Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/314

302 I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, etc., and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a Summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations, one specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate person as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself) who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Ambleside: 'Don't grant him an hour's credit,' she urged, upon the person unknown, 'if I had any regard to my family.' Cash down!! she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters certainly were open to the 'public' eye; but, meantime, the 'public' was a very narrow one; the clerks in the post office had little time for digesting such amenities of conjugal affection; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing an extra portion of madness in the writer, rather than an extra portion of knavery in the reverend receiver."

Whitefield, of blessed memory, married a widow of not far from forty, but neither fat nor fair, who had graduated from gayety into a pseudo-godly frame of mind. The union was not a "long path" of peace and pleasantness; for, after an unhappy matrimonial experience on both sides, we are comforted by the statement that "her death in 1768 set his mind much at rest."

That other famous Methody, John Wesley, at forty-eight, married misery in the person of a Mrs. Veazie, a widow with four children and a fair fortune. Settling her money upon her, he made the stipulation that he should not abridge the number of sermons preached, nor the number of miles travelled, without reflecting how surely he was saddling himself with a perpetual incumbrance by thus entering the marriage state. We are told that "at first she conformed to his ascetic habits, and travelled with him, but soon grew tired of his rigid and restless life, and of the society of the humble Methodists to whom she was introduced. She began to grumble, but Wesley was far too busy to attend to her wails; then she grew jealous, opened his letters, followed him from town to town as a spy, and plagued him in every way, openly and secretly, that her malice could contrive." Southey waxes warm over her henpecking proclivities, and says: "By her outrageous jealousy and abominable temper she deserves to be classed in a triad with Xantippe and the wife of Job, as one of the three bad wives." Wesley, however, was made of sterner stuff than to endure, with Job's patience, this visitation of Satan, and so he writes to her: "Know me and know yourself; suspect me no more, asperse me