A society had recently been gathered at Nantwich, of which Mr. Salmon, an eccentric Christian gentleman, and some of his sisters, were members; and hence Nantwich was now added to the places which Wesley had to visit. This was probably the Mr. Salmon who was to have gone with the Wesleys to Georgia, but who was forcibly detained in his Cheshire home by his father and mother, who were distracted at the thought of their son leaving them. Joseph Whittingham Salmon had a good heart, but muddy head. Soon after this, he began to preach,[159] and, at the death of his wife, in 1785, published a long rigmarole funeral sermon, 8vo, 39 pages, which he preached in Barker Street chapel, Nantwich, and which is strongly spiced with the mystical delusion into which he had fallen. It is scarcely too much to say, that the weak mind of this well meaning man henceforth lost its balance, and that mystic pride and _cacoethes scribendi_ were the chief features that distinguished the close of a lengthened but lustreless life. His wife, however, and several of the Misses Salmon were intelligent and earnest Methodists, and were among the earliest friends of Hester Ann Roe, afterwards Mrs. Rogers.[160] There was another gentleman of note, near Nantwich, Sir Thomas Broughton, of Doddington Hall, who had a chapel in his park, and who, though not a Methodist, himself read or preached to the congregation the whole of Wesley’s sermons from first to last.[161] Salmon tells us, that this “reverend baronet,” as he calls him, at the death of his lady, called together his eleven children and his thirty servants, at eleven o’clock at night, and then, as they stood round the corpse, amid midnight silence and the dim radiance of lighted tapers, engaged in prayer, previous to the interment, the whole forming a scene not easily forgotten. These were Methodism’s auxiliaries in the town of Nantwich; but, for long years, it had to struggle with adversity, its members worshipping in an old hired baptist chapel until the year 1808, when, chiefly through the help of Mr. Withinshaw, a new chapel was erected, and Nantwich was made a circuit town.[162] On the 5th of April, Wesley reached Bolton and Manchester. In reference to the former town he writes: “How wonderfully has God wrought in this place! John Bennet, some years ago, reduced this society from sevenscore to twelve; and they are now risen to a hundred and seventy.” At Manchester, Wesley “drank tea at Am. O.;” probably Adam Oldham’s, and remarks: “But how was I shocked! The children that used to cling about me, and drink in every word, had been at a boarding school. There they had unlearned all religion, and even seriousness; and had learned pride, vanity, affectation, and whatever could guard them against the knowledge and love of God. Methodist parents, who would send your girls headlong to hell, send them to a fashionable boarding school!”