written squibs and lampoons on the opposite side of the question, and the scars of persecution and controversy were still too recent to enable the friends who had hitherto watched his career, to reflect that " our little systems have their day" and ultimately "cease to be."
Hearts are the same in all centuries, and, considering that Susanna Wesley was some years younger than her future husband, one cannot help thinking that Cupid had something to do with the change of views she avowed so early in her teens, and that her kind and warm-hearted father had some suspicion of the truth, and no objection to it.
Samuel Wesley did not care to encounter home opposition; consequently, he rose before dawn one August morning in 1683, and with forty-five shillings in his pocket walked down to Oxford, where he entered himself as a servitor at Exeter College. Here he maintained himself by teaching, by writing exercises, &c. that wealthy undergraduates were too idle to do for themselves (a practice he ought not to have countenanced), by whatever literary employment Dunton could put into his hands, and by collecting and publishing his various scattered rhymes and poems in a volume, which appears to have rather more than paid its own expenses. He passed his various examinations creditably, and in June 1688 took his B.A. degree. The fact that he was the only student of Exeter who obtained that very moderate distinction in that year, does not say much for the abilities or industry of his companions as a body.
Samuel Wesley left Oxford just at the time when James II. had issued his fresh Declaration of Indulgence, which the clergy for the most part refused to
