road, held an aristocratic position in the community of thieves, appeared in fashionable coffee-houses in the capital, and betted with men of quality on the race grounds of the country. Most of Samuel Wesley’s life was spent in rural districts; and therefore amid the marshes, fens, forests, and heaths, the impassable roads, and the highway dangers just described. He was an author; but printing presses in the country did not exist. He was a man of education and of public spirit; but to obtain a newspaper was almost impossible. He was the head of a family; but to get coals, and other imported household comforts at Wroote and at Epworth, was a thing never contemplated. He was a student; but the difficulty and expense of conveying books from London to Lincolnshire were so great, that a folio was longer in reaching its way from Paternoster Row to Epworth, than it now is in reaching Kentucky. For a poor rector like him to buy and to get books, was a thing almost impracticable; and to borrow, such as he wanted, was impossible. Few knights of the shire had libraries so good as may now universally be found in a servant’s hall, or in the back parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras, and Baker’s Chronicles, Tarlton’s Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among his fishing rods and guns. Many lords of manors, in point of education, differed but very little from their menial servants; and heirs of estates often had no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign their names to a mittimus. Their chief serious employment was the care of their property. They examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with corn merchants and drovers. Their chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. Their oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of their province; while the litter of their farm-yards gathered under the windows of their bed-chambers, and cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew up to their very doors. These were the kind of country neighbours which Samuel Wesley was privileged to have for a period of more than forty years.