Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/434

420 established church, but her zeal enlarging with her success, and a great variety of persons throughout the kingdom begging her assistance, in London, and many of the most populous cities, she purchased, built, or hired, large and commodious chapels. These multiplied exceedingly through England, Ireland, and Wales, and the ministers she had hitherto employed found themselves unequal to the task, and some became unwilling to move in a sphere which began to be branded as irregular, and to meet with opposition. She, therefore, followed the steps of Messrs. Wesley and Whitfield, by inviting the aid of laymen to keep up the congregations she had established.

In order to provide proper persons for this purpose, she retired into Wales, where she erected a college for training up young men to the ministry. They were itinerant, moved from one congregation to another in an established rotation, and her correspondence with them, to regulate and provide a constant supply, was a labour to which her active spirit alone was equal.

Though Lady Huntingdon devoted the whole of her substance to these purposes, it is not a little surprising how her income sufficed for the immensity of expences in which she was necessarily involved. Her jointure was no more than twelve hundred pounds a-year, and only after the death of her son, a few years preceding her own, she received the addition of another thousand. She often involved herself in expences in building, but her debts were always honourably discharged.

To the age of fourscore and upwards, she maintained all the vigour of youth; and, though in her latter years the contraction of her throat reduced her almost wholly to a liquid diet, her spirits never seem- ed