In the second volume of the _Athenian Oracle_, p. 37, the question is asked, What books of poetry would you advise one that is young to read? In the answer, after recommending David’s Psalms, and the poems of Cowley, Herbert, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Tasso, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Dr Donne, and Dryden, it is quietly but significantly added, “and, if you have patience, Wesley’s Life of Christ.” Reader, the advice is worth taking, though it was probably given by Wesley himself. CHAPTER IX. WILLIAM AND MARY’S REIGN—1689–1702. William and Mary were declared King and Queen of England on the 12th of February 1689. Their reign is marked by great events—such as the siege of Londonderry, Lord Dundee’s insurrection in Scotland, the battle of the Boyne, the surrender of Limerick, the massacre of Glencoe, and the war with France; but we purposely pass over all civil and military transactions, and confine our attention to ecclesiastical and literary affairs, with which Samuel Wesley, as a clergyman and as an author, was more closely connected. One of the first acts of William, after his accession to the throne, was to give orders that, in his private chapel, the service should be said instead of sung. This alteration was warranted by the rubric, and yet it caused among the High Church and half-popish party a great amount of murmuring. Another of his early acts strangely enough occasioned much excitement. Touching for the scrofula was a practice which had come down from the darkest of the dark ages, and William dared to sneer at it. It had been sanctioned by high ecclesiastical authority, but even that did not deter the bold monarch from treating it with contempt. Charles II., in the course of his reign, touched near one hundred thousand persons. In 1682, only seven years before the commencement of the reign of William, he performed the royal rite not fewer than eight thousand five hundred times. Two years later, in 1684, the throng of scrofulous persons was such that six or seven of the sick were trampled to death. King James, two or three years after, touched eight hundred persons, in the choir of Chester Cathedral. The days for touching were fixed by the Privy Council, and were solemnly notified by the clergy in all the parish churches of the realm. When the appointed time came, several divines, in full canonicals, stood round the canopy of state, the surgeon of the royal household introduced the sick, a passage from 16th chapter of Mark was read, after which one of the sick was brought to the all-healing monarch. His Majesty stroked the ulcers and swellings, and hung round the patient’s neck a white riband, to which was fastened a gold coin. The other sufferers were then led up in succession, and as each was touched the chaplain repeated the incantation, “They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Then came the epistle,