lost—a thing not to be regretted. Doolittle was far too good a man to be lampooned by the clever, impertinent striplings belonging to a neighbouring school; but the man whose goods had been seized and sold, and whose house and person had been threatened by persecuting foes, was not likely to be crestfallen on account of the pretentious swagger of young Wesley and his coxcomb companions. Another of Wesley’s lampoons, written while he was at Morton’s Academy, was directed against Dr Williams, Bishop of Chichester, a man whom Dunton describes as “of solid worth and distinguished goodness.” Wesley says he was requested to write his satire against Williams by a Dissenting minister of no mean fame, and that the occasion of it was as follows:—A man, killed by a mob, had been buried, and Williams had ordered his body to be taken up, that a coroner’s inquest might be held upon it. Wesley knew nothing of the affair himself, but obtained full instructions from a minister near Clapham, who also gave the young Horace a guinea or two for encouragement. The lampoon was written, and Dr Williams, together with the whole order of bishops, abused to the very utmost of the young poet’s power, while his juvenile satirical performance, as he tells us, “was sufficiently applauded” by the unwise and dishonourable ministers who had prompted him to undertake such a work. The bishops of that period might not be as praiseworthy as was desirable; but it was a mean action for Christian ministers to do dirty work by proxy, and to employ a young fellow, cleverer than themselves, to write a pasquinade which, perhaps, they had not the ability to write. All this was discreditable, both to young Wesley and to his prompters; but there was something else, which, but for his own good sense, might have been even worse. In the same year that Samuel Wesley was born, Biddle, “the father of the English Unitarians,” died. Biddle had been the master of the Free School of St Mary de Crypt, in Gloucester, and had adopted the Unitarian doctrines respecting the Trinity. Among other works embodying his creed, he published a tract, entitled, “Twelve Arguments, drawn out of the Scriptures, wherein the commonly-received opinion touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit is clearly and fully refuted.” The House of Parliament ordered this tract to be burnt by the common hangman, and, for its publication, the writer was doomed to five years’ imprisonment. Biddle was repeatedly imprisoned after this, and died September 22, 1662.