This is all that is known respecting Wesley during his childhood years at Epworth. Imagination might conjure up his early thinkings, passions, and attachments, the localities he loved to visit, and the sports, fun, and frolic in which he occasionally indulged; but history, on such subjects, is entirely silent; and for want of its honest statements we look at him in the grave and sober aspect in which facts present him. While yet a child, only ten and a half years old, Wesley passed from under the tutelage of his accomplished mother, and became a pupil at the Charterhouse, London. For his son’s admission into this distinguished school, the Epworth rector was indebted to the friendly services of the Duke of Buckingham, at that time the Lord Chamberlain of the royal household.[11] The privilege was great, and, to the day of his death, John Wesley loved the place of his early education, and was accustomed to walk through its courts and grounds once every year. He was not without hardships; but he bore them bravely. Among other acts of cruelty, the elder boys were accustomed, in addition to their own share of animal food, to take by force that which was apportioned to the younger scholars; and, in consequence of this, for a considerable part of the five years that young Wesley spent at the Charterhouse, the only solid food he got was bread. There was one thing, however, which contributed to his general flow of health,—namely, his invariably carrying out a strict command which his father gave him, to run round the Charterhouse garden three times every morning. It is good for a man “to bear the yoke in his youth,” and Wesley learned, as a boy, to suffer wrongfully with a cheerful fortitude, and to submit to the cruel exactions of his elder tyrants without acquiring either the cringing of a slave or a despot’s imperious temper. Wesley entered the school as the poor child of an impoverished parish priest, and had to endure wrongs and insults neither few nor small; but, though he was only sixteen years of age when he left, he had, by his energy of character, his unconquerable patience, his assiduity, and his progress in learning, acquired a high position among his fellows. An old Methodist pamphlet[12] relates an anecdote, to the effect that the Rev. A. Tooke,[13] master of the school, was struck with the fact that, though Wesley was remarkably advanced in his studies, yet he constantly associated with the inferior classes, and was accustomed to harangue a number of the smaller boys surrounding him. On one occasion Tooke broke in upon him in the midst of an oration, and interrupted him, by desiring him to follow him into a private room. Wesley reluctantly obeyed, and the master, addressing him, asked how it was that he was so often found among the boys of the lower forms, and sought not the company of the bigger boys, who were his equals? To which the young orator replied, “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.”