E-text prepared by David Starner, Charles M. Bidwell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
Samuel Wesley's _Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry_ (1700) and the _Essay on Heroic Poetry_ (second edition, 1697)
The Augustan Reprint Society January, 1947 _Price:_ 75c
GENERAL EDITORS: _Richard C. Boys_, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; _Edward N. Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr._, University of California, Los Angeles 24, California.
Membership in the Augustan Reprint Society entitles the subscriber to six publications issued each year. The annual membership fee is $2.50. Address subscriptions and communications to the Augustan Reprint Society, in care of one of the General Editors.
EDITORIAL ADVISORS: _Louis I. Bredvold_, University of Michigan; _James L. Clifford_, Columbia University; _Benjamin Boyce_, University of Nebraska; _Cleanth Brooks_, Louisiana State University; _Arthur Friedman_, University of Chicago; _James R. Sutherland_, Queen Mary College, University of London; _Emmett L. Avery_, State College of Washington; _Samuel Monk_, Southwestern University.
Lithoprinted from Author's Typescript EDWARDS BROTHERS, INC. _Lithoprinters_ ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 1947
We remember Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), if at all, as the father of a great religious leader. In his own time he was known to many as a poet and a writer of controversial prose. His poetic career began in 1685 with the publication of _Maggots_, a collection of juvenile verses on trivial subjects, the preface to which, a frothy concoction, apologizes to the reader because the book is neither grave nor gay. The first poem, "On a Maggot," is composed in hudibrastics, with a diction obviously Butlerian, and it is followed by facetious poetic dialogues and by Pindarics of the Cowleian sort but on such subjects as "On the Grunting of a Hog." In 1688 Wesley took his B.A. at Exeter College, Oxford, following which he became a naval chaplain and, in 1690, rector of South Ormsby; he became rector of Epworth in 1695. During the run of the _Athenian Gazette_ (1691-1697) he joined with Richard Sault and John Norris in assisting John Dunton, the promoter of the undertaking. His second venture in poetry, the _Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour_, an epic largely in heroic couplets with a prefatory discourse on heroic poetry, appeared in 1693, was reissued in 1694, and was honored with a second edition in 1697. In 1695 he dutifully came forward with _Elegies_, lamenting the deaths of Queen Mary and Archbishop Tillotson. _An Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry_ (1700) was followed by at least four other volumes of verse, the last of which was issued in 1717. His poetry appears to have had readers on a certain level, but it stirred up little pleasure among wits, writers, or critics. Judith Drake confessed that she was lulled to sleep by Blackmore's _Prince Arthur_ and by Wesley's "heroics" (_Essay in Defence of the Female Sex_, 1696, p. 50). And he was satirized as a mare poetaster in Garth's _Dispensary_, in Swift's _The Battle of the Books_, and in the earliest issues of the _Dunciad_. Nobody today would care to defend his poetry for its esthetic merits.