This was tolerably strong; but it was not enough. The same periodical, in its review of Rowland Hill’s polite pamphlet, begins thus: “Hob in the well again; or pope John once more in the suds! Seldom has literary punishment been administered with greater keenness and spirit, than in this pamphlet; and, surely, never was a punishment administered on a juster occasion, nor to a more deserving delinquent. When you take Old Nick by the nose, it must be with a pair of red hot tongs.” The red hot reviewer reiterates the slander, that Charles Wesley offered the Greek bishop, Erasmus, forty guineas, upon condition that he would give his brother episcopal ordination; and continues: “Mr. Wesley’s vile ingratitude to the name and memory of Mr. Whitefield deserves the abhorrence and execration of all good men.” Wesley is “an unfeeling and unprincipled slanderer, a vile traducer,” and, in fact, guilty of “an extreme of malignity and baseness, for which language has no name.”[303] Such scurrility as this, heaped upon an old man, seventy-four years of age, who had spent his long life in unparalleled labours to honour God, and to benefit his fellow men, is almost incredible. But even this was not the worst that the immaculate _Gospel Magazine_ provided for its readers. In the same number, from which the above abuse is extracted, there is a long poem, entitled, “The Serpent and the Fox; or, an interview between old Nick and old John”; which strongly reminds us of a series of most infamous rhymed effusions which will have to be noticed in the ensuing year, and in which Wesley is always represented as a fox. The poem now published was not only foul, but, in the highest degree, profane. It would be a crime to reproduce it. Suffice it to say, that, as if to aggravate its infernal features, it immediately follows a really beautiful hymn of six stanzas “To God the Holy Ghost.” As a contrast, and to furnish a specimen of the medley often found in this Calvinistic periodical, we furnish the reader with the last verse of the thoroughly good hymn, and the first verse of the thoroughly bad poem. Addressing the Divine Spirit, John Stocker writes: “Thou my dross and sin consume; Let Thy inward kingdom come; All my prayer and praise suggest; Dwell and reign within my breast.” We shrink from the task of so closely annexing to such a stanza, the first, and by far the least objectionable, lines of the ribald poem of “The Serpent and the Fox”; but historical fidelity compels us. “There’s a Fox who resideth hard by, The most perfect, and holy, and sly, That e’er turned a coat, or could pilfer and lie; As this reverend Reynard, one day, Sat thinking what game next to play, Old Nick came a seasonable visit to pay.”