Wesley, Samuel, The Younger

, son of the preceding, was born about 1692, and sent to Westminster-school in 1704, and admitted a king’s scholar in 1707, whence he was elected to Christ- church, Oxford, in 1711. Here, as well as at Westminster, he acquired the character of an excellent classical scholar. He was the author of two poems of considerable merit, “The Battle of the Sexes,” and “The Prisons opened;” and of another called “The Parish-Priest, a Poem, upon a clergyman lately deceased,” a very dutiful and striking eulogy on his wife’s father; which are all printed among his poems, and several humorous tales, in 1736, 4to, and after his death in 1743, 12mo. He gave to the Spalding society an annulet that had touched the heads of the three kings of Cologne, whose names were in black letters within. When he took his master’s degree, he was appointed to officiate as usher at | Westminster-school; and soon after he took orders, under the patronage of bishop Atterbury, to whom he was ever greatly attached, and the banishment of that celebrated prelate made no change in his friendship for him, as he was Fully convinced of his innocence. This attachment, and his opposition to sir Robert Walpole, barred all hopes of preferment at Westminster, but in 1732 he was appointed mas* ter of Tiverton-school in Devonshire, over which he presided till his death. Samuel Wesley was unquestionably the best poet of his family, but he was a very high-rhurchman, and totally disapproved of the conduct of his brothers, John and Charles, when they became itinerant preachers, being afraid that they would make a separation from the church of England. He died at Tiverton Nov. 6, 1739, and was buried in the church-yard there, with a long epitaph. ¹