Mr. Told was the son of a physician at Bristol, where he was born in 1711. At the age of fourteen, he was bound apprentice as a sailor; and, for eleven years, lived a life of adventurous romance. In 1740, Charles Casper Greaves, a young bricklayer, introduced him to the Methodists. In 1744, Silas, at Wesley’s request, became the master of the Foundery school, and received a salary of £26 a year. At the same time, he began to visit the London prisons, and to preach to debtors and malefactors. There was not a prison in the metropolis, nor scarcely a workhouse within twelve miles round it, where Silas Told was not a frequent and welcome visitor. The scenes he witnessed were horrible; but for these the reader must turn to Told’s autobiography. Suffice it to add, that Silas Told was preeminently, in London, the prison philanthropist, the real, though unrecognised chaplain of all its wretched prisoners. For more than thirty years, no man was better known, or more welcome in the jails of the metropolis, than he. All sorts of criminals, papists and protestants, clung to him in their anguish, for counsel and consolation. Notwithstanding opposition at the first, he persisted in his enterprise, till even turnkeys, sheriffs, and hangmen, as well as prisoners, were wont to weep while listening to his exhortations and his prayers. Silas Told continued his great good work, till he tottered under the weight of nearly threescore years and ten, when he peacefully expired in December 1778. It was befitting that Wesley himself should inter such at Methodist. He writes: “1778, Sunday, December 30--I buried what was mortal of honest Silas Told. For many years, he attended the malefactors in Newgate, without fee or reward; and I suppose no man for this hundred years has been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar talents for it; and he had amazing success therein. The greatest part of those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of faith.” Several of Wesley’s publications in 1778 have been already mentioned; only two still require notice.