His own description of his mode of study at this period of his life is as follows: “During my literary pursuits, I regularly and constantly attend on my business, and do not recollect that one customer was ever disappointed through these means. My mode of writing and study may have in them perhaps something peculiar. Immersed in the common concerns of life, I endeavor to lift my thoughts to objects more sublime than those with which I am surrounded; and while attending to my trade, I sometimes catch the fibres of an argument, which I endeavor to note, and keep a pen and ink by me for that purpose. In this state, what I can collect through the day, remains on any paper which I have at hand, till the business of the day is despatched, and my shop shut, when, in the midst of my family, I endeavor to analyze, in the evening, such thoughts as had crossed my mind during the day. I have no study--I have no retirement--I write amid the cries and cradles of my children; and frequently, when I review what I have written, endeavor to cultivate ‘the art to blot.’ Such are the methods which I have pursued, and such the disadvantages under which I write.” The circumstances which led to his becoming an author, are these: A young gentleman with whom he was intimate, by profession a surgeon, put into his hands the first part of Paine’s Age of Reason, thinking to bring him over to the principles of infidelity. The sophistry of Paine’s book, Mr. Drew readily detected; and committing his thoughts to writing in the form of notes, by the advice of two methodist preachers, to whom he showed them, he was induced to publish them in a pamphlet entitled, “Remarks on Paine’s Age of Reason,” in September, 1799. This little work was favorably received by the public; and it procured for its author, the steady friendship of the Rev. John Whitaker, a clergyman of high literary reputation. Upon the Remarks on Paine’s Age of Reason, which first brought Mr. Drew before the public as an author, a writer in the Anti-Jacobin Review, of April, 1801, observes, “We here see a shoemaker of St. Austell, encountering a staymaker of Deal, with the same weapons of unlettered reason, tempered, indeed, from the armory of God, yet deriving their principal power from the native vigor of the arm that wields them. Samuel Drew, however, is greatly superior to Thomas Paine, in the justness of his remarks, in the forcibleness of his arguments, and in the pointedness of his refutations.” Mr. Drew had the satisfaction of knowing, that his “Remarks” were the means of leading the young man who put the Age of Reason into his hands, to renounce his deistical principles, and to embrace, with full conviction the doctrines of Christianity. The Remarks on Paine, having been several years out of print, were republished, in duodecimo, with the author’s corrections and additions, in 1820.