"I am sorrie to here my father is aleing; give him my love and servise, and will come to Ullerton immediate on receiving his commands. I am plesed to think Mrs. Rebecka Caulfeld is so dutifull and kind to him, and has comfortedd him with prairs and discorses. I thank her for this more than for any frendshipp for my undeserving self. Pray tell her that I am much at her servise.

"Our new king is lov'd and admir'd by all. His ministers not so; and wise peopel do entertain themselfs with what I think foollish jokes a-bout a Skotch boote. Perhapps I am not cleverr enuff to see the funn in this joke."

In this letter I detect a certain softening of feeling towards Mrs. Rebecca Caulfield. In the next year—'66—according to my notes, Matthew's father died, and I have no letters bearing the date of that year, which our Matthew no doubt spent at home. Nor have I any letters from this time until the year of Matthew's marriage with Rebecca Caulfield. In the one year of his union with Mrs. Rebecca, and the last year of his life, there are many letters, a few from London and the rest from the manor-house at Dewsdale. But in these epistles, affectionate and confidential as they are, there is little positive information.

These are the letters of the regenerate and Wesleyanised Matthew; and, like the more elaborate epistles of his wife Rebecca, deal chiefly with matters spiritual. In these letters I can perceive the workings of a weak mind, which in its decline has become a prey to religious terrors; and though I fully recognise the reforming influence which John Wesley exercised upon the people of England, I fancy poor Matthew would have been better in the hands of a woman whose piety was of a less severe type than that of Wesleyan Rebecca. There is an all-pervading tone of fear in these letters—a depression which is almost despair. In the same breath he laments and regrets the lost happiness of his youth, and regrets and laments his own iniquity in having been so ignorantly and unthinkingly happy.

Thus in one letter he says,—

"When I think of that inconsideratt foolish time with M., and how to be nere her semed the highest blisse erth cou'd bistowe or Heven prommis, I trimbel to think of my pore unawaken'd sole, and of her dome on wich the tru light never shown. If I cou'd believe she was happy my owne sorow wou'd be lesse; but I canot, sence all ye worthyest memberrs of our seck agree that to die thinking onely of erthly frends, and clingeng with a passhunate regrett to them we luv on erth is to be lesse than a tru Xtian, and for sech their is but one dome."

And again, in a still later epistle, he writes,—