he wrote with spirit, and even humor, to the Archbishop of York, that he expected to do far more good preaching in his new parish than in the old one.

To this man of firm nerve and iron will was joined a helpmeet ranking foremost among "elect ladies."

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Susannah Annesley, the youngest daughter among twentyfive children, in girlhood, in womanhood, in motherhood, in age and feebleness, was a woman such as this world is rarely blessed with. Think of a girl of thirteen examining and settling for herself the points of difference between Churchmen and Dissenters-and, with full knowledge of all her distinguished father had suffered as a Non-conformist, becoming a zealous Churchwoman.

In Epworth parsonage, amid the scenes and sufferings just alluded to, the mother of nineteen children, all blessed with grace of person and rare intellectual gifts, she brought out the rich treasures of her great soul. There is not an aspect of female character in which she is not a model. Cheerful in all fortune, good or ill, following to the grave nine beautiful lambs of her fold, selling her little trinkets and slipping the rings from her fingers to feed and comfort her husband in prison, ordering her household with a precision of Christian rules that tolerated no deviation, leading the minds of her children upward with a patience that amazes all fretful and impatient mothers, she was a living benediction in that humble household.

What a lesson we have in that family scene, when the irritable Samuel asked her, snappishly, "Why do you tell that boy the same thing twenty times over?" "Because," said the wise woman, “nineteen times were not enough." See her holding service in the kitchen for the poor of the parish while her husband is absent, reading the most awakening sermons with sweet, womanly eloquence to the crowd of eager listeners, and gently lead. ing them to the Fountain of Life. Note her answer to her husband's letter of rebuke, when his stupid curate, who could not interest the people, had reported to him that his wife was holding unlawful conventicles: "If you do after all (she had in her letter defended her course unanswerably) think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me you desire it, for that will not satisfy my conscience. But send me your positive

command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good when you and I shall appear before the grand and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ "-words and sentiments worthy of a loyal wife and a Christian woman.

The rarest and richest gifts were bound up in the character of the mother of the Wesleys. Her portraits show a classic beauty of face and form, while dignity, firmness, gentleness, strong common sense, far-seeing sagacity, clear penetration, and intense religious fervor blend and form a model for the study of all who can reverence one of the noblest works of God-a Christian mother. She has been well described as “a queen uncrowned and saintly:"

"Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants;
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt

In angelic instincts; breathing Paradise;
Interpreter between the gods and men

Who looked all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
Too great to tread."

The crowning scene in this rare life was reached when it was yielded up in the room fitted up for her by her son John in the old Foundry. As the noble woman felt death draw near, she calmly said, "Children, as soon as I am released, sing a hymn of praise to God."

That old rectory, with its peaked and thatched roof; its mysterious noises from the visits of "Old Jeffrey," as the children called the familiar ghost, which and its pranks Isaac Taylor explains to his own satisfaction, at least, by his conceit of "idiotic creatures" of the spiritual world, "not more intelligent than apes or pigs," which "by some mischance are thrown over their proper limits and disport themselves among things palpable, and go to the extent of their tether in freaks of bootless mischief;" the fire at midnight when John Wesley was six years old, from which he was saved by one man standing on the shoulders of another and dragging him from the window just as the roof crashed in, which scene so impressed itself on the imagination of the thoughtful child that in manhood he kept it ever before him by the motto on his seal: "Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?"

And Epworth church-yard, with its strange and awe-inspiring scenes, what a place it holds in Methodist history! There for eight successive nights John Wesley stood on his father's tomb in the midst of a great multitude and preached with amazing power. "While I was speaking," he says of one occasion, "several dropped down as dead; and among the rest such a cry was heard of sinners groaning for the righteousness of faith as almost drowned my voice."

Such was Epworth, never to be forgotten, for it cradled John Wesley, the prince of preachers in modern times, and Charles Wesley, the prince of Christian hymn writers for all time.

London is full of sacred places. In the west rises the mausoleum where rest beneath turret and tower in the aisles and chapels of the venerable pile the bones of kings and nobles, philosophers, poets, and statesmen renowned in English story. In the east stands the gloomy tower where the best and brav- · est have languished in cell and dungeon and found exit from earth and its sorrows beneath the headsman's ax.

In Smithfield, where thousands now rush daily to the vast meat-market, thousands once gathered around the blazing fires of persecution, while the souls of undaunted witnesses to the true faith ascended in the flames.

The memories that cluster about such shrines can never perish. The light that broke from them in the midst of dense moral darkness can never grow dim. But to me the historic places of Methodism have as rich memories and as strong a light. The achievements in war and peace, of Raleigh and Nelson, of Wellington and Burke, of Peel and Palmerston, all combined have not done for England and for the world what the Wesleys and Methodism have done. For without the reforming, renewing, and restraining power of their preaching on the ignorant and degraded masses of the English people, neither the eloquence of Burke nor the sword of Wellington could have saved that country from the red dragon of the French Revolution.

Near to Smithfield stands the famous old Charter-house towhich the loyal Methodist may well make pilgrimage. It was at first, and hence its name, a monastery of the Carthusian monks, and fell, with more than a thousand other such houses. of various monkish orders, under the wrath of that royal and FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.-44

incomparable monster, Henry VIII. It came, by gift or purchase, into the possession of the great house of the Howards, and after varying fortunes was bought by "Thomas Sutton, merchant of London, of the Earl of Suffolk," who founded there his famous school for boys and his asylum for decayed gentlefolks.

A hundred years after the death of Sutton, John Wesley, a frail, delicate boy of ten years, entered as a scholar under the patronage of the great Duke of Buckingham, Lord Chamberlain of the royal household. It was a sad place to thrust such a child into, fresh and untainted from the Epworth family. The gloomy cloisters were still there, "brick-built and grimy with traditions of monks' cells and a ghost-like smell," with an evil fame for small boys and even larger ones, "for did not a prior and five of his monks lie buried in the spot known and dreaded as Middle Briers?"" Wesley went in as a gown-boy among a set of urchins described by a chronicler, with perhaps undue latitude, as "well-bred, pleasant, idle, and ignorant,' and according to the fashion of the times was soon arrayed in gown-boy's uniform. A sort of jacket, which was waistcoat as well, trousers of dark blue stuff, shirt and socks, and a pair of stout shoes known as "gowsers" completed the Charter-house toilet.

Among the boys of the different houses, and especially among the gown-boys, discipline was left almost wholly to the boys themselves. They regulated the fights, and had a rough time generally. The type of the Charter-house boys was distinctly marked. They had an independence and a distrust of authority that they asserted in more ways than one, and one of these ways was the filching of the meat-ration from the small boys by the big fellows. John Wesley was a victim of this Charter-house etiquette. For five years his food was little more than bread, but he kept his health by faithfully obeying his father's command to race every morning three times around the garden.

There is a tradition that yet lingers, to the effect that Wesley, though a quick boy and well advanced in his studies, always consorted with smaller boys and inferior classes, and would often harangue them with juvenile eloquence. One of the masters, breaking in one day upon such a scene, called the

young orator into his room and asked him why he did not company with boys larger and more advanced, to which, as the story runs, the youngster replied: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." If Wesley was an ambitious boy never was ambition more wisely or grandly directed than when his richly gifted soul came fully under the power of divine grace. He bore his hardships bravely, loved the old school-house, and in after life made it an annual visit and strolled through its courts and grounds.

One quiet morning I left the crowded street and turned into the narrow way leading to this memorable place. It had been the abode of England's greatest nobles, and for a time of royalty itself, for the usher showed the room in which "good Queen Bess" had been entertained, with its high and curiously carved mantel, and walls still covered with rich but faded tapestry bearing quaint devices of the olden time, and the very spot at the head of the great stairs where the Duke of Norfolk was arrested as he came out of his dining hall. I saw the decayed gentlemen pensioners in their long cloth cloaks filing out of the chapel after daily prayers, and the tablets to the memory of Charter-house boys who had won renown in field and forum. But none of these interested me so much as the places that recalled "Jacky Wesley." There was the indentical dining-room, dark and low-pitched, with the oak table in the center, and the hard benches on which the gown-boys sat, and so high that the legs of a ten-year-old would dangle far above the floor. There were the long corridors, brick-paved, up and down which the boys ran for exercise in rainy weather, and the square plot of ground, rich in English grass, around which little Wesley ran three times every morning.

From the Charter-house boys sprang a noble race of men. The names of Thackeray, Havelock, Ellenborough, Grote, Thirlwall, and a host of others fill high niches in the temple of fame, but there is no name more revered or oftener written and sounded throughout the world than the name of the Charter-house boy, John Wesley.

As Methodism was born at Oxford, that quaint old university town must be set down as one of the most noted of its historic places. At seventeen Wesley escaped from the ruffianism of the Charter-house and entered the "aristocratic,