Note 260 — Chapter XVIII · THE LAST TWENTY YEARS—1714–1735.

The rector of Epworth was under considerable obligations to Lord Oxford, as appears from the dedication of his son Samuel’s poems to that nobleman. He writes:—“Neither obscurity of condition, nor distance of place, could prevent your lordship from distinguishing and encouraging a worthy clergyman, my father, in his indefatigable researches after truth, and his unfashionable studies in divinity; which, perhaps, might have been left unfinished without that encouragement.”—Poems on Several Occasions, by S. Wesley, London, 1736.