Mr Wesley, in his first reply to Mr Palmer, used the Latin line as his motto, _Noli irritare crabones_. He wished not to irritate the wasps; but whether he wished it or not, the thing itself was done. We have seen what Palmer and Defoe say of him and of his unlucky letter; and, we are bound to add, that others have been not less pointed and severe. Dunton writes—“Mr Wesley’s first piece was a most unkind satire. The world had not known him unless he had thought to make himself public. I am afraid Mr Wesley’s vein has almost spent itself; the dregs come the last. His taxing the morals and behaviour of the Dissenting ministers was a malicious falsehood, published on purpose to carry favour with the High Flyers, and to enlarge his preferments.” Chadwick, in his Life of Defoe, broadly asserts that Samuel Wesley himself published his letter respecting dissenting academies; and that his traducing the Dissenters “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.” Milner, in his “Life and Times of Dr Isaac Watts,” observes—“It is difficult to shield Mr Wesley from the charge of seeking to further the designs of tyranny by private slander; and of endeavouring to enlarge a scanty income by gratifying the heads of the Church, in vilifying the seceders from its communion. There is too much reason to fear that hopes of preferment led him to join the party of Sacheverell in the work of abuse and defamation. Mr Southey says, the reason why he left the Dissenters, was his falling in with bigoted and ferocious men, who defended the execution of King Charles, and shocked and disgusted him by their Calves—head Club. The only authority for this extraordinary assertion is the evidence of Samuel Wesley, the younger, a violent Jacobite; and Mr Southey introduces the statement into his pages as if no suspicion was to be entertained of the truth of the facts it expresses. It may be true that Mr Wesley was a member of the Calves—head Club; it may be true that he frequented the blind alley, near Moorfields, on the 30th of January; but it is not true that any other cause beside his own imprudence introduced him into such society; it is not true that the scenes he there witnessed led to his secession from the Dissenters; for they had no more to do with such disgraceful proceedings than their accusers; so that, the only inference we can derive from the representation of Mr Southey is, that the elder Wesley, in his youth, associated with a band of profligates; and, as extremes in politics often meet, the furious republican became at last a blind worshipper of the royal prerogative.”