But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied. “Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that love you for political service, love you less than their dinner; and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side--Jacob staring at him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,--for he was an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,--“History, poetry and philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times,”--are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday, February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.” Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little remarkable.