Mrs. Dunton throws a side light on Mrs. Wesley's own personality.

Mr. Wesley had been present at the wedding of the Duntons, and then presented them with an "Epithalamium" which was all doves and loves, and Cupids and Hymens. He evidently had a shrewd suspicion that the widowed bookseller was not made to live alone, for in the letter enclosing the epitaph he slily remarks that he hopes it may arrive before another Epithalamium is wanted. Mr. Dunton did marry again, within six months, and Mr. Wesley dropped his acquaintance as precipitately as Dr. Primrose might have done under the same circumstances. He was never tried in the same way himself, as Mrs. Wesley survived him, but, judging from what we know of his character, it is more than probable that he would not have lived long without a wife had he had the misfortune to lose his faithful partner.

Most likely it was when Mrs. Wesley was first installed at Epworth that she faced the problem of education for her children. Had she not done so, her daughters would have grown up ignorant, for funds wherewith to send them to school would never have been forthcoming. Strenuous efforts would naturally have been made for the boys; for education, and that at a public school, was regarded as a sine quá non by the father, and he would have moved heaven and earth to procure it for them. Mrs. Wesley was a quietly practical woman, who, having much to do, found time to do everything, by dint of unflagging energy and industry and a methodical habit of mind. It was, of course, impossible to teach her eldest boy till he was able to speak, but as soon as he began to talk she began to instruct him.

It was a rapid and pleasant process, for she wrote that "he had such a prodigious memory that I do not remember to have told him the same word twice. What was more strange, any word he had learned in his lesson he knew wherever he saw it, either in his Bible or any other book, by which means he learned very soon to read an English author well." For two years or so, Samuel was her only pupil, and from her experience with him she never attempted to teach any of her children the alphabet till they were turned five, although the youngest of all, Kezia, picked up her letters before that age. Her mother regretted this, and said it was none of her doing, but reading must have been in the atmosphere. Mrs. Wesley's ninth child was born at Epworth in 1698, but, the parish registers having been destroyed by fire, it is not known whether it was a boy or girl. This child speedily died, and the next addition to the family was a John who was followed the next year by a Benjamin, both of whom died in infancy.

It appears that during the earlier part of the time at Epworth, Mr. Wesley's aged mother lived with him, and was, probably, a valuable assistance to the young wife, who always had a baby coming, and was frequently confined to her room and couch for six months at a time, though, as she rarely had more than one maidservant for all purposes, she must have managed the children even in her moments of greatest weakness, and it was this perpetual strain of mind and body that added so much to her feebleness.

On the 16th of May 1701, husband and wife took counsel together. Money was terribly scarce and coals were wanted, for, though it was almost summer, it would not have done to be without firing when

another child was hourly expected. Every penny was collected together, but they could only muster six shillings between them. The coals were sent for, but On Thursday morning there

the pockets were empty. was a joyful surprise. Kind Archbishop Sharpe, who knew how poverty pinched the family at Epworth, and all about the debts, and how hard the rector worked in hammering rhyme and prose out of his brains for London publishers, spoke to several of the nobility about him, and even appealed to the House of Lords in his behalf. The Countess of Northampton, moved by the tale of privation, gave twenty pounds for the Archbishop's protégés, ten of which, at Mr. Wesley's desire, were left in his Lordship's hands for old Mrs. Wesley, and the other ten were sent by hand to the Rector, arriving on the morning that found him penniless. The money was not an hour too soon, for that very evening twins, a boy and girl, were born. In announcing the event to the Archbishop, Mr. Wesley

wrote:

"Last night my wife brought me a few children. There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present; we have had four in two years. and a day, three of which are living."

Neither the twins nor the boy who preceded them survived many months, and in 1702 Anne was born; and the mother having now, for a wonder, only one baby in hand, while little Mehetabel, or Hetty as she was called, having attained the dignified age of five years, Mrs. Wesley began to keep regular school with her family for six hours a day, and kept it up, for twenty years, with only the few unavoidable interruptions caused by successive confinements, and a fireat the Rectory.

How patiently she taught was shown when, one day, her husband had the curiosity to sit by and count while she repeated the same thing to one child more than twenty times. "I wonder at your patience," said he; “you have told that child twenty times that same thing." "If I had satisfied myself by mentioning it only nineteen times," she answered, "I should have lost all my labour. It was the twentieth time that crowned it."

Mrs. Wesley does not seem to have thought much of her own system of education, but she could not suffer her children to run wild, and could not afford either governesses, tutors, or schools. The only way of teaching them was to do it herself, and, while they were quietly gathered round her with their tasks, she plied her needle, kept the glebe accounts, wrote her letters, and nursed her baby in far more ease and comfort than she could have done if the little crew. had been racing about and getting into boisterous mischief. It was at the desire of her son John, when a man of thirty, and perhaps with his own aspirations to family life, that she wrote down the details of how she brought up and taught her children, and that record is best given in her own words.

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CHAPTER V.

TEACHING AND TRAINING.

JOHN WESLEY certainly could not have remembered the beginning of his mother's educational work, as it commenced before his birth; but he must have experienced its benefits, as she, with some assistance from her husband in rudimentary classics and mathematics, prepared him to enter the Charterhouse at eleven years of age with considerable credit to himself and his teachers. He pressed her repeatedly in after life to write down full details for his information, and she was evidently somewhat loath to do it, for at the end of a letter dated February 21st, 1732, she says:

"The writing anything about my way of education I am much averse to. It cannot, I think, be of service to anyone to know how I, who have lived such a retired life for so many years, used to employ my time and care in bringing up my children. No one can, without renouncing the world, in the most literal sense, observe my method; and there are few, if any, that would entirely devote above twenty years of the prime of life in hopes to save the souls of their children, which they think may be saved without so much ado; for that