[Character by Samuel Smiles]@TWC D-Link bookCharacter CHAPTER II 24/40
The father was a man of strong will, but occasionally harsh and tyrannical in his dealings with his family; [1111] while the mother, with much strength of understanding and ardent love of truth, was gentle, persuasive, affectionate, and simple.
She was the teacher and cheerful companion of her children, who gradually became moulded by her example.
It was through the bias given by her to her sons' 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.
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