Part 2

No wonder, therefore, considering the bigotry of his age, that Wesley was exposed to persecution by the mobs: but his leniency towards Romanism was not the only cause of this. To-day, however, I wish to utilize the story of the attacks made on the Methodists to shew the state of the country. Mob law was powerful wherever population was dense. Towns were gradually growing up and the English system of legal machinery was devised rather for a rural population. There was no police properly so called. Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Verges would not have been caricatures in the 18th century. Wesley himself speaks of the watchmen as “those poor fools.” The violence of the mob was a feature of the 18th century in England. Perhaps you may recollect Hogarth’s picture of the chairing of a member of Parliament after an election,--the man laying about him with a flail, the prize-fights, etc. Riots play an important part in the history of the time and the no-popery riot in 1780 when Lord George Gordon stirred up the fanaticism of the London mob is only one of many similar occurrences. Never did the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, shew the courage of good breeding more conspicuously than when they faced an infuriated rabble and saved themselves and their followers by the dignity of their demeanour and the fearless mildness of their conduct amid scenes of tumult. Witness the affair at Wednesbury and Walsall. The mob dragged John Wesley from one magistrate to another. Some tried to protect him but were overpowered. To quote the Journal: “To attempt speaking was vain; for the noise on every side was like the roaring of the sea. So they dragged me along till they came to the town where seeing the door of a large house open, I attempted to go in; but a man catching me by the hair pulled me back into the middle of the mob.... I continued speaking all the time to those within hearing, feeling neither pain nor weariness.... I stood at the door (of a shop) and asked ‘Are you willing to hear me speak?’ Many cried out ‘No, no, knock his brains out, kill him at once, etc.’.... In the mean time my strength and voice returned and I broke out aloud in prayer. And now the man who just before headed the mob, turned, and said, Sir I will spend my life for you: follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.” Throughout the riot Wesley notices: “From first to last I heard none give me a reviling word, or call me by any opprobrious name; but the cry of one and all was “The Preacher! the Parson! the Minister!” A man rushed at him to strike him but paused and merely stroked his head, saying, “Why, what soft hair he has!” In Cornwall attempts were made to stop Methodism by calling in the aid of the Press-Gang. Thomas Maxfield was caught and offered to the captain of a ship in Mount’s Bay, who refused to take him. An attempt was actually made to press John Wesley. A clergyman, Dr. Borlase, acted in his magisterial capacity to further this infamous project. But a Mr. Eustick who was charged with executing the warrant had the sense to see the indecency of arresting such a man to serve in the navy as a common seaman. He conducted Mr. Wesley to Dr. Borlase’s door and told him he had done his duty and that his prisoner was free to depart. Wesley’s description of the event is characteristic. Mr. Eustick was visited by him in order to be taken to Dr. Borlase’s to be pressed into the army.

“I went thither, and asked, ‘Is Mr. Eustick here?’ After some pause one said ‘Yes’; and he showed me into the parlour. When he came down he said ‘O Sir will you be so good as to go with me to the doctor’s?’ I answered ‘Sir I came for that purpose.’ ‘Are you ready Sir,’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Sir I am not quite ready, in a little time, in a quarter of an hour I will call upon you.’ In about three-quarters of an hour he came and finding that there was no remedy, he called for his horse and put forward to Dr. Borlase’s house; but he was in no haste so we were an hour and a quarter riding three or four measured miles. As soon as he came into the yard he asked a servant, ‘Is the Doctor at home’ upon whose answering ‘No Sir he is gone to Church;’ he presently said ‘Well Sir I have executed my commission. I have done Sir; I have no more to say.’”

Not that Wesley was not in serious danger at times, especially in Cornwall. Once at Falmouth the house was filled with privateersmen. Only a wainscot partition separated him from the mob. “Indeed to all appearances our lives were not worth an hour’s purchase.” When the door was broken down he came forth bareheaded (“For I purposely left off my hat that they all might see my face”). His calmness saved him; for though countless hands were lifted up to strike or throw at him yet they were “one and all stopped in the midway so that I had not even a speck of dirt on my clothes!” Ferocious as were the British mobs of this period they were capable of generous sentiments and chivalrous admiration for courage. The people were often set on Wesley by the gentry and, to their shame be it said, by some of the clergy. The excuse, both in Cornwall in 1745 and in Newcastle, was that the Methodist societies were with the Pretenders. “All the gentlemen in these parts say,” Wesley was told, “that you have been a long time in France and Spain, and are now set hither by the Pretender; and that these societies are to join him.”

It is scarcely necessary to do more than allude to the extreme brutality of the amusements of people in England in the eighteenth century. Dog fighting, bear baiting, bull baiting, cock fighting, were universal and, as we may see from Hogarth’s pictures, cruelty to animals was universal. On one occasion a baited bull was turned loose to interrupt a congregation assembled to hear Wesley preach. One of the ringleaders of the mob at Walsall who ended by taking the part of the Methodists was a noted prize-fighter in a bear garden.

John and Charles Wesley began their religious labours at Oxford in the city prison, Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and the Journal throws a lurid light on the condition of felons, criminals, and debtors in England. The system was atrocious, there was no real control; and the jailers farmed the place and made what they could out of it. The result was that if a man paid he could do what he liked in jail; and, if he could not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. Side by side, therefore, with the utmost squalor and misery was almost indescribable profligacy. “I visited the Marshalsea prison,” writes Wesley, “on February 3, 1753, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O shame to man that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell upon earth! And shame to those who bear the name of Christ that there should need any prison at all in Christendom.” Let me quote an extract from a letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 1761, “Sir, of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it, a few years ago Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.”

The prison at Bristol had been reformed by a good keeper, who, says Wesley, “deserves to be remembered full as well as the man of Ross.” It was clean, there was no drunkenness nor brawling, no immorality, no idleness, and a decent service in the chapel. These reforms themselves shew what most prisons of the time must have been like.

Another evil was smuggling: wherever a boat could land there was a conspiracy to defraud the revenue. The business, for it was nothing else, was run on the most extensive scale and the whole countryside was engaged in it. The smugglers were armed and disciplined and prepared to offer furious resistance to the officers of the Revenue. Wesley set his face sternly against the practice.

“The stewards met at St. Ives, from the western part of Cornwall. The next day I began examining the society; but I was soon obliged to stop short. I found an accursed thing among them; well nigh one and all bought and sold ‘uncustomed’ goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any more till I had met them all together. This I did in the evening and told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they would see my face no more.”

This was in November, 1753. In June, 1757, Wesley was in the north at Sunderland.

“I met the Society and told them plain, none could stay with us, unless he would part with all sin; particularly robbing the King, selling or buying run goods; which I would no more suffer than robbing on the highway.”

In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall:

“The detestable practice of cheating the King (smuggling) is no more found in our societies, and since the accursed thing has been put away, the work of God has everywhere increased.”

The Cornish practice of “wrecking” still continued and in 1776 Wesley writes, “I was afterwards inquiring if that scandal in Cornwall of plundering wrecked vessels still continued.” He was told that it was as great as ever and only the Methodists would not share in it. Wesley remarks, with his usual good sense when dealing with a practical matter, “The Gentry of Cornwall may totally prevent it whenever they please. Only let the law take its course and the plundering will stop. Even if every labourer or tinner (_i.e._ tin miner) guilty of it were to be discharged and his name advertised to prevent his getting respectable employment, there would be no more of it.” In his peregrination Wesley did not disdain to visit and to note in his Journal objects of curiosity and interest. His active mind could not help occupying itself with anything exceptional, and many a traveller with nothing to do but investigate the locality has seen much less than he. Here is his description of how apprentices were made free of the corporation of Alnwick:

“Sixteen or seventeen, we were informed, were to receive their freedom this day, and in order thereto (such is the unparalleled wisdom of the present corporation, as well as of their forefathers), to walk through a great bog (purposely preserved for the occasion; otherwise it might have been drained long ago), which takes some of them to the neck, and many of them to the breast.”

A few months later he is in the south near Carisbrooke Castle, whither he walked in the afternoon.

“It stands upon a solid rock upon the top of a hill and commands a beautiful prospect. There is a well in it, cut quite through the rock, said to be seventy two yards deep, and another in the citadel, near a hundred. They drew up the water by an ass, which they assured us was sixty years old. But all the stately apartments lie in ruins. Only just enough of them is left to shew the chamber where poor King Charles was confined, and the windows through which he attempted to escape.”

From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.

“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior to the best counties in England.”

When he came to Edinburgh he was not so pleased with the High Street. “The situation of the city, on a hill shelving down on both sides, as well as to the east is inexpressibly fine. And the main street so broad and finely paved, with lofty houses on either side (many of them seven or eight stories high), is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can it be suffered that all manner of filth should be thrown even into this street continually? Where are the magistracy, the gentry, the nobility of the land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it stink worse than a common sewer? Will no lover of this country, or of decency and common-sense find a remedy for it?”

On one occasion he went to the Tower of London, where lions used to be kept, with a man who played the German flute to see whether music had any influence on animals. The lions rose up and came to the front of the den and seemed all attention. A tiger started up and began continually leaping over and crawling under a lion. Wesley asks “Can we account for this by any principle of mechanism? can we account for it at all?” At Carn Brae in Cornwall he admires the Druidical remains. At Windsor he views the improvements of that “active and useful man the Duke of Cumberland,” especially the triangular tower built at the edge of Windsor Park. Here also he visited the house of a lover of the antique, “The oddest I ever saw with my eyes. Everything breathes antiquity; scarce a bedstead is to be seen that is not an hundred and fifty years old; and everything is out of the common way: for six hours I suppose these oddities would much delight a curious man; but after six months they would probably give him no more pleasure than a collection of feathers.” When he was eighty we find him in Holland delighted with the country and its people and his reception by Madam de Wassenaar. “She received us with that easy openness and affability which is almost peculiar to persons of quality.” The great hall in the Staat haus at Amsterdam reminds him of his old College hall at Christ Church, it is “near as large.”

It is a temptation to me to multiply examples of how the great preacher illustrates the country, every way of which was familiar to him. After his long journeyings no man of his time could have known England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, with all our facilities of travel, know it half as well. Much of it was wild and almost uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough to daunt the hardiest of travellers. On one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and a half was under water. The chaise found the roads impassable near St. Ives, so Wesley borrowed a horse and rode forward till the ground was completely under water. Then he borrowed a boat “full twice as large as a kneading-trough.” He was seventy two years old at this time! So wild were parts of the island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, relates that he once saw what he supposed to be a supernatural appearance in the clear sky, “a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black and part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting on the ground stood staring upon him.” This was undoubtedly a great bustard, and Southey in his “Life of Wesley” quotes the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ to shew that one was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen, the very people of this time seem almost as unfamiliar to us as the scenery would have been. But is it not strange that with a guide whose thoughts were almost entirely in the world to come we should have seen so much and could see so much more, if only we could study him more closely? He lays bare to us England during the very long and active life of a man born just after the death of William III, who saw George III thirty years and more upon the throne. Wesley might have heard of the peace of Utrecht in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the French Revolution in 1789 and the fall of the Bastille. And throughout this long period of time the remarkable thing is his amazing vitality. He says he never felt low spirited: a sleepless night is so unusual that it is specially commented on. Till his 85th year he never acknowledged that he felt old: his youthfulness surprised him when recording his eighty eighth and following birthdays. No man had therefore a greater opportunity for seeing what England was like; and Wesley used it to the full. Yet it is a strange and perhaps an original guide whom we have used and it may be that the impression he leaves upon your minds is not quite what I had designed. Suppose my lecture should have been to some of you like the sermon of which George Herbert writes, “Where all lack sense, God takes the text and preaches patience;” and, my listeners, you have surrendered yourselves to your own thoughts and dreams. You may have pictured in the England of the eighteenth century a moorland on a windy winter evening, and on the near horizon the glare of an ill-lit manufacturing town, and a single figure small and slight, his long gray hair falling over his shoulders, sitting on a tired horse plodding forward with loosened rein. It is a subject the genius of a Millet might have made as memorable as his famous “Angelus,”--the two peasants praying as they hear the bell across the damp fields at even. And your dream, vision, picture, call it what you will, would be no less an adequate clue to the meaning of that famous age, than would some of the most stirring scenes in the history of Great Britain in those thrilling times. For in a sense John Wesley expressed the spirit of many thousands of its people.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] To shew how inaccessible Epworth must have been, I may mention that when I went there in an automobile, the sides of the roads were pointed out to me as paved so as to make a mule track about three feet in width.

LECTURE II

GEORGE CRABBE

I have chosen the subject of George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly out of attachment to the county of my birth, but also because I have certain faint though undoubted family links in connection with him.[2] In addition to this, his character, as a man as well as a poet, has a certain attraction for me; and even though there has been a revival of interest in him, comparatively few have studied him, or are acquainted with the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was singularly fortunate in having a son, possessed of many valuable qualities as a biographer, for not only was he affectionate, and extraordinarily proud of his father, but at the same time he was not blind to his defects as a man or as a writer. And it must be remembered that Crabbe at his death occupied a place in public estimation, together with Scott and Byron; that the latter had described him as “Nature’s sternest painter and the best,” and had written of him, “Crabbe, the first of living poets.” A son, therefore, who under such circumstances could refrain from indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved father just after his death must be a man to be trusted.

George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, a somewhat squalid little fishing town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, however, in the dignity of a corporation, and returning two members to Parliament. His father was saltmaster and general _factotum_ of the borough; a man, to all appearances, of rough manners, not improved by unfortunate circumstances; but sufficiently intelligent to recognise that in George he had a son who would repay a good education.[3] Not that with his narrow means he could do much; but he certainly did his best, and more than could be expected. George was intended for the medical profession; and it may be of interest to hear how a boy was educated to be a doctor in the eighteenth century. Young Crabbe was sent to school at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh or twelfth year. He was next sent to a Mr. Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where he showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, in which his father was also proficient. His master, to quote the biography, “though neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the foundations of a fair classical education also.” But he soon had to return home and had to work in the warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling up butter and cheese, duties which the poor boy--he was but thirteen, and was of a dreamy, meditative temperament--bitterly resented. But his father had not forgotten that George was to be a doctor, and seeing an advertisement, “Apprentice Wanted,” he sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. Edmunds. There he was treated as a mere drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked on the farm, and learned his profession apparently by delivering medicine bottles to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he removed to Woodbridge as apprentice to a Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under more favourable circumstances. Here it was he met his future bride, Miss Elmy, at the neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize poem in the _Lady’s Magazine_ owned by a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of “Hope”; and later he published at Ipswich a poem entitled “Inebriety,” in the preface of which he apologises “for those parts wherein I have taken such great liberties with Mr. Pope.” And it was certainly to Pope that Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imitate Pope’s versification is easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius. Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide.

“Inebriety” did not catch on in Suffolk, a land which bears the epithet “silly” in two senses. I prefer the one which alludes to its numerous churches, “selig,” or pious. At any rate, no young author could expect an appreciative audience of clerics when he wrote thus:

“Lo proud Flaminius at the splendid board, The easy chaplain of an atheist lord, Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense, And clouds his brain in torpid elegance.”

Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’ privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself. His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was peopled, to quote his own words, by--

“A wild amphibious race With sullen woe expressed on every face, Who far from civil acts and social fly, And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.”

Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel, General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]