Death was indeed rapidly approaching. He said to the chaplain, Doctor, I have not been a great sinner;" and after a short pause, "Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country." His articulation now became difficult, but he was distinctly heard to say, "Thank God, I have done my duty!" These words he had repeatedly pronounced, and they were the last words which he uttered. He expired at thirty minutes after four, three hours and a quarter after he had received his wound. (From the Life of Nelson.)

:

THE ORIGIN OF METHODISM

CHARLES, then pursuing contentedly his scholastic course, had been elected from Westminster to Christ Church, just after his brother John obtained his fellowship. He was diligent in study, and regular in his conduct; but when John sought to press upon him the importance of austerer habits, and a more active devotion, he protested against becoming a saint all at once, and turned a Ideaf ear to his admonitions. While John, however, resided at Wroote, the process which he had vainly sought to accelerate in his brother was going on. His disposition, his early education, the example of his parents and of both his brethren, were in unison not knowing how or when he woke out of his lethargy, he imputed the change to the efficacy of another's prayers-most likely, he said, his mother's; and meeting with two or three undergraduates, whose inclinations and principles resembled his own, they associated together for the purpose of religious improvement, lived by rule, and received the sacrament weekly. Such conduct would at any time have attracted observation in an English University: it was peculiarly noticeable at that time, when a laxity of opinions as well as morals obtained, and infidelity, a plague which had lately found its way into the country, was becoming so prevalent, that the vice-chancellor had, in a programmæ, exhorted the tutors to discharge their duty by double diligence, and had forbidden the undergraduates to read such books as might tend to the weakening of their faith. The greatest prudence would not have sufficed to save men from ridicule, who, at such an age, and in such a scene, professed to make religion the great business of their lives: and prudence is

rarely united with enthusiasm. They were called in derision the Sacramentarians, Bible-bigots, Bible-moths, the Holy, or the Godly Club. One person, with less irreverence and more learning, observed, in reference to their methodical manner of life, that a new sect of Methodists was sprung up, alluding to the ancient school of physicians known by that name. Appellations, even of opprobrious origin, have often been adopted by the parties to which they were applied, as well as by the public, convenience legitimating the inventions of malice. In this instance there was neither maliciousness nor wit, but there was some fitness in the name; it obtained vogue; and though long, and even still sometimes indiscriminately applied to all enthusiasts, and even to all who observe the forms of religion more strictly than their neighbours, it has become the appropriate designation of the sect of which Wesley is the founder.

It was to Charles Wesley and his few associates that the name was first given. When John returned to Oxford, they gladly placed themselves under his direction; their meetings acquired more form and regularity, and obtained an accession of numbers. His standing and character in the University gave him a degree of credit; and his erudition, his keen logic, and ready speech commanded respect wherever he was known. But no talents, and, it may be added, no virtues, can protect the possessor from the ridicule of fools and profligates. "I hear," says Mr. Wesley, "my son John has the honour of being styled the Father of the Holy Club: if it be so, I am sure I must be the grandfather of it; and I need not say, that I had rather any of my sons should be so dignified and distinguished, than to have the title of His Holiness." (From Life of Wesley.)

WESLEY ON OLD AGE

"LEISURE and I," said Wesley, "have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live, if my health is so long indulged to me.” This resolution was made in the prime of life, and never was resolution more punctually observed. "Lord, let me not live to be useless!" was the prayer which he uttered after seeing one whom he had long known as an active and useful magistrate, reduced by age to be "a picture of human nature in

disgrace, feeble in body and mind, slow of speech and understanding." He was favoured with a constitution vigorous beyond that of ordinary men, and with an activity of spirit which is even rarer than his singular felicity of health and strength. Ten thousand cares of various kinds, he said, were no more weight or burden to his mind, than ten thousand hairs were to his head. But in truth his only cares were those of superintending the work of his ambition, which continually prospered under his hands. Real cares he had none; no anxieties, no sorrows, no grief which touched him to the quick. His manner of life was the most favourable that could have been devised for longevity. He rose early, and lay down at night with nothing to keep him waking, or trouble him in sleep. His mind was always in a pleasurable and wholesome state of activity, he was temperate in his diet, and lived in perpetual locomotion; and frequent change of air is perhaps, of all things, that which most conduces to joyous health and long life.

The time which Mr. Wesley spent in travelling was not lost. History, poetry, and philosophy," said he, "I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times.” He used to throw the reins on his horse's neck; and in this way he rode, in the course of his life, above a hundred thousand miles, without any accident of sufficient magnitude to make him sensible of the danger which he incurred. His friends, however, saw the danger; and in the sixty-ninth year of his age they prevailed upon him to travel in a carriage, in consequence of a hurt which had produced a hydrocele. The ablest practitioners in Edinburgh were consulted upon his case, and assured him there was but one method of cure. "Perhaps but one natural one," says he, "but I think God has more than one method of healing either the soul or the body." He read upon the subject a treatise which recommends a seton or a caustic, "but I am not inclined," said he, "to try either of them; I know a physician that has a shorter cure than either one or the other." After two years, however, he submitted to an operation, and obtained a cure. A little before this, he notices in his Journal the first night that he had ever lain awake; "I believe," he adds, "few can say this; in seventy years I never lost one night's sleep."

He lived to preach at Kingswood under the shade of trees which he had planted; and he outlived the lease of the Foundery, the place which had been the cradle of Methodism. In 1778 the

headquarters of the society were removed to the City Road, where a new chapel was built upon ground leased by the city. Great multitudes assembled to see the ceremony of laying the foundation, so that Wesley could not, without much difficulty, get through the press to lay the first stone, in which his name and the date were inserted upon a plate of brass: "This was laid by John Wesley on 1st April 1777. "Probably," says he, "this will be seen no more by any human eye, but will remain there till the earth and the works thereof are burnt up."

(From the Same.)

EVILS OF THE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

THE manufacturing poor are also removed from other causes which are instrumental to good conduct in the labouring classes. They have necessarily less of that attachment to their employers which arises from long connexion, and the remembrance of kind offices received, and faithful services performed, an inheritance transmitted from parent to son: and being gathered together in herds from different parts, they have no family character to support in the place to which they have been transplanted. Their employments, too, unlike those of the handicraft and the agriculturist, are usually so conducted as to be equally pernicious to mind and body. The consumption of life in some manufactories, even in those which might at first be thought most innocuous, though it may be a consolation to those philosophers who are afraid of being crowded at the table of nature, would make good men shudder if the account could be fully laid before them. We could mention one of the most extensive and important of our fabrics, where the first generation of persons who were employed bore the change of life without much apparent injury; the second grew sickly and were invalided long before the natural age of decay; and in the third the whole race was extinct !

John Hunter predicted that our manufactories would engender new varieties of pestilence. New and specific diseases they have produced, but the only pestilence which has yet manifested itself is of a moral nature. Physical diseases are not more surely generated by crowding human beings together in a state of filth and wretchedness, than moral ones by herding them together, and

that, too, without distinction of sex, in a state of ignorance.

This is the case under the least unfavourable conditions which can be imagined; but it is doubly so under the manufacturing system, where children are trained up in the way wherein that system destines them to go, as soon as their little fingers can twirl a thread, or feed a machine. When that system was at its height, the slave-trade itself was scarcely more systematically remorseless. The London workhouses supplied children by waggon loads to those manufactories which would take them off the hands of the parish; a new sort of slave trade was invented; a set of child jobbers travelled the country, procuring children from parents whose poverty was such as would consent to the sacrifice, and undertaking to feed, lodge, and clothe them for the profits of their labour. In this manner were many of our great manufactories supplied! In those manufactories the machinery never stood still. One set of these poor children worked by day, another by night; and when one relay was relieved, they turned into the beds which had been vacated by the other, warm as the others had left them. When this system had continued long enough for those who lived through so unnatural and miserable a childhood to reach the age of maturity, it was found that the girls, when they married, were utterly unable to perform the commonest and most indispensable domestic work; and the remedy which was devised for the future, was, that they should go to school to learn those things for an hour in the day, after they had done work!

(From Collected Essays.)

LORD BYRON

It was because Lord Byron had brought a stigma upon English literature, that I accused him; because he had perverted great talents to the worst purposes; because he had set up for pandergeneral to the youth of Great Britain as long as his writings should endure; because he had committed a high crime and misdemeanour against society, by sending forth a work, in which mockery was mingled with horrors, filth with impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. For these offences I came forward to arraign him. The accusation was not made darkly, it was not