Poetry Codex

Restoration & Augustan

Samuel Wesley

1662–1735

Samuel Wesley (1662–1735) was an English clergyman and poet, born in Dorset and educated at Oxford. He became rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire in 1696 and held the living until his death. He is best remembered as the father of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and of the hymn-writer Charles Wesley.

Before his long career in the Church he published Maggots, or Poems on Several Subjects (1685), a book of comic verse written in his youth. Its mock-heroic and burlesque poems on trifling subjects, a hog's grunting, a cheese, a tobacco pipe, a louse, are the playful side of a man later known for pious and learned writing.

Poems (32)

  1. On a Maggot
  2. On two Souldiers killing one another for a Groat
  3. The Argument
  4. A Pindaricque on the Grunting of a Hog
  5. To my Gingerbread Mistress
  6. On the Bear-fac'd Lady
  7. An Anacreontique on a Pair of Breeches
  8. A Tobacco Pipe
  9. On a Cow's Tail
  10. The Lyar
  11. On a Hat broke at Cudgels
  12. A Covetous old Fellow having taken occasion to hang himself a little
  13. On a Supper of Stinking Ducks
  14. To the Laud and Praise of a Shock Bitch
  15. An Elegy on the untimely and much lamented Death of Poor Spot
  16. A Box made like an Egg
  17. The Beggar and Poet
  18. Plures aluit Aristoteles quam Alexander
  19. A King turn'd Thresher
  20. On a Discourteous Damsel
  21. On a Cheese
  22. A Full and True Account of a Journey with its Appurtenances
  23. The Leather Bottle
  24. Out of Lucian's true History, Part the First
  25. Dialogue II
  26. Dialogue III
  27. Against a Kiss
  28. On a certain Nose
  29. Advice to Monsieur Ragoo
  30. On a pretended Schollar
  31. A Pindaric Poem on Three Skipps of a Louse
  32. On Butler's Monument

See Samuel Wesley in the full archive →