minds and developed their characters. The father was a man of
strong will, but occasionally harsh and tyrannical in his dealings
with his family; (11) while the mother, with much strength of
understanding and ardent love of truth, was gentle, persuasive,
affectionate, and simple. She was the teacher and cheerful
companion of her children, who gradually became moulded by her
example. It was through the bias given by her to her sons' minds
in religious matters that they acquired the tendency which, even
in early years, drew to them the name of Methodists. In a letter
to her son, Samuel Wesley, when a scholar at Westminster in 1709,
she said: "I would advise you as much as possible to throw your
business into a certain METHOD, by which means you will learn to
improve every precious moment, and find an unspeakable facility in
the performance of your respective duties." This "method" she went
on to describe, exhorting her son "in all things to act upon
principle;" and the society which the brothers John and Charles
afterwards founded at Oxford is supposed to have been in a great
measure the result of her exhortations.

In the case of poets, literary men, and artists, the influence of
the mother's feeling and taste has doubtless had great effect in
directing the genius of their sons; and we find this especially
illustrated in the lives of Gray, Thomson, Scott, Southey, Bulwer,
Schiller, and Goethe. Gray inherited, almost complete, his kind
and loving nature from his mother, while his father was harsh and
unamiable. Gray was, in fact, a feminine man--shy, reserved, and
wanting in energy,--but thoroughly irreproachable in life and
character. The poet's mother maintained the family, after her
unworthy husband had deserted her; and, at her death, Gray placed
on her grave, in Stoke Pogis, an epitaph describing her as "the