The home of the family was amid the fens of Lincolnshire; and the fenland had still many of its peculiar characteristics during the childhood and youth of the Wesleys. The Isle of Axholm had been but recently literally an island, rising out of the swamps and often approached only by boat. These islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth race who lived partly as farmers, and partly by capturing the fish and birds which swarmed in the surrounding fens. Here lived John Wesley and his family. By birth they were emphatically gentlefolk, by education highly cultivated; they were miserably poor, severed from the society of their equals among a people with whom they could have but little sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit; the father a pious and conscientious but disappointed scholar, the mother sternly determined to do her duty, the sons endowed with singular gifts of leadership, the daughters sensitive and refined, condemned to live as peasant girls. A family so able, so thrown on its own resources, so out of contact with the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost bound to develop on exceptional lines. Their virtues and their strength were as abnormal as their weakness, their singularly active minds were equally capable of the greatest deeds and the most surprising mistakes. All the girls were unfortunate in the choice of their partners and had sad lives. John, the most gifted of all this gifted household, was able to transform England by his preaching; yet made the most astonishing blunders in the conduct of his private life, though shewing a talent for administration worthy of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley, or Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying the movement we must always keep Epworth in the background.[1] But there was another side of the life of the sons of the Rector. Samuel’s friend Atterbury, the Tory Bishop of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable figures of his age. John and Charles at Oxford were poor enough but found a welcome in society congenial to them. Their birth and manners gave them access to a coterie of religious yet cultured circles, especially at Stanton in Gloucestershire; and they always comported themselves with a consciousness of a perfectly secure position in society. Neither of them was in the slightest degree dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly position. When Count Zinzendorf, the great German noble, and the patron of the Moravians, spoke with the authority of a pious prince to John, he was answered in a spirit as uncompromising as his own. Selina, the famous and pious Countess of Huntingdon, “the elect lady” of evangelical preachers, might patronise Whitefield; but could not take a high tone with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy who preferred the treasure of the Gospel to be contained in clergy, who might be described as “earthen vessels,” disliked the Wesleys, whose greatest successes were obtained among the middle class. None the less their