I am just going down to a dinner of calves’ head and bacon, with some of the best green cabbages in the town. I wish I could send you a plate of our entertainment while it is hot. We have just tapped a barrel of admirable cider. “2 o’clock. I am come up again with a belly-full, _sufficit_. Your most deserving, queer character,—your worthy personal accomplishments,—your noble endowments of mind,—your little and handsome person,—and your obliging and desirable conversation, have been the pleasing subject of our discourse for some pleasant hours. You have often been in the thoughts of M. B., which I have curiously observed, when with her alone, by inward smiles and sighs and abrupt expressions concerning _you_. Shall this suffice? I caught her this morning in an humble and devout posture on her knees. I am called to read a _Spectator_ to my sister Capoon. I long for the time when you are to supply my father’s absence. Keep your counsel, and burn this when perused. You shall have my reasons in my next. I must conclude, and subscribe myself, your most affectionate friend, and _brother_ I wish I might write, “ROBERT KIRKHAM.”[54] The above somewhat frothy epistle indicates an important fact, that Wesley was in love with Miss Betty, Kirkham’s sister, or, at all events, that Kirkham wished to have him for a brother. Nothing more is known of this incipient courtship, except that in a letter to Wesley, dated five days after Kirkham’s, and written by Martha Wesley, it is said, “When I knew that you were just returned from Worcestershire, where I suppose you saw your _Varanese_, I then ceased to wonder at your silence, for the sight of such a woman, ‘so known, so loved,’ might well make you forget me. I really have myself a vast respect for her, as I must necessarily have for one that is so dear to you.” Wesley soon became far too much immersed in more serious things to have time to think of wooing. He writes:— “Removing to another (Lincoln) college, I began to see more and more the value of time. I applied myself closer to study. I watched more carefully against actual sins. I advised others to be religious, according to that scheme of religion by which I modelled my own life. But meeting now with Mr. Law’s ‘Christian Perfection’ and ‘Serious Call,’ although I was much offended at many parts of both, yet they convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height and breadth and depth of the law of God. The light flowed in so mightily upon my soul, that everything appeared in a new view. I cried to God for help, resolved, as I had never done before, not to prolong the time of obeying Him. And by my continued endeavour to keep His whole law, inward and outward, to the utmost of my power, I was persuaded that I should be accepted of Him, and that I was even then in a state of salvation.”[55]