He had maintained himself by instructing wealthier undergraduates and
writing their exercises for them (as a servitor he had to black their
boots and run their errands); also by scribbling for John Dunton, the
famous London bookseller, whose acquaintance he had made during his
last year at Mr. Morton's. With all this he found time and the will
to be charitable, and had visited the poor creatures imprisoned in
the Castle at Oxford--many for debt. He lived to take the measure of
this kindness, and to see it repeated by his sons.
_Maggots: or Poems on Several Subjects never before Handled_ was no
very marketable book of rhymes. Yet it served its purpose and helped
him, through Dunton, to become acquainted with a few men of letters
and learning. He had something better, too, to cheer his start in
London. Dunton in 1682 had married Elizabeth, one of the many
daughters of Dr. Samuel Annesley, the famous Dissenter, then
preaching at a Nonconformist church which he had opened in Little St.
Helen's, Bishopsgate. Young Wesley, a student at Newington Green,
had been present at the wedding, with a copy of verses in his pocket:
and there, in a corner of the Doctor's gloomy house in Spital Yard,
he came on the Doctor's youngest daughter, a slight girl of fourteen,
seated and watching the guests.
She was but a child, and just then an unhappy one, though with no
childish trouble. Minds ripened early in Annesley House, where
scholars and divines resorted to discuss the battle raging between
Church and Dissent. Susanna Annesley had listened and brooded upon
what she heard; and now her convictions troubled her, for she saw, or
thought she saw, the Church to be in the right, and herself an alien
in her father's house, secretly rebellious against those she loved
and preparing to disappoint them cruelly. She knew her father's
beliefs to be as strong and deep as they were temperately expressed.
So it happened that Samuel Wesley, halting awkwardly (as a
hobbledehoy will) before this slip of a girl and stammering some
words meant to comfort her for losing her sister, presently found
himself answering strange questions, staring into young eyes which
had somehow surprised his own doubts of Dissent, and beyond them into
a mind which had come to its own decision and quietly, firmly,
invited him to follow. It startled him so that love dawned at the
same moment with a lesser shock. He seated himself on the window
cushion beside her, and after this they talked a very little, but
watched the guests, feeling like two conspirators in the crowd,
feeling also that the world was suddenly changed for them both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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