“The clergy had all refused him their pulpits, and the lord mayor the halls and markets of the city.” He was “a conceited boaster and heterodox intruder; whose next performance was to be accompanied with a chorus of ten thousand sighs and groans, deepened with bassoons. In the approaching winter, the town would be entertained with harlequin turned Methodist, by way of reprisals, since the Methodist had turned harlequin. In Yorkshire, by the preaching of the Methodists, the spirit of enthusiasm had so prevailed, that almost every man who could hammer out a chapter in the Bible had turned an expounder of the Scripture, to the great decay of industry, and the almost ruin of the woollen manufacture, which seemed threatened with destruction for want of hands to work it.” “Methodism has laid aside play-books and poems, for Scripture phrases and hymns of its own composing. Its disciples were never easy but when they were in a church, or expounding the Bible, which they could do offhand, from Genesis to Revelation, with great ease and power. They had given away their finery to tattered beggars, resolving to wear the coarsest attire and to live upon the most ordinary diet. They hired barns, where they met at six in the evening; expounded, prayed, and sang psalms till towards ten; and then had a lovefeast to communicate their experiences, especially as to love affairs.” “Several fine ladies, who used to wear French silks, French hoops of four yards wide, bob-wigs, and white satin smock petticoats, were turned Methodists, and now wore stuff gowns, common night-mobs, and plain bays for _Jennys_.” Numbers of similar extracts might be given from the newspapers and periodicals of 1739; but the reader has had enough of scurrilous and lying hodge-podge to satisfy the cravings of the greatest gossip. Such were the premonitory mutterings of the storm in which the Methodist movement was cradled. Mobs threatened; newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals fulminated their malicious squibs; prelates, priests, and doctors of divinity became militant pamphleteers; but, in the midst of all, Wesley and his friends calmly proceeded in their glorious calling. Some even, who were animated with a friendly feeling towards them, looked upon their course of conduct with alarm. Good Dr. Doddridge, in a letter dated May 24, 1739, writes:—