felt that his work was there less hampered by the disturbing influence of conflicting opinions, which were barren of practical effects upon the life.  As usual, he made no secret whatever of his preference.  A nobleman accustomed to flattery on all sides must have been rather taken aback on the receipt of this very outspoken rebuff from plain John Wesley:  ’To speak the rough truth, I do not desire any intercourse with any persons of quality in England.  They can do me no good, and I fear I can do none to them.’[739] One can fancy the amazement of Lady Huntingdon, who exacted and received no small amount of homage from her proteges, when she received a letter from John Wesley so different from those which were usually addressed to her.  ’My Lady, for a considerable time I have had it in my mind to write a few lines to your ladyship, though I cannot learn that your ladyship has ever enquired whether I was living or dead.  By the mercy of God I am still alive and following the work to which He has called me, although without any help, even in the most trying times, from those I might have expected it from.  Their voice seemed to be rather, Down with him! down, even to the ground! I mean (for I use no ceremony or circumlocution) Mr. Madan, Haweis, Berridge, and (I am sorry to say) Whitefield.’  Had it been to an earl instead of a countess the letter would probably have been rougher still; but John Wesley was a thorough gentleman in every sense of the word, and could not insult a female—­only if the female had been plain Sarah Ryan instead of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, she would have had more chance of being treated with deference; for Wesley positively disliked the rich and noble.  ’In most genteel religious people,’ he said, ’there is so strange a mixture that I have seldom much confidence in them.  But I love the poor; in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation.’  And again, ’Tis well a few of the rich and noble are called.  May God increase the number.  But I should rejoice, were it the will of God, if it were done by the ministry of others.  If I might choose, I would still, as hitherto, preach the Gospel to the poor.’  He had the lowest opinion both of the intellectual and moral character of the higher classes.  ’Oh! how hard it is,’ he once exclaimed, ’to be shallow enough for a polite audience!’ And on another occasion he records with some bitterness of a rich congregation to which he had preached at Whitehaven, ’They all behaved with as much decency as if they had been colliers.’  ’I have found,’ he says again, ’some of the uneducated poor who have exquisite taste and sentiment, and many, very many, of the rich who have scarcely any at all.’  He wrote to Fletcher, in what one must call an unprovoked strain of rudeness, on the danger of his conversing with the ’genteel Methodists.’  Indeed, the leading members of the Evangelical school—­Lady Huntingdon, Sir Richard and Rowland Hill, Venn, Romaine, and others—­were,