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 recognisable 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. 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 jail 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, and when called to encounter prejudices, to have met them with prejudices as virulent of his own. Into such a home as all this bespeaks, needy but not sordid, poverty-stricken yet garnished by high principle and dogged resolution, full of anxieties for temporal provision, yet free from the discontent that dishonours God, |