Susanna Wesley

SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS. 229
"I hate to meet John Wesley; the dog enchants
you with his conversation, and then breaks away to go
and visit some old woman/'
And again
:
" John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is
never at leisure. He is
always obliged to go at a
to a man who
certain hour. This is very diagreeable
loves to fold his legs and have his talk out as I do/'
One feels that Dr. Johnson certainly was not made
for an age of railways and steamboats, but that John
Wesley would have taken to them very kindly.
Curiously enough Mrs. Hall was neither witty herself
nor admired wit in others. Even as a child she
was grave and staid ;
and when her mother once found
her little ones romping and " laughing, and exclaimed,
Ah !
you will all be serious some day," Martha looked
up in her face and asked, " Shall I too be more
serious?" and Mrs. Wesley answered her with an
emphatic "No," as if that were impossible. Charles
" said, Sister Patty was too wise to be witty and ''; it is
on record that once, when Dr. Johnson was in doleful
mood and holding forth on the unhappiness of mortals
in her presence, she
"
said : Doctor, you have always
lived among the wits, not the saints ;
and they are a
race of people the most unlikely to seek true happiness
or find the pearl of great price/' She refused to
admire Swift's works, which were favourites with her
brothers and sisters, and especially disliked The Tale
of a Tub, which she considered irreverent in the
extreme.
After spending some twenty years of married life
in Bristol, Charles Wesley and his wife removed with
their children to London, where Mrs. Hall had the
pleasure of introducing her niece Sally to the burly