tening 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,--

"On Toosday sennite an awakning discorse fromm a verry young man, until
lately a carppenter, but now imploid piusly in going from toun to toun
and vilage to vilage, preching. He says, that a life of cairlesse
happyness, finding plesure in ye things of this worlde, is--not being
repentied of--irretrevable damnation. This is a maloncally thort! I
fell to mewsing on M., with hoom I injoy'd such compleat happyness, tel
Deth came like a spekter to ba