before the month expired, Prince William had collected 15,000 land troops, a fleet of seventy ships, and a large train of artillery.

James began to apprehend danger, and attempted to disarm the animosity of the people by concessions. He even condescended to consult with the seven bishops whom he had so recently harassed. He replaced the Protestant deputy-lieutenants and magistrates. He gave back to the city of London its old charter, and restored Compton to his Episcopal office.

On the 3d of October, the primate and eight bishops waited upon the king, and endeavoured to bring him back “to the religion in which he had been baptized and educated;” but, just at that time, the infant, whose birth had helped to increase the storm, was baptized, with great pomp, according to the rites of the Church of Rome. The Pope, represented by his nuncio, was godfather to the child, and the baptism of James Francis Edward, with full particulars of the ceremony, was published in the Gazette. This added fresh elements to the storm which was already raging, and the bastardy of the unlucky child was sung in scurrilous songs in the streets of London.

On October 16th, William of Orange set sail, his ship bearing the British flag, which was emblazoned with the motto, “I will maintain the Protestant religion, and the liberties of England.” James soon found that his game was ended, and that there was nothing left for him but an ignominious flight. William came safe to anchor at Torbay, and landed on the 5th of November, the anniversary of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Exactly five weeks after, the queen, disguised as an Italian lady, fled with the infant prince across the Thames to Lambeth, being lighted on her dolorous way by the flames of burning popish chapels. From Lambeth, she and her child were conveyed in a coach to Gravesend, where they entered a yacht, which landed them at Calais. In less than twenty-four hours the stupified king fled after them, throwing the great seal of England into the river as he crossed to the Surrey side. At FavershamFaversham he embarked in a custom-house hoy. The boat encountered a storm, and was obliged to put in at the Isle of Sheppy. There the people seized the disguised monarch, under the idea that he was a fugitive Jesuit, treated him with rudeness, and dragged him back a prisoner to Faversham. At Faversham he was subjected to further indignities, the mob calling him a “hatchet-faced Jesuit.” At length he was rescued by Lord Winchelsea out of the rude hands of sailors, smugglers, and fishermen, and actually came back to London, and invited his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, to meet him, for the purpose of amicably settling the distractions of the nation. The invitation was declined; and, on December 23d, James again set sail for France, where he landed two days after; and thus was England happily delivered from the popish, perfidious, dissolute, and despotic dynasty of the Stuarts.^[37] Seven weeks afterwards both Houses of Parliament agreed to the resolution, “That William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be, and be declared, King and Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging.”

It was in the midst of this national revolution that Samuel Wesley left the University of Oxford, and became an ordained clergyman of the Church of England.

Perhaps this digression may be thought too long, and yet, at the risk of wearying the reader’s patience still further, a few more sketches of the state of the country, at this momentous period of its history, are added. They are chiefly taken from Macaulay, and it is hoped that they may help to convey some idea of the condition of affairs when Samuel Wesley commenced his ministry. Things at that time were widely different from what they are at present, and that must be borne in mind if the reader wishes rightly to understand the difficulties and discouragements of a Christian minister like the subject of this biography.

London, where Wesley first entered upon the duties of his sacred office, was, comparatively speaking, a small, dirty, ill-built town. In the east, no part of the immense line of warehouses and artificial lakes, which now spreads from the Tower to Blackwall, had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of those stately piles of building, which are inhabited by the noble and the wealthy, was in existence; and Chelsea, now peopled by tens of thousands of human beings, was then a quiet country village. On the north cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude; and poets loved to contrast its silence and repose with the din and turmoil of the monster London. On the south, the capital was connected with its suburbs by a single line of irregular arches, impeding the navigation of the river, and overhung by piles of mean and crazy houses. In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, and cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham. The centre of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields was an open space, where the rabble congregated every evening to hear mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. St James’s Square was a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, and for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. The pavement of London was detestable, and the drainage so bad that, in rainy weather, the gutters soon became torrents. The houses were not numbered. The shops were distinguished by painted signs, gay and grotesque. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens’ Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs. When the evening closed in, garret windows were opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who walked on the path below. Most of the streets were left in profound darkness, where thieves plied their trade with impunity, and dissolute young gents broke windows, upset sedans, beat quiet men, and offered rude caresses to pretty women.

Nothing like the London daily newspaper of our time existed, or could exist. Both the necessary capital and the necessary skill were wanting. No newspaper was published oftener than twice a week; and none exceeded in size a single small leaf. The quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more than is often found in two numbers of the Times. There were no provincial newspapers whatever. Indeed, except in the capital and at the two universities, there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom; and the only printing press in England, north of the river Trent, appears to have been at York.

In the country, many thousands of square miles, now enclosed and cultivated, were marsh, forest, and heath. The peasant kept a flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich with apple blossoms. He snared wild fowl on the fen which has long since been drained, and divided into corn and turnip fields. He cut turf among the furze bushes on the moor, which is now a meadow, bright with clover, and renowned for its butter and its cheese. The market-place, which the rustic can now reach with his cart in an hour, was then a day’s journey from his home. On the best lines of communication, the ruts of the roads were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the unenclosed heath and fen which lay on both sides. It was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available; for, in wet, the mud lay deep both on the right and the left, and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire on each hand. Almost every day coaches stuck fast, until teams of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm, to tug them out of the slough in which they were imbedded. On the best highways, heavy goods were generally conveyed by stage waggons, in the straw of which nestled a crowd of passengers, who were not able to ride on horseback, and could not afford to indulge in the luxury of a coach. The expense of transmitting heavy goods was enormous. From London to Birmingham, the charge was £7 a ton; and from London to Exeter it was £12. The cost of conveyance amounted to a prohibitory tax on many useful articles; and coal, in particular, was never seen except in the districts where it was produced, or in the districts to which it was conveyed by water. On by-roads, and generally throughout the country north of York and west of Exeter, goods were carried by long trains of pack-horses; and a traveller of humble condition often found it convenient to perform a journey, mounted on a pack-saddle, and seated between two baskets. The rich commonly travelled in their own carriages, drawn by at least four horses, and often by six, because, with a less number, there was great danger of sticking fast. Flying coaches ran thrice a week from London to the chief towns; but no stage-coach, indeed no stage-waggon, appears to have proceeded further north than York, or further west than Exeter. The ordinary day’s journey of a flying coach was about fifty miles in summer; and in winter, when the roads were bad and the nights were long, a little more than thirty. In Cornwall, in the fens of Lincolnshire, and among the hills and lakes of Cumberland, letters were received only once a-week; the letter-bags being carried on horseback, day and night, at the rate of about five miles an hour. Travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable risk of being stopped and plundered; for the mounted highwayman was to be found on every main road, held an aristocratic position in the community of thieves, appeared in fashionable coffee-houses in the capital, and betted with men of quality on the race grounds of the country.

Most of Samuel Wesley’s life was spent in rural districts; and therefore amid the marshes, fens, forests, and heaths, the impassable roads, and the highway dangers just described. He was an author; but printing presses in the country did not exist. He was a man of education and of public spirit; but to obtain a newspaper was almost impossible. He was the head of a family; but to get coals, and other imported household comforts at Wroote and at Epworth, was a thing never contemplated. He was a student; but the difficulty and expense of conveying books from London to Lincolnshire were so great, that a folio was longer in reaching its way from Paternoster Row to Epworth, than it now is in reaching Kentucky. For a poor rector like him to buy and to get books, was a thing almost impracticable; and to borrow, such as he wanted, was impossible. Few knights of the shire had libraries so good as may now universally be found in a servant’s hall, or in the back parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras, and Baker’s Chronicles, Tarlton’s Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among his fishing rods and guns. Many lords of manors, in point of education, differed but very little from their menial servants; and heirs of estates often had no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign their names to a mittimus. Their chief serious employment was the care of their property. They examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with corn merchants and drovers. Their chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. Their oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of their province; while the litter of their farm-yards gathered under the windows of their bed-chambers, and cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew up to their very doors. These were the kind of country neighbours which Samuel Wesley was privileged to have for a period of more than forty years.

The state of the common people may be judged from the state of those above them. Four-fifths of them, throughout the country, were employed in agriculture; and four shillings a-week were fair agricultural wages. There were few articles, important to the working man, as coffee, tea, sugar, &c., the price of which was not double what it is at present. Beer was much cheaper; and meat was also cheaper; but the latter was even then so dear that hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew the taste of it. Bread, such as is now given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom seen, even on the trencher of a shopkeeper or of a yeoman. The great majority of the nation lived almost entirely on rye, oats, and barley. Such was the general condition of Samuel Wesley’s Lincolnshire parishioners.

We refrain, at present, from any lengthy remarks respecting the religion and morals of the nation. It may be added, however, that the manners of the people were exceedingly coarse and vicious. The discipline of workshops, of schools, and of private families was harsh to an extreme. The implacability of hostile factions was such as, at the present day, we can scarcely conceive. Sufferers by the law experienced but little mercy. Put an offender in the pillory, and it was well if he escaped with his life from the showers of stones and brick-bats thrown at him. Tie him to the cart’s tail, and the crowd pressed round him, begging the hangman to give it to the fellow well, and to make him howl. Fights, compared with which a boxing match is a refined and humane spectacle, were among the favourite diversions of a large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other in pieces; and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. Prisons were hells on earth, and seminaries of every disease and of every crime.

It would not be difficult to multiply such facts as these; but enough has been said to show that when Samuel Wesley began his ministry, England and the English people were very different from what they are at present. The Christian minister even now has difficulties and discouragements; but, as a rule, he is almost a stranger to the trials encountered by young Wesley. For a penny he has his newspaper every morning; and for a trifle more he has his monthly review and magazine. He lives in an age when even the poorest of his parishioners will hardly deign to ride in the stage-waggon, but all aspire to be conveyed by the swift railway train. Books are published by millions; and circulating libraries, in one shape or in another, may be found in almost every hamlet of the land. Education is general; and not merely country squires, but country peasants, study classical and scientific books. Work is plentiful; and, except in a few bucolic districts, wages are sufficient to make the poor man’s cottage a neat and a happy home. It was otherwise one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, when Samuel Wesley, a young man of twenty-six years of age, first entered upon the office and duties of a clergyman of the Church of England.

[This chapter is chiefly taken from Macaulay, from Knight, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, and from Baxter’s Life and Times.]