anonymous publication, ‘The Song of the Three Children,’ 1724, is by Wesley, and many of his pieces were published separately (‘Neck or Nothing,’ 1716, 8vo; ‘The Battle of the Sexes,’ 1724; ‘The Parish Priest,’ 1732; ‘The Christian Poet,’ 1735; ‘The Pig, and The Mastiff,’ 1735) or contributed to magazines. Like his brother John, Samuel was near-sighted, and his health had never been good. He died suddenly at Tiverton on 6 Nov. 1739, and was buried in the churchyard. His portrait has been engraved. He married a daughter of John Berry (d. 1730), vicar of Watton, Norfolk, and had several children, who died in infancy (a memorial tablet to four of them was placed in 1880 in the south cloister of Westminster Abbey), and a daughter, who married Earle, apothecary in Barnstaple. From her family a quantity of Wesley's papers passed into Badcock's hands.
[Tyerman's Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, 1866, a careful study, giving many of Wesley's letters; some others are in Tyerman's John Wesley, 1870; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 503; Wood's Fasti, ed. Bliss, ii. 403; Calamy's Account, 1713, p. 280; Calamy's Continuation, 1727, ii. 429–37; Priestley's Original Letters by the Rev. John Wesley and his Friends, 1791; Lives of John Wesley, especially Hampson's, Whitehead's, and Moore's; Clarke's Memoirs of the Wesley Family, 1822; Dove's Biographical History of the Wesley Family, 1833; Beal's Fathers of the Wesley Family, 1852; London Quarterly Review, April 1864 (‘The Ancestry of the Wesleys’); Reliquary, January 1868, p. 188 (Westley Pedigree by Mark Noble, with biting comment); Stevenson's Memorials of the Wesley Family, 1876 (much new information); Kirk's Mother of the Wesleys, 1876; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, 1892.]
WESLEY, SAMUEL (1766–1837), musician, son of Charles Wesley (1707–1788) [q. v.], the hymn-writer, was born at Bristol on 24 Feb. 1766. He showed remarkable musical gifts from his earliest childhood, and, although not so pronounced a prodigy as his brother Charles Wesley (1757–1834) [q. v.], he far outshone him in musicianship in after years. His father records: ‘He was between four and five years old when he got hold of the oratorio of “Samson,” and by that alone he taught himself to read. … The airs of [his oratorio] “Ruth” [Addit. MS. 34997] he made before he was six years old, laid them up in his memory till he was eight, and then wrote them down.’ He attracted the attention of Dr. William Boyce [q. v.], who said to the boy's father: ‘Sir, I hear you have an English Mozart in your house.’ Daines Barrington (Miscellanies, 1781, pp. 291–3) gives a full account of the remarkable precocity of Samuel and his brother Charles.
Wesley was a harpsichord pupil of David Williams, organist of St. James's, Bath, in which church, at the age of seven, he (Wesley) played a psalm-tune. He also studied the violin under Bean, Kingsbury, and Wilhelm Cramer [q. v.]; he was, however, mostly self-taught, and throughout his life he does not seem to have received any instruction in the theory of music. He showed a special predilection for the organ.
About 1771 his father removed to London, and occupied a house in Chesterfield Street, Marylebone. Here, in the spacious music-room which apparently contained two organs, the brothers Wesley as boys gave subscription concerts during a series of years (beginning in 1779), which were well attended by many members of the nobility. A transcript of the subscribers' names, programmes of the concerts, list of refreshment expenses, payments to performers, &c. is contained in Additional MS. 35017.
About 1784 Wesley became a Roman catholic, to the grief and consternation of his father as well as of his uncle, John Wesley. He composed a mass (Addit. MS. 35000) dated at the end ‘May 22, 1784,’ which he dedicated and sent to Pius VI. The pope acknowledged the receipt of the manuscript in a Latin letter addressed (presumably) to the Rev. Dr. Talbot, then the chief representative of the vatican in this country (Notes and Queries, 6th ser., iv. 147, 196, 251). A series of six letters from Wesley to Miss Freeman Shepherd (the originals of which are in the National Archives, Paris) throws further light upon the Roman catholic period of his life (transcripts in Addit. MS. 35013; see also Thomas Jackson's Life of Rev. Charles Wesley, 1841, ii. 357 et seq., and Life of Adam Clarke, 1833, ii. 231, for references to Miss Freeman Shepherd). In later life Wesley repudiated the Roman catholicism of his early days, and he is stated to have returned to the ‘faith of his father.’ He said: ‘The crackers of the vatican are no longer taken for the thunderbolts of heaven: for excommunication I care not three straws.’
In 1787, at the age of twenty-one, Wesley met with an accident when passing along Snow Hill one evening. He fell into a deep excavation, with consequences that affected his brain for the remainder of his life. To this cause are to be attributed the erratic and eccentric habits for which he became remarkable. He refused to undergo
