seen by many admiring eyes; unseen-except by the inward eye of him who so well described it, who robed it with undying song. Autumn scatters her purple and gold on the trees that fringe her uplands, and then the apples glow in the orchards throughout the valleys of the Cornwallis and the Gaspereau, and the brown cattle are dotting the green acres of the Grand Pré. Back then we hie to the shores of "Acadia, home of the happy;" and next our heart, that we may read it again amid the scenes to which it perennially belongs, we carry our sweet poet's idyllic story steeped in

tears.

But whoever has been permitted to con and handle, even for five minutes, the original manuscript copy of "Evange line" must have thereby a better appreciation of its genesis. The writer is taken back in his memory to a summer evening, over thirty years ago, when he stood beside the poet in the study of the Cragie House and was permitted this pleasure. Here were the very sheets sent to the printer, collected and bound and stored in this literary treasure house for the delectation of all reverently curious souls. I noted the wide margins of this original draught, with its lines leaving wide spaces for interlineation and correction, and written with a quill pen, the favorite implement of our author. Here one may be persuaded of the poet's pains, his art, his industry, as he handles this parent and begetter of golden pages that fly, thicker than leaves in Vallombrosa, and make all corners of the world sweeter and brighter where they fall.

Inthir J. Lockhart.

ART. III.-DR. JOHNSON AND JOHN WESLEY.

At the time when Mr. Augustine Birrell's striking article on Wesley appeared in Scribner's Magazine I was giving a graduate course in the literature of the eighteenth century. Although familiar with the name of Wesley from my childhood and a communicant of the Methodist Church, I had had no adequate conception of his place in the development of English civilization, nor of the attractiveness of his personality. I had in the course referred to paid due attention to the letters of Horace Walpole, the speeches of Burke, and Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson, but had made only a passing allusion to the Wesleyan movement as one of the phases of the reaction against the prevailing spirit of the century. These words of Mr. Birrell sent me posthaste to the Journal of Wesley:

If you want to get into the last century, to feel its pulses throb beneath your fingers, be content to leave sometimes the letters of Horace Walpole unturned, resist the drowsy temptation to waste your time over the learned triflers who sleep in the seventeen volumes of Nichols-nay, even deny yourself your annual reading of Boswell, or your biennial retreat with Sterne, and ride up and down the country with the greatest force of the eighteenth century in England. . . . No single figure influenced so many minds, no single voice touched so many hearts. No other man did such a life's work for England.

It is interesting to put beside these words of a distinguished man of letters a contemporary account of Wesley by Horace Walpole, who had been attracted to him out of idle curiosity. After describing the little chapel where the meeting was held he says:

Wesley is a lean, elderly man, fresh-colored, his hair smoothly combed, but with a soupçon of curl at the ends; wondrous clean, but as evidently an actor as Garrick. He spoke his sermon, but so fast and with so little accent that I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson. There were parts and eloquence in it; but toward the end he exalted his voice and acted very ugly enthusiasm— decried learning, and told stories, like Latimer, of the fool of his

college, who said, “I thanks God for everything." Except a few from curiosity and some honorable women, the congregation was very

mean.

Other contemporaries of Wesley underrated him in the same way. Little did Bishop Warburton and his colleagues think that a great prophet of Israel was among them, destined not only to change the Church of England but to start a movement that would culminate in one of the largest Churches of Christendom. The members of the Literary Club, as they gathered at Turk's Head Tavern from week to week, had little idea that one of their members was writing a diary which in time, by reason of its vigorous, terse style and its dramatic incidents, might vie in public interest with the portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the speeches of Burke, or even the conversation of their leader, the great "Cham of Literature.”

Of all the celebrated men of that day Dr. Johnson seems to have been the one most interested in Wesley, and to have had a genuine admiration for him notwithstanding the fact that they differed widely in their ideas and temperaments. Mr. Birrell in an essay on Johnson refers to Wesley as Johnson's friend, and in the index to the late George Birkbeck Hill's monumental edition of Boswell's Johnson there are more than forty references to Wesley-most of them to the notes, to be sure. They evidently knew each other well. Johnson gave Boswell a letter of introduction when the latter wished to inquire further into the Cock Lane ghost story. He also wrote a letter of congratulation when Wesley published his Calm Address to the English People. He said to Boswell that Wesley could talk well on any subject. Mr. Hill in a footnote to this passage says: "Wesley, like Johnson, was a wide reader. On his journey he read books of great variety, such as the Odyssey, Rousseau's Emile, Boswell's Corsica, Swift's Letters, Hoole's Tasso, Franklin's letters on electricity, besides a host of theological works. Like Johnson, too, he was a great dabbler in physics, and a reader of medical works. He had seen an almost infinite

variety of characters." One objection Dr. Johnson had to Wesley's conversation was that he was never at leisure. "He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk as I do"-words that indicate clearly the difference between the two men. Johnson, after he received his pension, in 1760, had abundant leisure that enabled him to follow his course of triumph through the taverns and clubs and parlors of London, while Wesley was always traveling and preaching and organizing. It is very unfortunate that we have record of only one conversation that they had. Wesley's sister, Mrs. Hall, resided in Johnson's house for several months, but we have no evidence that Wesley visited her.

In Wesley's Journal, December 18, 1783, we find: "I spent two hours with the great man, Dr. Johnson, who is sinking into the grave by a gentle decay." Tyerman, the biographer of Wesley, speaks of this as a pastoral visit, but is it not better to think of it in a less formal way, as the meeting of two friends, both of them now in old age? Wesley although then eighty years of age-six years older than Johnsonwas as robust as he had ever been, having during the past year traveled his usual number of miles and preached his usual number of sermons. Johnson, just five days before, while attending a meeting of the newly organized Essex Strand Club, had been attacked by sporadic asthma, which combined with dropsy had confined him to his room. Suffering intensely as he did, at times, he gladly welcomed his friends, the old fear of solitude and the enjoyment of conversation being temperamental. To quote the words of Boswell: "He had none of that social shyness which we commonly see in people afflicted with sickness. He did not hide. his head from the world in solitary abstraction, he did not deny himself to the visits of his friends and acquaintances; but at all times, when he was not overcome by sleep, was ready for conversation as in his best days." To those who came he talked on many subjects, but mostly about religion. He frequently had the sacrament administered to him, went

through the services of the Church, read the Bible, and talked with his friends about their spiritual condition. Wesley in all his journeys found no man more penitent or more concerned about his soul's salvation than the great lexicographer. As all who have read his Prayers and Meditations know, Johnson had an almost Puritanic conception of the sinfulness of his life, little of the peace that Wesley always held out to men. The imagination will busy itself with this conversation. An artist has recently tried to paint the scene when the two remarkable men met. One wishes that Walter Savage Landor had written an imaginary conversation based on this meeting, or, what would have been better still, that Boswell had been present and reported it with the same accuracy and charm that he did the Wilkes dinner or some of the meetings of the Literary Club. But he was in Scotland at the time and somehow preferred to get hold of the Rev. Mr. Hoole's recollections of his conversations with Johnson. While I have no doubt that religion was the subject uppermost in the conversation, their minds must have ranged over subjects and incidents common to their lives. They were both Oxford men. While they had no knowledge of one another while there, they had both been profoundly influenced by the same book, Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life, and about the same year. Although Johnson had little use for the Holy Club or the Methodists certainly not for Whitefield, whom he knew as a servitor in Pembroke College-he, under the influence of Law's book and as a result of the increased seriousness arising from a severe illness, had reached about the same point of view as the Methodists had. As Boswell says, "He was a Methodist in a dignified way." All his life he bemoaned the fact that he had not methodized his life morethe wail heard constantly in his Prayers and Meditations. The accounts afterward given of their reading of Law bear out the statement that in very different forms but with much the same spirit they set about their new religious life. Wesley says: "Law's books convinced me more than ever of the