Wesley Corpus

Yet, 4. I admire him for doing justice to many great men, who have been generally misrepresented; Manlius Capitolinus, in particular, as well as the two Gracchi. So that, upon the whole, this is far the best history of Rome that I have seen. I read to-day a circumstantial account of the late inundations in the north of England, occasioned by the sudden and violent overflowing of three rivers, the Tees, the Wear, and the Tyne. All these have their rise within a few miles of each other, in a mountain at the head of Teesdale and Weardale; on which there was nothing more than a little mizzling rain, till the very hour when the rivers rose, and poured down such an amazing quantity of water as utterly astonished the people of Sunder land, at the mouth of the Wear, overflowed all the lower part of Newcastle-upon-the-Tyne, and filled the main street of Yarm, upon the Tees, with water nine or ten feet deep. Such an overflowing of these rivers none ever saw before, nor have we an account of any such in history. Rain was not the cause of this; for there was next to none at the head of these rivers. What was the cause we may learn from a letter wrote at this time, by a Clergyman in Carlisle:--“Nothing is so surprising as what lately happened at Solway-Moss, about ten miles north from Carlisle. About four hundred acres of this Moss arose to such a height above the adjacent level, that at last it rolled forward like a torrent, and continued its course above a mile, sweeping along with it houses and trees, and every other thing in its way. It divided itself into islands of different extent, from one to ten feet in thickness. It is remarkable, that no river or brook runs either through or near the Moss.” To what cause then can any thinking man impute this, but 450 REv. J. wesDEY’s [Dec. 1771. to an earthquake? And the same doubtless it was, which, about the same time, wrought in the bowels of that great mountain, whence those rivers, rise, and discharged from thence that astonishing quantity of water. Sun. 8.--I read a little more of that strange book, Baron Swedenborg's Theologia Caelestis. It surely contains many excellent things.