Till he die with her to live.
Or, if more we would comprize,
Here interr’d Eliza lies.”
This epitaph was written within two months after Mrs Dunton’s death. Dunton was professing unutterable distress on account of his wife’s decease, and Wesley, in his epitaph, represents him as resolved to heave his agonizing sighs until death should re-unite them in a more blissful world than this; and yet, in the midst of all this pretended blubberment, Dunton was sweethearting another lady, and, before the year was out, actually made her his second wife. It is more than probable that Samuel Wesley had some knowledge of this unseemly haste to contract another matrimonial alliance, when, in the foregoing letter, he expressed the hope that the epitaph for Dunton’s dead wife would come to hand before he needed an epithalamium for his second one.
Wesley and Dunton had been warm and faithful friends for, at least, the last fifteen years; but, from this period, their friendship seems to have entirely ceased, and, ever after, Dunton speaks of his old friend with unmistakable animosity. “Now my purse is empty,” snarls Dunton, “nobody knows me. There is the rector of Epworth, that got his bread by the Maggots I published. He has quite forgotten me.” Again—“My old friend, Mr Samuel Wesley, was educated upon charity in a private academy, if we may take his own word for it in his late pamphlet, which was designedly written to expose and overthrow those academies. One would have thought that, either gratitude or his own reputation among his relations and best friends, might have kept him silent, though when a man is resolved to do himself a mischief, who can help it. Mr Wesley had an early inclination to poetry, but he usually wrote too fast to write well. Two hundred couplets a day are too many by two-thirds to be well furnished with all the beauties and graces of that art. He wrote very much for me, both in verse and prose, though I shall not name over the titles, because I am as unwilling to see my name at the bottom of them, as Mr Wesley would be to subscribe his own. Mr Wesley had read much, and is well skilled in the languages; he is generous and good-humoured, and caresses his friends with a great deal of passion so long as their circumstances are anything in order, and then he drops them. I challenge the rector of Epworth (for he is not yet ‘My Lord,’ nor ‘His Grace,’) to prove that I injure him in his character. I could be very maggoty in the character of this conforming Dissenter; but, except he further provokes me, I bid him farewell till we meet in heaven, and there I hope we shall renew our friendship; for, human frailties excepted, I believe Sam. Wesley a pious man. I shall only add, that giving this true character of Parson Wesley, is all the satisfaction I ever desire for his dropping an old friend. I shall leave him to struggle through life, and to make the best of it; but, alas!
‘He loves too much the Heliconian strand,
Whose stream’s ungarnish’d with the golden sand.’
I do not speak this out of prejudice to Mr Wesley; (for to forgive a slight is so easy to me, it is scarce a virtue,) but this rhyming circumstance of Mr Wesley is what I learn from the poem called, ‘The Reformation of Manners,’[[117]] where are these words:—
‘Wesley, with pen and poverty beset,
And Blackmore, versed in physic as in wit;