Turning from the character of the Clergy to notice their circumstances, we meet with an interesting picture of domestic life in the case of the father of the Wesleys. He was a rector upon £50 a year at South Ormsby, a little village in Lincolnshire, skirting the parks and woodlands of a goodly mansion. We find the same clergyman shortly afterwards established in the same county at the Rectory of Epworth, described, in a survey of the period, as consisting of “five bays built all of timber and plaister, and covered with straw thatch, the whole building being contrived into three stories, and disposed into seven chief rooms, namely--a kitchen, a hall, a parlour, a buttery, and three large upper rooms, besides some others of common use, and also a little garden impaled between the stone wall and the south.”[417] This minute description brings before us a humble, but pleasant parsonage of the end of the seventeenth century; and it is added that to the dwelling stood attached one barn of six bays, likewise built of clay and thatch; also one dovecote of timber and plaister, and one hempkiln. The glebe was stocked. Cows fed in the meadows, and pigs in the stye. A nag and two fillies occupied the stable, and flax and barley waved in the fields. The parishioners were, according to Wesley’s daughter, “unpolished wights,” “dull as asses,” and with heads “impervious as stones.” The clerical dress, the rustic manner, and the lowly employments of the Rector, are portrayed by another member of the gifted family: “To rub his cassock’s draggled tail, Or reach his hat from off the nail, Or seek the key to draw the ale, When damsel haps to steal it; To burn his pipe, or mend his clothes, Or nicely darn his russet hose, For comfort of his aged toes, So fine they cannot feel it.”