Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/58

46 riding before him on the same horse, and speedily won the favour of his new tutors and governors. He had also several friends in London; his paternal grandmother was still alive, and his uncle Matthew was a surgeon and apothecary in good circumstances, while another uncle, Timothy Wesley, and an aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Dyer, his father's only sister, also lived in the city. They all appear to have shown the boy the kindness to be expected by a nephew, and were most likely proud of his talents and rapid progress. His mother's anxious affection for him was so great that she devoted many hours, and also many sheets of foolscap, to writing him a series of letters, which were neither more nor less than treatises on Revelation and the law of reason. The first is dated March 11th, 1704, and is very long, and, to say the truth, dry, unrelieved by a scrap of home news or gossip. She, no doubt, in writing it and successive epistles, fulfilled what she felt to be a conscientious duty, but was aware that they were beyond the boy's comprehension at that period, as she told him to keep them till he was older and better able to understand them. A letter written towards the close of the summer seems more natural, and better suited to a school-boy's comprehension:—

",

"I have been ill a great while, but am now, I thank God, well recovered. I thought to have been with you ere this, but I doubt if I shall see you this summer; therefore send me word particularly what you want.

"I would ere now have finished my discourse begun so long ago, if I had enjoyed more health; but I hope