Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/22

10 Perhaps he sympathised with her, at all events he neither reproached nor hindered her; to the end of his life she remained his favourite child, and it was to her care that he committed the family papers, which, unfortunately, were destroyed in the fire that many years after wrecked the parsonage at Epworth. Among the many visitors to the hospitable house in Spital Yard was Samuel Wesley, the descendant of a long line of "gentlemen and scholars," as they were termed by one of his grandsons. He was an inmate of the Rev. Edward Veal's dissenting academy at Stepney, and was a promising student with a ready pen. The pedigree of his family was traceable to the days of Athelstan, when they were people of some repute, probably the remnants of a good old decayed stock. They were connected with the counties of Devon and Somerset, always intermarrying with the best families; some of them fought in Ireland and acquired property there. It need only be added that Lord Mornington, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Ker Porter and his sisters, the famous novelists, were among their kith and kin, to show that many and rare talents and a vast amount of energy were hereditary gifts. Samuel Wesley was the son of the Rev. John Wesley, sometime vicar of Winterborn, Whitchurch, in Dorsetshire, one of the ejected clergy, and a grandson of the Rev. Bartholomew Wesley, who married Ann Colley of Castle Carbery, Ireland, and was the third son of Sir Herbert Wesley, by his wife and cousin Elizabeth Wesley of Daugan Castle, Ireland. These few facts will probably make clear to most minds the main points respecting the family connections and their proclivities.

Samuel Wesley had been from his youth a hard