All this is despicable growling. Dunton accuses Wesley that he had ceased to be his friend, or, to use his own word, which twice over he has italicised, because he had _dropped_ him. But what of that? Had Wesley not had cause to drop him? Was it nothing that this man, who for fifteen years had been blessed, in the sister of Susannah Wesley, with one of the best wives that ever lived, began to sweetheart another within two months after she was dead, though all the while he was indulging in noisy grief for his irreparable loss, and was urging Wesley to write both an epitaph and an elegy, for the devoted and exalted woman whose place at his hearth and in his bed he was labouring to fill up with another? Was it surprising that Samuel Wesley should resent this insult to the memory of his wife’s sister, and that he should _drop_ the friendship of a man who was making himself such a fool? Wesley was no longer Dunton’s _friend_; but there is no evidence that he became Dunton’s _enemy_. On the contrary, when Dunton was crushed with financial embarrassments, Mr Wesley was not only _a_ creditor, but _the chief_ creditor, and wrote to Dunton assuring him that he should do nothing to his prejudice.[119] Dunton himself confesses this; and yet, with consummate and most ungrateful impudence, not only whines about Wesley’s _dropped_ friendship, but malignantly endeavours to injure Wesley’s fair character. ----- Footnote 119: Dunton’s _Life and Errors_. ----- Dunton, in the foregoing extract, insinuates that Wesley had written articles (we presume in the _Athenian Gazette_) which were discreditable both to him and to his publisher; but, in the absence of something more than insinuation, and taking into account the general character of Wesley’s acknowledged writings, it is not unfair to say that Dunton’s inuendo is as baseless as it is base. Dunton intimates that Wesley had sought to be made a bishop, and had cast a longing eye on even the dignity of an archbishop. The same thing has been broadly uttered in a life of Defoe, recently written by William Chadwick. This pungent and scurrilous author says:—“Wesley made his way by flattering royalty; he could write either prose or poetry, and dedicate his work to the queen for the time being, and then ask for a living as the reward of his services. The rectory of Epworth was one produce of his pen, Queen Mary being the patron. The neighbouring living of Wroot he obtained for bedaubing with poetic flattery the Duke of Marlborough, after his victory of Blenheim; and his traducing of the Dissenters in the eventful year of 1703, was intended, through the royal patronage, to send this time-serving flatterer into the Archbishopric of Canterbury, upon the back of that unprincipled miscreant, Dr Sacheverell.”[120] ----- Footnote 120: Chadwick’s _Life of Defoe_, p. 214. -----