“Your authority for John, the clerk, is my dear uncle; ours, my father and Aunt Hall, who, had they lived, I doubt not, would have stood to their account of the circumstance, and contested it with their good brother; who, when he related it to you, was considerably advanced in years, and far more likely to misplace circumstances, with such a weight of business and years, than my father or aunt, who had made us acquainted with the anecdote in the vigour of their memory. If it were as you state, I am persuaded had my dear uncle been younger, he never would have related (without disapprobation, even of his own parent) such conduct in a church.”[[350]]
Dr Clarke still adhered to the correctness of his version of the story, and defended the action on the ground that “it was the only way in which a weak, well-meaning, but vain man, could be cured of a vanity discreditable to himself and troublesome to others;” and that “the means employed were as innocent, as they were appropriate and efficient.” He also justifies his publication of the anecdote, because he thought the thing was “characteristic of the man;” that it is “from facts of this nature that the biographer forms a proper estimate of the character he describes;” and that, without “such incidents,” he must “plod on in dry detail of facts,” in a manner “little pleasing to himself,” and almost “unsupportable to his readers.”
This is all that the writer knows respecting this paltry business, which has become far more important than it deserves to be. It has already occupied too much of the writer’s space, and hence, without any comment of his own, he leaves the ingenious reader to form his own opinion.
Matthew Wesley, in the letter already quoted in the previous chapter, insinuates that his brother had indulged in “ungovernable appetites.” This was an unfounded and cruel accusation. In all respects, Samuel Wesley was a most temperate and frugal man, except, perhaps, in his indulgence of snuff and tobacco.
Living in the midst of Lincolnshire fens, it is not surprising that he used the pipe; for the belief was common that it helped to prevent disease. It is not improbable, however, that the weed was an early friend; for, in the Athenian Oracle, while the editors allow that tobacco when immoderately used is insalubrious, they also, as is usual with smokers, contend that, when properly employed, it helps to cure headaches, toothaches, asthmas, and old coughs; and though it might induce drinking, yet so did the eating of bread and cheese or Westphalia ham. Snuff, however, seems to have been Mr Wesley’s favourite indulgence; and on this account he was, perhaps, undutifully attacked by his son, Samuel, as early as the year 1714, in one of the keenest satires that the young poet ever penned. Speaking of the box, he says:—
“The snuff-box first provokes our just disdain,
That rival of the fan and of the cane.
Your modern beaux to richest shrines intrust
Their worthless stores of fashionable dust.”
And again of snuff itself:—