“DEAR BROTHER,—It has been neither unkindness to you, with whom I have traded and been justly used for many years, nor unthankfulness to Mr Rogers, (for I shall own my obligations to that good man while I live,) which has made me so long neglect answering your several letters; but the hurry of a remove,[115] and my extraordinary business, being obliged to preach the visitation sermon at Gainsborough, at the bishop’s coming hither, which is but just over. Besides, I would fain have sent you an elegy as well as an epitaph, but cannot get one to my mind, and therefore you must be content with half your desire; and if you please to accept this epitaph, it is at your service. I hope it will come before you need another epithalamium.—I am, your obliged friend and brother, “S. WESLEY.”[116] ----- Footnote 115: This indicates that Samuel Wesley did not remove to Epworth until the spring, or early summer of 1697. Footnote 116: Dunton’s _Life and Errors_. ----- The epitaph was as follows, and is engraved on Mrs Dunton’s tomb:— “TEARS TO THE MEMORY OF MRS ELIZABETH DUNTON, WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE, _May 28, 1697_— “Sacred urn! with whom we trust This dear pile of sacred dust; Know thy charge, and safely guard, Till Death’s brazen gate’s unbarr’d; Till the Angel bids it rise, And removes to Paradise. A wife obliging, tender, wise; A friend to comfort and advise; Virtue, mild as Zephyr’s breath; Piety, which smiled in death: Such a wife and such a friend All lament, and all commend. Most, with eating cares, opprest, He who knew and loved her best; Who her loyal heart did share, He who reign’d unrivall’d there, And no truce to sighs will give, Till he die with her to live. Or, if more we would comprize, Here interr’d _Eliza_ lies.” This epitaph was written within two months after Mrs Dunton’s death. Dunton was professing unutterable distress on account of his wife’s decease, and Wesley, in his epitaph, represents him as resolved to heave his agonizing sighs until death should re-unite them in a more blissful world than this; and yet, in the midst of all this pretended blubberment, Dunton was sweethearting another lady, and, before the year was out, actually made her his second wife. It is more than probable that Samuel Wesley had some knowledge of this unseemly haste to contract another matrimonial alliance, when, in the foregoing letter, he expressed the hope that the epitaph for Dunton’s dead wife would come to hand before he needed an epithalamium for his second one.