s' minds in religious matters that they acquired the tendency which,
even in early years, drew to them the name of Methodists. In a letter to
her son, Samuel Wesley, when a scholar at Westminster in 1709, she said:
"I would advise you as much as possible to throw your business into a
certain METHOD, by which means you will learn to improve every precious
moment, and find an unspeakable facility in the performance of your
respective duties." This "method" she went on to describe, exhorting
her son "in all things to act upon principle;" and the society which the
brothers John and Charles afterwards founded at Oxford is supposed to
have been in a great measure the result of her exhortations.

In the case of poets, literary men, and artists, the influence of the
mother's feeling and taste has doubtless had great effect in directing
the genius of their sons; and we find this especially illustrated in the
lives of Gray, Thomson, Scott, Southey, Bulwer, Schiller, and Goethe.
Gray inherited, almost complete, his kind and loving nature from his
mother, while his father was harsh and unamiable. Gray was, in fact,
a feminine man--shy, reserved, and wanting in energy,--but thoroughly
irreproachable in life and character. The poet's mother maintained the
family, after her unworthy husband had deserted her; and, at her death,
Gray placed on her grave, in Stoke Pogis, an epitaph describing her as
"the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the
misfortune to survive her." The poet himself was, at his own desire,
interred beside her worshipped grave.

Goethe, like Schiller, owed the bias of his mind and character to his
mother, who was a woman of extraordinary gifts. She was full of
joyous flowing mother-wit, and possessed in a high degree the art of
stimulating young and active minds, instructing them in the science
of life out of the treasures of her abundant experience. [1112] After a
lengthened interview with her, an enthusiastic traveller said, "Now do
I understand how Goethe has become the man he is." Goethe himself
affectionately cherished her memory. "She was worthy of life!" he
once said of her; and when he visited Frankfort, he sought out every
individual who had been kind to his mother, and thanked them all.

It was Ary Scheffer's mother--whose beautiful features the painter so
loved to reproduce in his pictures of Beatrice, St. Monica, and others
of his works--that encouraged his study of art, and by