It has long been confessed that a Life of Wesley, worthy of the man, is a desideratum. Hampson, Coke, Moore, and Whitehead used, with a sparing hand, the materials which were already accessible to all, and added a few original papers, for the preservation of which every one feels grateful. Southey acknowledges that he “had no private sources of information”; and, in the list of books from which his materials were chiefly taken, we find nothing but what is in the hands of most Methodist students. Watson says, he had “the advantage of consulting unpublished papers”; but it is not injustice to Watson, to say that very few of these “unpublished papers” were embodied in his book. This is not ill natured depreciation of previous biographers, all of whom I revere, and wish to honour. But any ordinary reader, who will take the trouble, may easily perceive, that the Lives of Wesley that have been published, during the last seventy-six years, have contained no additional information worth naming. In this interval, Wesley has yearly been growing in historic fame, until he is now, among all parties,—Churchmen, Methodists and Dissenters, papists, protestants and infidels, statesmen, philosophers and men of letters,—one of the greatest and most interesting studies of the age. The world wishes to know something more respecting the man, who, under God, was the means of bringing about the greatest reformation of modern times. Since the publications of Whitehead, Coke and Moore—his literary executors—innumerable letters and other manuscripts have come to light; but no subsequent biographer has used them. Besides, in the magazines, newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets, tracts, and songs, published during Wesley’s lifetime, there is a mine of biographical material incalculably rich; but, hitherto, no one has taken the trouble to delve and to explore it. Ought this apathy and negligence to continue longer? Is it right to keep the world, the church, and especially the Methodists, in ignorance of what exists concerning one of the most remarkable men that ever lived? I think not; and, hence, as no one else attempted it, I have done my best to collect these scattered facts, and to give them to the public in the following volumes.