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Bunting, William MacLardie

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Bunting, William

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an English Wesleyan minister, son of Rev. Dr. Jabez Bunting, was born in Manchester, November, 1805. He was educated at the Woodhouse Grove School and at St. Saviour's Grammar-school, Southwark, London. He was converted in his seventeenth year; entered the Wesleyan ministry in 1824; battled all his life against ill-health and a weak constitution; spent seventeen years usefully as a supernumerary; and died at Highgate, Kentish-town, London, Nov. 9 (13), 1866. He was a man of large and varied attainments, of refined taste, and of a genial and sympathetic temper. As a preacher he ranked deservedly high, though he preached too long and his delivery was lacking in physical energy. His generosity to the poor was constant and' large.

Bunting's hymns and poems are marked by exquisite tenderness, a catholic spirit, and a fervent, enlightened piety. From 1820 to 1840 he published, in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, some of as beautiful gems of sacred fugitive poetry as were ever penned; his name disguised under the sobriquet "Alec." About forty of Bunting's hymns are found in Leifchild's collection of Original Hymns, and some of them appear in most of the hymnals, especially "My God, how often bath thine ear." Bunting also published Love made Perfect; or, Memorials of Mrs. Elizabeth Pickford (1859):-Select Letters. of Mrs. Agnes Bulmer, with Introduction and Notes (Lond. 1842, 12mo):-Notes in Stevenson's Wesleyan Hymn-book and its Associations (ibid. 1870).

See Memorials of the late Rev. W. M. Bunting (Lond. 1870); West, Sketches of Wesleyan Preachers, p. 336344; Minutes of the British Conference, 1867, p. 15; Stevenson, The Meth. Hymn-book and its Associations, p. 375 sq.; Wesl. Meth. Magazine, Dec. 1870, p. 1121; Local Preachers' Magazine, Jan. 1869, p. 23 Stevenson, City-road Chapel, p. 236, 521; Everett, Wesleyan Takings, vol. ii, sketch 15.