Susanna Wesley

THE SUPERNATURAL NOISES. 125
family, and never changed his political opinions, as
may oe seen by a glance at his collected poems, which
were reprinted as lately as 1862.
The last words Mrs. Wesley
is known to have written
on the supernatural were in 1719, in answer to a
letter from John Wesley, who gave extraordinary credence
to stories of ghosts and apparitions ;
at Oxford, where he was interested
he was then
in a haunted house
in the neighbourhood. The special subject of his
epistle was to describe how a Mr. Barnesley and two
other undergraduates had recently met a wraith in
the fields, and afterwards ascertained that Barnesley's
mother had died in Ireland at the very moment of
the spectre's appearance. Mrs. Wesley's reply was
temperate, and even guarded :
"DEAR JACKY,
"The story of Mr.
Barnesley has afforded me
many curious speculations. T do not doubt the fact ;
but I cannot understand why these apparitions are
permitted. If they were allowed to speak to us, and
we had strength to bear such converse if they had
commission to inform us of anything relating to their
invisible world that would be of any use to us in this
if they would instruct us how to avoid danger, or put
us in a way of being wiser and better, there would be '
sense in it ;
but to appear for no end that we know
of, unless to frighten people almost out of their wits,
seems altogether unreasonable.
"S. WESLEY."
It was a very curious circumstance that about a
hundred years after the Wesleys had ceased to have