o Wesley's credit that in this quarrel he stood shoulder to
shoulder with that most hot-headed of all contemporary bigots, Henry
Sacheverell. His prominence in the controversy earned him the ironic
compliments of Defoe, who recalled that our "Mighty Champion of this very
High-Church Cause" had once written a poem to satirize frenzied Tories
(_Review_, II, no. 87, Sept. 22, 1705). About a week later Defoe,
having got wind of a collection being taken up for Wesley--who in
consequence of a series of misfortunes was badly in debt--intimated that
High-Church pamphleteering had turned out very profitably for both Lesley
and Wesley (Oct. 2, 1705). But in such snarling and bickering Wesley was
out of his element, and he seems to have avoided future quarrels.

His literary criticism is small in bulk. But though it is neither
brilliant nor well written (Wesley apparently composed at a break-neck
clip), it is not without interest. Pope observed in 1730 that he was a
"learned" man (letter to Swift, in _Works_, ed. Elwin-Courthope, VII,
184). The observation was correct, but it should be added that Wesley
matured at the end of an age famous for its great learning, an age whose
most distinguished poet was so much the scholar that he appeared more the
pedant than the gentleman to critics of the succeeding era; Wesley was not
singular for erudition among his seventeenth-century contemporaries.

The "Essay on Heroic Poetry," serving as Preface to _The Life of Our
Blessed Lord and Saviour_, reveals something of its author's erudition.
Among the critics, he was familiar with Aristotle, Horace, Longinus,
Dionysius of Halicarnasseus, Heinsius, Bochart, Balzac, Rapin, Le Bossu,
and Boileau. But this barely hints at the extent of his learning. In the
notes on the poem itself the author displays an interest in classical
scholarship, Biblical commentary, ecclesiastical history, scientific
inquiry, linguistics and philology, British antiquities, and research into
the history, customs, architecture, and geography of the Holy Land; he
shows, an intimate acquaintance with Grotius, Henry Hammond, Joseph Mede,
Spanheim, Sherlock, Lightfoot, and Gregory, with Philo, Josephus, Fuller,
Walker, Camden, and Kircher; and he shows an equal readiness to draw upon
Cudworth's _True Intellectual System_ and Boyle's new theories concerning
the nature of light. In view of such a breadth of knowledge it is somewhat
surprising to find him quoting as extensively as h