inconveniently numerous, but Samuel Wesley was not one of them. As already stated, he was the clergyman of an obscure village, with about two hundred inhabitants. There was plenty of opportunity to live a lazy life. He might have droned away his time, and wasted “the uncomfortable day in sighs;” but, like all men of genius and of mark, he could be happy only by being hard at work. His scanty income, and his increasing family, might be one of the inducements which led him to devote himself to literary labour; but had his income been even larger than his necessities required, it is almost certain that he would have pursued the same course of conduct; for, to a literary man, literary labour is not merely toil, but likewise luxury. Samuel Wesley’s first publication was the “Maggots,” already noticed. His next undertaking was the _Athenian Gazette_, projected by his brother-in-law, John Dunton, just before Wesley removed from London to South Ormsby. The title of the new work was the “_Athenian Gazette; or, Casuistical Mercury, Resolving all the Nice and Curious Questions Proposed by the Ingenious_.” The _Gazette_ was published twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, each number consisting of a single folio. The first number made its appearance on Tuesday, March 17, 1691, and the last on June 14, 1697. Each number was sold at one penny, and thirty numbers, that is, sixty pages, made what was called a volume; and which, stitched in marble paper, was sold for half-a-crown. In the first number that was issued, seven questions are answered in the following order, viz.:—1. Whether the torments of the damned are visible to the saints in heaven? 2. Whether the soul is eternal, or pre-existent from the creation, or contemporary with its embryo? 3. Whether every man has a good and bad angel attending him? 4. Where was the soul of Lazarus for the four days he lay in the grave? 5. Whether all souls are alike? 6. Whether it is lawful for a man to beat his wife? 7. How came the spots in the moon? In an advertisement, at the end of No. 1, correspondents are requested to send their questions, “by a penny post letter, to Mr Smith’s, at his Coffee-house, in Stocks Market, in the Poultry.” As already stated, thirty numbers made what was called a volume; but to each of the first five volumes was attached a supplement, quite as large as the volume itself, containing “the transactions and experiments of the foreign virtuosos, and also their ingenious conferences upon many nice and curious questions; together with an account of the design and scope of most of the considerable books printed in all languages, and the quality of the author, if known.”