Wesley Corpus

While he officiated at Madeley, as he still lived at the Hall, ten miles distant from it, a groom was ordered to get a horse ready for him every Sunday morning. But so great was his aversion for giving trouble to any one, that if the groom did not wake at the time, he seldom would suffer him to be called, but prepared the horse for himself. 12. In answer to some queries concerning him, a gentle man who was intimately acquainted with him for many years wrote to me as follows:- “MY aversion to writing letters increases with my declining years. And yet I most willingly pay this debt to the precious memory of an old friend. I dwelt near him only two or three years; but our intimacy was great. And perhaps I may be able to present you with some particulars which you have not seen before. 13. “About the year 1760, he showed me, at his lodgings, a rope with pulleys, which he used for exercise; and added, with a smile, that the devil often tempted him to hang himself therewith. I said, ‘The desire of women is a temptation far more dangerous than this.’ He answered with surprise, (or rather, as it seemed to me, with a degree of contempt,) “In all my life I never felt that temptation; no, not in any degree.” But it is dangerous for a Christian, how great or good soever he may be, to despise another for being tempted. When we met again, he acknowledged he had been plagued, like other men, with that formerly unknown temptation.” 14. In the same year, the living of Madeley fell vacant, and Mr. Fletcher was presented to it; which he accepted in preference to another, that was of double the value. He embraced it as his peculiar charge, the object of his most tender affection. And he was now at leisure to attend it, being fully discharged from his former employment; for his pupils were removed to Cambridge. The elder of them died about the time of his coming of age; the younger first represented the town of Salop, as his father had done, and afterwards the county; till he took his seat in the House of Peers, as Baron Berwick, of Atcham-House: This is now the name that is given to what was formerly called Tern-Hall.