PORTRAIT OF DR. WATTS.

PRESENTED BY MISS ABNEY TO DR. WILLIAMS’ LIBRARY.

Isaac Watts;

His Life and Writings,

HIS HOMES AND FRIENDS.

“Few men have left behind such purity of character, or such monuments of laborious piety. He has provided instruction for all ages, from those who are lisping their first lessons to the enlightened readers of Malebranche and Locke; he has left neither corporeal nor spiritual nature unexamined; he has taught the art of reasoning and the science of the stars.”—Dr. Johnson.

“The Independents, as represented by Dr. Watts, have a just claim to be considered the real founders of modern English hymnody.”—Lord Selborne.

LONDON:
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY,
56, Paternoster Row; 65, St. Paul’s Churchyard;
and 164, Piccadilly.
MANCHESTER: CORPORATION STREET. BRIGHTON: WESTERN ROAD.

Preface.

Most men who have left behind them a name so universally honoured and beloved as that of Isaac Watts have shone in many biographies; he reverses the rule, and really has more monuments in stone erected to his memory than there have been readable biographies to record the transactions of his life.

From time to time it seems necessary and natural to attempt some fresh record of the memory of honoured men; even the best biographies wear out, and succeeding ages demand a tribute in harmony with varying impressions or increased information. The life of Watts was one of the most quiet and equable of lives; it flowed on in almost unbroken tranquillity and peace; it was passed in much seclusion, neither his taste nor his health permitting him to come much personally into the presence of the world. The authentic incidents of his career, of which we have any record, are, indeed, very few, yet, such as they are, they should surely be gathered up, and put into some fitting memorial. Besides this, it is a life always good to contemplate. Acquaintance seems to lift the reader almost into that region whose air the good man breathed so freely.

The object of the following pages will be to attempt to do some justice to the various attributes of his mental character. His fame as a writer of hymns has, by its very brightness, obscured departments of work which cost him far more labour. Watts was modest; in every estimate of himself he disclaimed any title to the rank of a poet; but in truth his powers, as manifested in his writings, whether we regard him as a preacher, theologian, or metaphysician, are all equally luminous and instructive. Beyond all these, a character exalted by seraphic piety and all-embracing charity makes the narrative of such a life well worthy of the study of all to whom it is pleasant to contemplate human nature in the finer proportions of genius, sanctified and illustrated by Divine grace. It is curious, and almost amusing, to notice that Samuel Johnson quite tamed down his rugged temper and speech when he wrote the life of Watts. He speaks of him as one who maintained orthodoxy and charity not only in his works but in his innermost nature: not a discourteous or disrespectful word flaws the sketch he has written.

Watts was the Melancthon of his times,—not only in the ranks of Nonconformity, but within the pale of the Establishment there was no other mind so resembling the mild and uniform spirit, and graced by the many-coloured scholarship of the great Reformer. It cannot indeed be expected that those should know or care for Watts, who are not in affinity with his mild and temperate, and yet majestic nature. Equally removed from the servility which would have enslaved, or the fanaticism which would have inflamed, the portrait of Watts is one which will be studied to advantage at all times. When Johnson characterized the philosophical and literary writings of Dr. Watts as “productions which, when a man sits down to read, he suddenly feels himself constrained to pray,” he also describes the influence which the reading or the study of his whole life is calculated to have upon the mind. It is not fertile in personal incidents, but it has been well remarked that the Christian biography has other objects—it may be hoped that many other biographies have higher objects—than that of merely exciting the imagination, or agitating the mind by the recital of romantic adventures, brilliant actions, or daring exploits. Watts reminds us of that saying of Richard Sibbes, that “a Christian must be neither a dead sea nor a raging sea.” His frequent illnesses, as in the case of Richard Baxter, “set him upon learning to die, and thus he learned how to live.” For the greater portion of his life he lived painfully within sight of the world to come; he hovered on the border-land of life; he is a fine illustration of power in weakness, and he adds another to the list of those men who surprise us by the results of amazing industry, plied beneath all the interferences of sickness, and a weak and fragile frame.

Thanks are due, and are hereby heartily rendered, to the Rev. Herman Carlyle, LL.B., of Southampton, for permission to engrave the portrait from the vestry of Above Bar Chapel—it has never been engraved before, and is believed to be the portrait presented by his pupil, early in life, to the Rev. John Pinhorne, master of the Southampton Grammar School; and also to J. Hunter, Esq., of Dr. Williams’ Library, for his invariable courtesy, and for permission, obtained through him, to use the portrait formerly the property of Miss Abney, and the bust, of which also engravings are given in the work.

E. PAXTON HOOD.

Contents.

ST. MICHAEL’S GAOL, IN WHICH WATTS’ FATHER WAS CONFINED.

CHAPTER I.
Birth and Childhood of Isaac Watts.

Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, July 17th, 1674, the same year in which John Milton died. He was the eldest of nine children, and was named after his father, Isaac. His father was a truly worthy and respectable man. In the course of the future years of his very long life, he became the master of a school of considerable reputation in the town. Dr. Johnson says it was reported that Watts’ father was a shoemaker. In the year 1700 Isaac Watts, of 21, French Street, Southampton, was a clothier or cloth factor; so he is described in legal documents which still exist in that town; so he is described in another deed of 1719; while in 1736 he is described as “Isaac Watts, of the town and county of Southampton, gentleman:”[1] this was the year in which he died. At the time, however, of Isaac’s birth, deep grief was round, and heavy distress over the household. The father was a Nonconformist, and a deacon of that which is now the Above Bar Congregational Church in Southampton. It was a cruel time; the laws were very bitter against Nonconformists, and the traveller through Southampton in many months of the year 1674-75 might have seen a respectable young woman, with a child at her breast, sitting on the steps of the gaol seeking and waiting for admission to her husband. It was the mother of Watts, and the daughter of Alderman Taunton. Tradition says, she was French in her lineage, of an exiled Huguenot family, driven over to England by intolerance and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Thus Watts was the child of persecution, and through all the earliest years of his life his mind must have been habituated to such impressions and associations as were well calculated to draw out and give sharpness and distinctness to his convictions. The old prison remains very nearly the same as when the young mother sat with her child looking up to the barred room in which her husband was confined. It stands upon the beach of the sweet Southampton waters, which then rolled much further in, and almost washed the prison doors. Legend asserts that it was only a few steps from this spot that Canute fixed his chair when, in order that he might rebuke the adulation of his courtiers, he commanded the waves to retire. Perhaps the imprisoned man turned to the incident, and thought of One who is able to still the noise of the waves and the tumult of the people, and to say to all billows, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further.” If able to climb to the tower of his prison, a lovely scene opened to his view: the charming hills of Bittern on the left; the “sweet fields beyond the swelling floods” opposite, on the right of the Southampton waters; at his foot the old houses of the quaint little town, and his own persecuted abode.

The author of “The Christian Life in Song” has not unnaturally conceived that probably to his mother he was indebted for the lyrical tendencies in which at a very early period his faith sought to express itself. The French Huguenots led the way in the utterance of feeling in sweet sacred hymns; and the grieving young mother might perhaps refresh her faith by some of the strains of her old people, while little knowing that she held in her arms one who was to eclipse the fame of Clement Marot in this particular. As to the imprisonment of the father, a licence had been issued in 1662 by Charles II., under the signature of Arlington, allowing “a room or rooms” in the house of Giles Say to be used for congregational worship, and Mr. Say, himself an exile and refugee from the persecutions of France, to be “the teacher.” In a short time this licence of indulgence was withdrawn, and Mr. Say and his chief supporters were thrown into prison; one of the principal of these, as we have seen, was Isaac Watts the elder. It was an unpromising commencement to an illustrious life; and this trouble was no sooner escaped from than it was renewed. Liberated from prison, Isaac was still a very young child when his father was imprisoned again on the same charge for six months. In 1683 he was obliged to flee from home into exile from his family. Where he passed his time we have no exact information, but for two years he was living principally in London; and thus the family continued to pass through a course of domestic suffering until those happier days came which brought the abdication of the Stuart family and in honour of which, on the succession of William, we cannot wonder that Isaac Watts was glad to pour out some of his earliest verses.

Watts sprang from a fairly good family. Alderman Taunton, his grandfather on his mother’s side, is still remembered in Southampton by his public benefactions. The grandfather Watts had been engaged in the naval service, and was commander of a man-of-war in the year 1656 under Admiral Blake. He appears to have been a man of great courage and many accomplishments. He had some skill in the lighter recreations of music, painting, and poetry. A story is told how in the East Indies he had a personal conflict with a tiger, which followed him into a river; he grappled with the monster, and got the better in the conflict. In the Dutch war the vessel he commanded exploded, and thus in the prime of life he met his end. It has been tenderly remarked that “the grandmother Lois” is often as influential on the opening mind as “the mother Eunice.” The widow of the gallant sailor, and grandmother of the poet, had not only many stories to tell of her husband’s adventures, but seems to have been remarkably amiable, if she may be judged by the glowing verses in which her grandson sought to do honour to her memory. She sought to instil into his mind the lessons of early piety, and exercised an influence over his early education during the time when trial and grief were strong in the household of her children. The old people appear to have possessed considerable property, but it was probably much diminished during those persecuting times. Such was the stock whence the poet was descended. We may speak of it as a good strong root, both upon the father’s and upon the mother’s side. A sap of nobleness and gentleness seems to have given vitality to both families, and to have left its best influences in their child.

Isaac Watts the elder was a man of great social worth. In after years his boarding-school became a most flourishing establishment, and children were sent to it to receive their training both from America and the West Indies. There is a document written to his family when he was living in exile from them, which places his high principles of character, his prudence and his piety, his strong Protestantism, and his intelligence in a very remarkable light. He also had a taste for sacred verse, and many of his pieces have been preserved breathing a saintly meditative spirit.

Mr. Parker, the amanuensis of Dr. Watts, mentions a singular anecdote to illustrate how his advice was sought by persons of the town on account of his reputation for wisdom. A person, a stonemason, in Southampton, had a dream. He had purchased an old building for its materials; previous to his pulling it down he dreamed that a large stone in the centre of an arch fell upon him and killed him. Upon asking Mr. Watts his opinion, he said, “I am not for paying any great regard to dreams, nor yet for utterly slighting them. If there is such a stone in the building as you saw in your dream” (which he told him there really was), “my advice to you is, that you take great care, in taking down the building, to keep far enough off from it.” The mason resolved to act upon his opinion, but in an unfortunate moment he forgot his dream, went under the arch, and the stone fell upon him and crushed him to death.

This good father lived to the advanced age of eighty-five; his son Isaac was then in his sixty-third year, and only two or three days before his father’s death addressed to him the following tender and satisfying letter:—

“Newington: February 8th, 1736-37.

“Honoured and dear Sir,

“It is now ten days since I heard from you, and learned by my nephew that you had been recovered from a very threatening illness. When you are in danger of life, I believe my sister is afraid to let me know the worst, for fear of affecting me too much. But as I feel old age daily advancing on myself, I am endeavouring to be ready for my removal hence; and though it gives a shock to nature when what has been long dear to one is taken away, yet reason and religion should teach us to expect it in these scenes of mortality and a dying world. Blessed be God for our immortal hopes, through the blood of Jesus, who has taken away the sting of death! What could such dying creatures do without the comforts of the Gospel? I hope you feel those satisfactions of soul on the borders of life which nothing can give but this Gospel, which you taught us all in our younger years. May these Divine consolations support your spirits under all your growing infirmities; and may our blessed Saviour form your soul to such a holy heavenly frame, that you may wait with patience amidst the languors of life for a joyful passage into the land of immortality! May no cares nor pains ruffle nor afflict your spirit! May you maintain a constant serenity at heart, and sacred calmness of mind, as one who has long passed midnight, and is in view of the dawning day! ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand!’ Let the garments of light be found upon us, and let us lift up our heads, for our redemption draws nigh. Amen.

“I am, dear Sir,

“Your most affectionate obedient Son,

“Isaac Watts.”

Troubled as were the early years of his life, the subject of our biography furnishes one of those rare instances in which the precocity of infancy was not purchased at the expense of power in maturity; it is said that before he could speak plainly, when any money was given to him, he would cry, “A book! a book! buy a book!” He began to learn Latin at the age of four years, and in the knowledge of this language and in Greek he made swift progress; it is probable that of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew he had considerable knowledge while yet a child. He is one of those who have been said to “lisp in numbers.” His utterances of infant rhyme are not astonishing, but every biography of him has repeated the story how, when he was seven years of age, his mother after school-hours one afternoon offered him a farthing if he would give her some verses, when he presented her with the well-known couplet:

I write not for a farthing, but to try

How I your farthing writers can outvie.

It was about the same time that, some verses of his falling into the hands of his mother, she expressed her doubts whether he could have written them, whereupon he immediately wrote the following acrostic; and if some of the lines seem to falter, the last two are certainly remarkable as the expression of a mere child, and have even a kind of prophecy in them of his future years:

I am a vile polluted lump of earth,

S o I’ve continued ever since my birth;

A lthough Jehovah grace does daily give me,

A s sure this monster Satan will deceive me,

C ome, therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me.

W ash me in Thy blood, O Christ,

A nd grace Divine impart,

T hen search and try the corners of my heart,

T hat I in all things may be fit to do

S ervice to Thee, and sing Thy praises too.

It was perhaps from the uncertainty of tuition at home, or from the youthful student outstripping the attainments of his father, that he was early sent to the grammar-school at Southampton, of which the Rev. John Pinhorne was the principal. He was a man of good character and attainments, rector of All Saints Church in Southampton, prebendary of Leckford, and vicar of Eling, in the New Forest. The Nonconformist relations of his young pupil appear to have produced no uncharitable effect upon the master’s mind. From the first he prophesied the future eminence and celebrity of the young scholar. He died in 1714, when these were in their dawn. Watts held him in most reverent and grateful memory, and illustrated these feelings in a Pindaric Latin ode, which, in its recapitulation of the classical authors, to whose pages the master had guided his knowledge, certainly shows at once the abundant scholarship of the worthy pair.

There, in the grammar-school of the town, in the dark reigns of the Second Charles and James, the little Puritan was the most diligent and advanced scholar, the beloved of his master. He very early exhibited a great proficiency in Latin, Greek, and French. A spare, pale child, there was perhaps nothing peculiarly prepossessing in his features, if we except the bright, intense sparkling eye, and the quivering, nervous expression. There was certainly nothing robust about him, but all the indications of the future scholar. May we not also say the indications of the future saint—a little meditative Samuel—of a time in our history of which we may say “the Word of the Lord was precious in those days, there was no open vision?”

These first years, when the mind was gathering to itself the many tools of knowledge, were passed in his father’s house at Southampton—an utterly different Southampton from that which we see now—a charming little sequestered town; the gentle river rolled its pleasant and pellucid waves before it, undisturbed by the iron floating bridge, as the nobler Southampton Water rolled along between it and the Isle of Wight. Unsullied by steamboats, it was no depôt for the great navies of the West, but it must have been a charming country town, its streets almost overshadowed by the noble trees of the New Forest. The historian and antiquarian will find no lack of material for observation and suggestion in Southampton; it is rich in old nooks and reminiscences, and as full of material for the artist as for the archæologist. Legend and story of St. Benedict or King Canute, of the knightly Bevis and Ascapart were, we may be sure, not less fragrant then than they are there to-day. Many of the old houses are standing; the old town walls, the monuments of the great Roman road, and the noble bars of the town looked, we may be sure, more perfect then than now; the neighbourhood in which Watts lived still bears traces of being the oldest part of the town; other spots, which bear the marks of nineteenth century improvements in handsome parks and squares and streets, were then only wide, open fields; and many of the objects interesting to those who visit English shrines have altogether passed away. The gaol in which Watts’ father was confined, St. Michael’s Prison, the old Bull Hall, and the buildings round the old Walnut tree—the town retains the names of these places, and still conveys some impression of what they were. The Blue Anchor Postern still exhibits its massive old masonry, the relics of a building inhabited by King John, and a royal residence of Henry III. Yet more interesting memories gather in another part of the town, round the Widows’ Almshouses,[2] founded by Mr. Thorner, the friend and co-religionist of Watts’ father. The little town, from being one of the most inconsiderable, has become one of the most thriving and famous in the empire.

Still, changed as Southampton is during the last two hundred years, it is not difficult to realize something of its ancient character. Its counterpart or resemblance may still be found in some of those small seaport towns of France which have been left to their primitive isolation by the retreating tides of population. Yet a good many things in the old town of Southampton remain unchanged. It is full of quaint nooks and corners, gateways and archways bearing the evident marks of high antiquity. For a long period Southampton sank into a state of sequestration and repose; but her early history was something like her later, and there was a day when in the most palmy and splendid time of Venice her connection with that great commercial republic was as intimate as it is now with the Eastern and Western Indies. Its glory dates from the time of the Conquest; and a circumstance ominous to England in the landing there of Philip II., of Spain, the husband and ill-adviser of Mary, is the last instance recorded of its prominence and splendour in the ancient day. The old parish of All Saints, in which Watts was born, and the neighbourhood in which his childhood was passed, remain so little changed as to enable the visitor to carry in his mind a fair picture of the old lanes and streets, rambling round the old church, in the middle of the now rudely paved square.

The house in which Watts was born, in French Street, is still standing, and seems to give the assurance of being much the same, although it has so far yielded to the indignities of time that one side of it is a public-house and the other a marine store. It must have been a plain but roomy, substantial building, standing back with its garden behind it, full of lofty rooms and rambling nooks and passages. There he first saw the light, there he passed his play days of childhood; there the dreamy, studious boy accumulated the first spoils of knowledge; returning thither after his academical course was closed, there he wrote his first, and even a considerable number of his hymns; and thither, a celebrated man, he often came to visit his parents, even when he was an old man. A fragrant memory of early piety and matured holiness still lingers over the old place, and consecrates it as one of our English shrines.[3]

In his childhood circumstances happened likely to produce some effect upon his mind. The memory of the terrible plague of 1665, in which between one and two thousand persons were swept away, was still fresh in Southampton for one hundred and fifty years after. The annalists of the town tell us it did not recover from the state of decay into which it fell from that dreadful visitation. The shops were all closed, all who could fled from the town, and the streets were overgrown with grass. When Watts was six years old the great comet flamed over England, with which were associated in many minds such dreadful portents, and it no doubt lent a colour to many of his after most imaginative conceptions. It was an object of singularly marvellous splendour. Several years after he seems to have put the memory of the impressions it produced upon him into the couplets in which he alters Young’s description, and the words sufficiently show how the surprising spectacle had excited his youthful fancy:

Who stretched the comet to prodigious size,

And poured his flaming train o’er half the skies?

Is’t at Thy wrath the heavenly monster glares

O’er the pale nations, to announce Thy wars?

The life of Watts had very little in it at any time which related to the history of the period in which he lived, yet it is impossible not to notice that these first years of his life at Southampton were among the most exciting and memorable of the country’s history. What England was Lord Macaulay has well described in perhaps one of the most charming chapters of his history—the State of England at the death of Charles II. It was the time of England’s Reign of Terror, and circumstances were happening, the conversations upon which must have produced a vivid impression upon the mind of a youth of lively sensibility. The execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the trial of Richard Baxter, the rising of Monmouth, the tremendous descent of Jefferies in the Bloody Assize of the West, the trial of the bishops, the flight of James, the landing of William at Torbay, and his progress to London; these were circumstances such as England had never seen before, such as England can never see again, and they all crowded fast upon each other in the years of Watts’ boyhood and early youth.

The period of the youth of Watts calls up to the mind a singularly contradictory range of associations; it was a wild, wicked, and frivolous time, and yet there were men living then whose names have adorned, and will ever adorn the literature of our land. Watts was fourteen years of age when John Bunyan finished his eventful course. Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles, was just leaving his academy at Stoke Newington and the Dissenters, by whom he had been educated; Henry More, the singular mystic, preceded Bunyan by one year to the grave; Ralph Cudworth was accumulating his immense mass of nebulous scholarship; South was preaching his celebrated sermons, in which coarseness so frequently “kibes the heels” of wisdom; Robert Boyle was, with intense ardour, prosecuting his observations and studies in natural history and science, and blending with equal ardour with them his devotions to revealed religion and Divine truth; Barrow was pursuing his ponderous lucubrations; Newton was expounding the system of the universe, and Locke the system of the mind; Howe was indulging in his seraphic ardours; Dryden was drawing to the close of an inglorious life, and writing some of the pieces which have best served his fame; John Evelyn, the model of an English gentleman, was studying his trees at Wootton, or penning his entertaining diary at Sayn Court; Samuel Pepys, garrulous and silly, was writing a history without knowing it, as the Boswell or the Paul Pry of the court and the town; Lely was flattering a meretricious taste by his paintings, and Christopher Wren preparing his plans for rebuilding London.

The persecutions to which the Nonconformists through this period were exposed of course affected society in Southampton; the avenues to prosperity and peace seemed to lie only in conformity to the Church of England. It was then that, in consequence of his great and promising attainments, his diligence and high character, an offer was made to Watts by Dr. John Speed, a physician of the town, on the behalf of several others, to send him to one of the universities, and very handsomely defray all his expenses there. He did not hesitate for a second, but respectfully and firmly replied that he was determined to take up his lot amongst the Dissenters. Two of his early friends, in every way incomparably his inferiors, conformed, and attained to archiepiscopal dignities. Yet, in spite of all that he afterwards wrote on the relation of the civil magistrate to religion, there would seem to have been little in his faith, feeling, or practice which might not easily have found a home in the Establishment but for the persecuting spirit of the time. It was the same year that in his slight, curious autobiographical memoranda,[4] he mentions concisely how he “fell under considerable convictions of sin;” in the year following, his entry runs on, “and was led to trust in Christ, I hope.” In the same year, 1689, he mentions that he had a great and dangerous sickness; and all these events of his life, which look so brief and cold to us as we put them down on paper, were great and crucial events to him, settling the foundations of his character, probably leading him away from the pursuits of scholarship as a mere charm and recreation of cultivated taste, to regard it as the important means by which an entrance might be obtained to everlasting truths. These events would add to those motives which had determined him to renounce the idea of university training, and to seek an entrance into the ministry through the humbler portal of a Dissenting academy.

CHAPTER II.
In the Academy at Stoke Newington.

The neighbourhood of London, to which Isaac Watts removed from Southampton for the purpose of completing his studies, and preparing for the work of the ministry, was Stoke Newington, and in that neighbourhood he was destined to pass the greater part of his life. It was probably even then pervaded, as for a long time before and ever since, by an atmosphere of mild but consistent Nonconformity; the academy in which he studied was beneath the superintendence of the Rev. Thomas Rowe, the pastor of the Independent Church assembling in Girdlers’ Hall, in the City. It was probably one of the most considerable of the time, and appears to have succeeded to one also well known upon the same spot, of which the principal was the Rev. Charles Morton. Here studied the celebrated Daniel Defoe, also originally intended for the Nonconformist pulpit, as he says in one of his reviews: “It is not often I trouble you with any of my divinity; the pulpit is none of my office. It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of that sacred employ.” The academy had a good reputation, and the effort which old Samuel Wesley had made to sully its fair fame only reflected his own dishonour, and left it untarnished.

Charles Morton was one of those obscure but remarkable men in which our country at that time was so rich. He was descended from a singularly distinguished family—that of Cardinal Morton, Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham, and many other distinguished men. He took his degree of M.A. at Wadham College, Oxford, and became, and continued until the Act of Uniformity, rector of Blisland, in Cornwall; after preaching for a short time at St. Ives he removed to London, and shortly after opened an academy on Newington Green. Defoe pronounces the highest encomiums upon him and his method as a tutor; and Samuel Wesley, in the midst of his bitterness and ungracious flippancy—for he had been maintained on the foundation under the idea of entering the Nonconformist ministry—ceases from his abuse to honour the memory of his master; he, however, after having trained several men who became eminent in their day, teased by continued persecution, passed over to America; there his fame had preceded him; there he became pastor of a church in Charlestown, and Vice-president of Harvard University.[5]

Shortly after the departure of Mr. Morton for America, the academy to which Watts was consigned was founded by the eminently learned Theophilus Gale, M.A., the author of that large medley of scholarship “The Court of the Gentiles.” He also had been deprived of considerable Church preferments. To his charge the eccentric Philip Lord Wharton committed the tutorship of his sons; with them he travelled on the Continent, adding to the stores of his mental wealth, and contracting a friendship with the learned Bochart. He arrived in the metropolis on his return to see the city in the flames of the terrible conflagration, but to learn that the manuscripts he had left in the care of a friend were all saved, while the house in which they had been preserved was destroyed. His mind was so largely stored with every kind of learning that his friends entreated him to settle as a professor of theology, which he did at Stoke Newington, and there he continued till he died in 1678, at the early age of forty-nine. He left his personal estate for the education of young men for the ministry; his library, with the exception of his philosophical books, to Harvard College. Beneath a tutor so distinguished the interests of the two academies had probably merged into one. The successor of Mr. Gale was one of his own students, Thomas Rowe, whom we have already mentioned. He was the son of the Rev. John Rowe, M.A., ejected from Westminster Abbey, and who was called to preach the thanksgiving sermon before the Parliament on the occasion of the destruction of the Spanish fleet, October 8th, 1656. Thomas Rowe very early entered upon the work of the ministry. At the age of twenty-one he succeeded his father as pastor of Girdlers’ Hall in Basinghall Street.

Isaac Watts came to the academy of Stoke Newington in the year 1690; he was then in his sixteenth year. “Such he was,” says Dr. Johnson, “as every Christian Church would rejoice to have adopted.”

There was no doubt a rare congeniality of spirit between the tutor and his illustrious pupil; the native gentleness of the latter found nothing perhaps in the former to give to it either sharpness or force; indeed, the name of Thomas Rowe would be lost but for the fame of Watts. The pupil was nearer to manhood than was implied in his years; he was a well-informed and richly cultivated scholar when he left his father’s house, and his modest bearing was such as even a tutor might entrust with the responsibilities of friendship. Friendship soon matured between them; the tutor testified that he never on any occasion had to give his pupil a reproof. His academical exercises show with what diligence he was applying himself to the work of preparation for the work of his future life. A sweet and cheerful gravity pervaded his manners and his studies, and it may be boldly said that in the great universities of that time there were very few who wrought with so much vigour or to so much purpose. His Latin essays written at this period “show,” says Dr. Johnson, “a degree of knowledge both philosophical and theological, such as very few attain by a much longer course of study.” This verdict of Johnson is only just. One method adopted by Watts in his studies he has commended to others in his “Improvement of the Mind,” and it has probably been often successfully adopted. It was the plan of abridging the works of the more eminent writers in the various departments of study. Thus he printed the material more indelibly on his memory; at the same time, by recasting the thoughts or the information in his own mind, he was so compelled to analyze and digest that he made the whole matter more entirely his own mental property. To this practice he alludes when he says: “Other things also of the like nature may be usefully practised with regard to the authors which you read—viz., If the method of a book be irregular, reduce it into form by a little analysis of your own, or by hints in the margin; if those things are heaped together which should be separated, you may wisely distinguish and divide them; if several things relating to the same subject are scattered up and down separately through the treatise, you may bring them all to one view by references; or if the matter of a book be really valuable and deserving, you may throw it into a better method, reduce it to a more logical scheme, or abridge it into a lesser form. All these practices will have a tendency both to advance your skill in logic and method, to improve your judgment in general, and to give you a fuller survey of that subject in particular. When you have finished the treatise with all your observations upon it, recollect and determine what real improvements you have made by reading that author.”[6]

There was another plan which reveals the careful student, and to which Dr. Gibbons refers in his life: “There was another method also which the doctor adopted, it may be in the time of his preparatory studies, though of this we are not able to furnish positive evidence, but of which there is the fullest proof in his further progress of life, namely, that of interleaving the works of authors, and inserting in the blank pages additions from other writers on the same subject. I have now by me, the gift of his brother Mr. Enoch Watts, the ‘Westminster Greek Grammar’ thus interleaved by the doctor, with all he thought proper to collect from Dr. Busby’s and Mr. Teed’s ‘Greek Grammars,’ engrafted by him into the supplemental leaves; and I have besides in my possession a present from the doctor himself, a printed discourse by a considerable writer, on a controverted point in divinity, interleaved in the same manner, and much enlarged by insertions in the doctor’s own hand.” Certainly from hints such as these no writer could seem by his own careful diligence to be more admirably prepared to write to and counsel young men and others concerning the improvement of the mind.

Most of the biographers of Watts have referred to his fellow-students. Several of them were interesting men. “The first genius in the academy,” to adopt Watts’ own descriptive designation, was Mr. Josiah Hart; but very speedily after his removal from Mr. Rowe he conformed, and became chaplain to John Hampden, Esq., the member for Buckinghamshire. Presently after he became chaplain to his grace the Duke of Bolton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Such offices furnished very easy opportunities for advancement in the Church. Before long he became Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh; and in 1742 he was translated to the archbishopric of Tuam, with which was united the bishopric of Enaghdoen, with liberty to retain his former see of Ardagh; yet he retained friendly relationships with his old fellow-student, and in the “Lyrics” occurs a free translation of an epigram of Martial to Cirinus, which seems to intimate that he was not wanting himself in poetic inspiration:

So smooth your numbers, friend, your verse so sweet,

So sharp the jest, and yet the turn so neat,

That with her Martial, Rome would place Cirine,

Rome would prefer your sense and thought to mine.

Yet modest you decline the public stage,

To fix your friend alone amidst th’ applauding age.

Fifty years after the period of their life as fellow-students we find the Archbishop writing to Watts, “God grant we may be useful while we live, and may run clear and with unclouded minds till we come to the very dregs! I send you my visitation charge to my clergy of Tuam. I submit it to your judgment. Your old friend and affectionate servant, Josiah Tuam.” If in some part singularly expressed, it gives a not unpleasing idea of the writer’s character.

Another fellow-student was Mr. John Hughes; but he also, though dedicated to, and educated for, the Dissenting ministry, upon leaving the academy soon conformed to the Establishment; he cultivated the lighter studies of music, poetry, and painting. The Lord Chancellor Cowper, in 1717, appointed him secretary to the commissions of the peace; and after the resignation of the Chancellor he was still continued in the same office. He became a contributor to the “Tatler,” “Spectator,” and “Guardian,” and he attained to the friendship of some of the most distinguished men of the age. Addison admired him as a poet, Pope held him in veneration for his goodness, and Bishop Hoadley honoured him as a friend.

Others of the fellow-students continued stedfast to the principles of their Dissenting Alma Mater, and became in their way also useful and remarkable men; among these was Mr. Samuel Say, the fellow-townsman of Watts, and one year his junior. After a useful course of ministrations he succeeded Dr. Calamy at Westminster, and continued there until his death. Through life he was on intimate friendly terms with his fellow-townsman. Little as we know of him, sufficient is known to give to us the picture of a thoroughly accomplished man, even with considerable claims to be regarded as a man of genius; indeed it strikes us, in reviewing the intercourse of these young men with each other, and their recommendations of each other, that there was a thoroughness about their attainments; and that while they were faithful to severer studies they were not indisposed to those graceful exercises of the mind and fancy which have generally, but we believe unjustly, been regarded as incompatible with the severity of the Puritan character. To this indulgence, no doubt, the taste of the tutor, Mr. Rowe, was favourable. We know that Watts was accomplished in several departments of taste, although all the exercises which have come down to us from his college-days are quite of the severer character—critical, metaphysical, and theological—but his conscience was probably of that tender order which would esteem it an unfaithfulness to the object for which he was placed in the academy to turn aside to pursuits of a lighter and less sacred description. Another fellow-student of Isaac Watts was Daniel Neal, celebrated as the author of “The History of the Puritans;” he proved in an eminent degree his call to the work of the ministry, and after some time spent in travel settled as a pastor in the metropolis.

It is usual in our day, with the Dissenting academies, to receive no one as student for the ministry who has not previously qualified himself by membership with the church which commends him. The practice appears to have been more liberal in Watts’ day. He was never a member of the church at Southampton, but in the third year of his residence with Mr. Rowe he united himself with the church of his tutor, as he enters it in his memoranda, “I was admitted to Mr. T. Rowe’s church December, 1693.” This church also, like so many of the Independent churches in the city, had a very honourable ancestry—as we have previously said, it then held its meetings in Girdlers’ Hall, Basinghall Street; after the death of Mr. Rowe it removed to Haberdashers’ Hall, but the church itself appears to have originated with the eminent William Strong, M.A., still held in honour by the lovers of old Puritan literature for his folio on the Covenants. He was a fellow of Katherine Hall, Cambridge, and rector of More Crichel, in Dorsetshire. This living during the Civil Wars he was compelled by the Cavaliers to relinquish, and, coming to London, he became minister of the church assembling in Westminster Abbey, and subsequently in the House of Lords. It is singular that thus both the ministers of the congregation in Girdlers’ Hall were originally pastors of the church in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Strong died in 1654, and was buried in the Abbey church, but upon the restoration his remains had, with those of Cromwell, Blake, and Pym, the honour of exhumation. Still, in the church when Watts became a member of it, lingered some of the old elements which first composed it; perhaps the most conspicuous of these was Major-General Goffe, the well-known name of one of the judges of Charles I.

Such was the church with which Watts held his first communion, and from which he was only transferred to become the pastor of that over which he presided for the remainder of his life. It need hardly be said that whatever interest attached to its memory in connection with the circumstances which we have recited, his name confers upon it the most permanent human interest. The union must have strengthened that intimacy we have already pointed out between himself and his tutor, pastor, and friend. It is not probable that even at this period Mr. Rowe had the large scholarship and keen insight into the beauties of the most famous classics possessed by his pupil, if we may form a judgment from the Pindaric ode to Mr. Pinhorne, but a quiet mind will often marshal ideas into order, and give a military usefulness in commanding materials it could not recruit. Watts was probably never, at any period of his life, wanting in the accoutrements of discipline; but this was the service chiefly rendered at the academy, this and the more earnest entrance upon philosophical and theological studies. We are sure also that he and his tutor well harmonized in their sense of the duty and the dignity of moral independence; Watts had already shown himself to be possessed of this by his entrance into the academy. In his lines “To the much honoured Mr. Thomas Rowe, the director of my youthful studies,” he says:

I hate these shackles of the mind

Forged by the haughty wise;

Souls were not born to be confined,

And led, like Samson, blind and bound;—

But when his native strength he found

He well avenged his eyes.

I love thy gentle influence, Rowe,

Thy gentle influence like the sun,

Only dissolves the frozen snow,

Then bids our thoughts like rivers flow,

And choose the channels where they run.

And here we may say farewell to the tutor; he lived just long enough to see his scholar settled in the ministry; but for his companion pupils he occupied a solitary home; he was never married, and in 1705, riding through the city on horseback, he was seized with a fit, fell from his horse, and instantly died. He was one of those men of whom the world makes little mention, and finds little recorded; he was a comparatively young man. We have dwelt upon the furniture of his mind, the attractiveness of his manners, the docility and beauty of his disposition; to these it may be added that he was also probably possessed of an engaging manner in the pulpit, as he retained what was then considered a large congregation to the time of his death.

While referring to the Dissenting academies of those days, it may be interesting to notice that from one of them in Gloucester, beneath the tutorship of the Rev. Samuel Jones, two eminent men received their first training for the ministry of the Church of England, although intended for the Nonconformist communion—Samuel Butler, the distinguished author of the “Analogy,” and Bishop of Durham; and Thomas Secker, Bishop of Oxford, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop probably found one of his earliest patrons in Dr. Watts, by whom, as the following letter testifies, he was introduced to the academy. The biographers of the Archbishop, Dr. Porteus and Dr. Stinton, pass over the Archbishop’s first studies, as conducted by “one Mr. Jones, who kept an academy at Gloucester;” but the following letter from Secker, written when about the age of eighteen to Dr. Watts, gives a very admirable idea of the manner in which he directed the work of study in the academy:

“Gloucester: Nov. 18th, 1711.

“Rev. Sir,

“Before I give you an account of the state of our academy, and those other things you desired me, please to accept of my hearty thanks for that service you have done me, both in advising me to prosecute my studies in such an extraordinary place of education, and in procuring me admittance into it. I wish my improvements may be answerable to the advantages I enjoy; but, however that may happen, your kindness has fixed me in a place where I may be very happy, and spend my time to good purpose, and where, if I do not, the fault will be all my own. I am sensible how difficult it is to give a character of any person or thing, because the most probable guesses we make very often prove false ones. But, since you are pleased to desire it, I think myself obliged to give you the best and most impartial account of matters I can.

“Mr. Jones, then, I take to be a man of real piety, great learning, and an agreeable temper; one who is very diligent in instructing all under his care, very well qualified to give instructions, and whose well-managed familiarity will always make him respected. He is very strict in keeping good order, and will effectually preserve his pupils from negligence and immorality. And accordingly, I believe, there are not many academies freer in general from those vices than we are. In particular my bedfellow, Mr. Scott,[7] is one of unfeigned religion, and a diligent searcher after truth. His genteel carriage and agreeable disposition gain him the esteem of every one. Mr. Griffith is more than ordinary serious and grave, and improves more in everything than one could expect from a man who seems to be not much under forty; particularly in Greek and Hebrew he has made a great progress. Mr. Francis and Mr. Watkins are diligent in study and truly religious. The elder Mr. Jones, having had a better education than they, will in all probability make a greater scholar; and his brother is one of quick parts. Our logic, which we had read once over, is so contrived as to comprehend all Hereboord, and far the greater part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, and the Art of Thinking. What Mr. Jones dictated to us was but short, containing a clear and brief account of the matter, references to the places where it was more fully treated of, and remarks on, or explications of the authors cited, when need required. At our next lecture we gave an account both of what the author quoted and our tutor said, who commonly then gave us a larger explication of it, and so proceeded to the next thing in order. He took care, as far as possible, that we understood the sense as well as remembered the words of what we had read, and that we should not suffer ourselves to be cheated with obscure terms which had no meaning. Though he be no great admirer of the old logic, yet he has taken a great deal of pains both in explaining and correcting Hereboord, and has for the most part made him intelligible, or shown that he is not so. The two Mr. Joneses, Mr. Francis, Mr. Watkins, Mr. Sheldon, and two more gentlemen, are to begin Jewish Antiquities in a short time. I was designed for one of their number, but rather chose to read logic once more; both because I was utterly unacquainted with it when I came to this place, and because the others having all, except Mr. Francis, been at other academies, will be obliged to make more haste than those in a lower class, and consequently cannot have so good or large accounts of anything, nor so much time to study every head. We shall have gone through our course in about four years’ time, which I believe that nobody that once knows Mr. Jones will think too long.

“I began to learn Hebrew as soon as I came hither, and find myself able now to construe and give some grammatical account of about twenty verses in the easier parts of the Bible, after less than an hour’s preparation. We read every day two verses apiece in the Hebrew Bible, which we turn into Greek (no one knowing which his verses shall be, though at first it was otherwise). And this, with logic, is our morning’s work. Mr. Jones also began about three months ago some critical lectures, in order to the exposition you advised him to. The principal things contained in them are about the antiquity of the Hebrew language, letters, vowels, the incorruption of the Scriptures, ancient divisions of the Bible, an account of the Talmud, Masora, and Cabala. We are at present upon the Septuagint, and shall proceed after that to the Targumim, and other versions, etc. Every part is managed with abundance of perspicuity, and seldom any material thing is omitted that other authors have said upon the point, though very frequently we have useful additions of things which are not to be found in them. We have scarce been upon anything yet but Mr. Jones has had those writers which are most valued on that head, to which he always refers us. This is what we first set about in the afternoon, which being finished we read a chapter in the Greek Testament, and after that mathematics. We have gone through all that is commonly taught of algebra and proportion, with the first six books of Euclid, which is all Mr. Jones designs for the gentlemen I mentioned above, but he intends to read something more to the class that comes after them.

“This is our daily employment, which in the morning takes up about two hours, and something more in the afternoon. Only on Wednesdays, in the morning, we read Dionysius’s Periegesis, on which we have notes, mostly geographical, but with some criticisms intermixed; and in the afternoon we have no lecture at all. So on Saturday, in the afternoon, we have only a Thesis, which none but they who have done with logic have any concern in. We are also just beginning to read Isocrates and Terence, each twice a week. On the latter our tutor will give us some notes which he received in a college from Perizonius.

“We are obliged to rise at five of the clock every morning, and to speak Latin always, except when below stairs amongst the family. The people where we live are very civil, and the greatest inconvenience we suffer is, that we fill the house rather too much, being sixteen in number, besides Mr. Jones. But I suppose the increase of his academy will oblige him to move next spring. We pass our time very agreeably betwixt study and conversation with our tutor, who is always ready to discourse freely of anything that is useful, and allows us either then or at lecture all imaginable liberty of making objections against his opinion, and prosecuting them as far as we can. In this and everything else he shows himself so much a gentleman, and manifests so great an affection and tenderness for his pupils as cannot but command respect and love. I almost forgot to mention our tutor’s library, which is composed for the most part of foreign books, which seem to be very well chosen, and are every day of great advantage to us.

“Thus I have endeavoured, sir, to give you an account of all that I thought material or observable amongst us. As for my own part, I apply myself with what diligence I can to everything which is the subject of our lectures, without preferring one subject before another; because I see nothing we are engaged in but what is either necessary or extremely useful for one who would thoroughly understand those things which most concern him, or be able to explain them well to others. I hope I have not spent my time, since I came to this place, without some small improvement, both in human knowledge and that which is far better, and I earnestly desire the benefit of your prayers that God would be pleased to fit me better for His service, both in this world and the next. This, if you please to afford me, and your advice with relation to study, or whatever else you think convenient, must needs be extremely useful, as well as agreeable, and shall be thankfully received by your most obliged humble servant,

“Thomas Secker.”

Secker’s first communion was with a Dissenting church—the Rev. Timothy Jollie’s—and he preached his first sermon in a Dissenting meeting-house at Bolsover, in Derbyshire. He retained his feelings of affectionate indebtedness to his early friend to the close of Watts’ life.

His term of study closed at Stoke Newington, Watts, still little more than a youth, returned for some time to his father’s house at Southampton. Worshipping with the congregation there, under the ministry of the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson, he felt that the psalmody was far beneath the beauty and dignity of a Christian service. He was requested to produce something better, and the following Sabbath the service was concluded with what is now the first hymn of the first book; and a stirring hymn it is—as an ascription of praise or worship, and as a confession of faith it is remarkably comprehensive and complete.

Behold the glories of the Lamb

Amidst His Father’s throne;

Prepare new honours for His name,

And songs before unknown.

Let elders worship at His feet,

The church adore around,

With vials full of odours sweet,

And harps of sweeter sound.

Those are the prayers of the saints,

And these the hymns they raise;

Jesus is kind to our complaints,

He loves to hear our praise.

Eternal Father, who shall look

Into Thy secret will?

Who but the Son shall take the book,

And open every seal?

He shall fulfil Thy great decrees,

The Son deserves it well;

Lo! in His hand the sovereign keys

Of heaven, and death, and hell.

Now to the Lamb that once was slain,

Be endless blessings paid;

Salvation, glory, joy, remain

For ever on Thy head.

Thou hast redeemed our souls with blood,

Hast set the prisoners free;

Hast made us kings and priests to God,

And we shall reign with Thee.

The worlds of nature and of grace

Are put beneath Thy power;

Then shorten these delaying days,

And bring the promised hour.

This is the tradition of the origin of the first hymn. It was received with great alacrity and joy. It was indeed “a new song.” The young poet was entreated to produce another, and another. The series extended from Sabbath to Sabbath, until almost a volume was formed, although their publication was long delayed. This was the interesting result of his return to Southampton.

CHAPTER III.
In the Hartopp Family.

Returning from Southampton, Isaac Watts entered the family of Sir John Hartopp, the first of those two influential friends whose names will always be associated with his own; it was October 15th, 1696, he being then twenty-two years of age, when he went to reside with him. Within the memory of some of the old inhabitants of Stoke Newington there stood on the north side of Church Street the remains of a red brick house, with large casement windows; once they were all handsomely painted, and bore the arms of Fleetwood, Hartopp, and Cook. But no one of these later generations saw that old mansion in all its original greatness. In later years it came to be divided into houses, and parts of it drifted down from the abode of statesmen to the boarding-school for young ladies. Still it retained even to its close, traditionary relics and reminiscences of the old days of its pride and importance. On the ceilings of its principal rooms were the remains of the arms of the Lord General Fleetwood; and in the upper part there was a little door concealed by hangings, through which the persecuted Nonconformist passed into a place of safety and concealment, in the days of Charles II. The old house was built towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, so that even at the period when it comes before our readers it was ancient. It was purchased by Charles Fleetwood, Lord General of the army of the Commonwealth, and under Cromwell one of the Council of State. It is quite unnecessary here to dwell upon his transient importance and power; he was one of the last of those remarkable men in that singular interregnum of our history, and the very last after the resignation of Richard Cromwell who held some of the shadows of the departed substance of greatness. He spent the remainder of his days in the mansion of Stoke Newington before his final departure for Bunhill Fields. To this place, in time succeeded Sir John Hartopp, by his wife Elizabeth Fleetwood, a grand-daughter of the General; and to this old red brick building, with its secret chambers and armorial casements and ceilings, Isaac Watts came as a tutor in the family.

Sir John Hartopp was not a mere city knight, and indeed city knighthoods meant much more in those days than now. He was of an old Leicestershire family of Dalby Parva, in the register books of which place the name is written Hartrupte. The family was able to trace a very interesting history back to the time of Richard II.; the baronetcy dated from the time of James I., and the family received considerable honours from Charles I., and, what is more to the purpose of the present memoir, it was in his house that Richard Baxter planned, if he did not partly write, “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest.” Sir John Hartopp, the friend of Watts, was born at the commencement of the Civil Wars. In his early youth the whole of his neighbourhood was alive with marchings and counter-marchings. Buckminster was the place of the family residence, and the steeple of the parish church was used as a watch-tower for reconnoitring. The house was alive and perpetually on the guard against the incursions of the Cavaliers. Sir Edward Hartopp, the first baronet, died at the commencement of the Protectorate of Cromwell, and was buried at Buckminster; his son, the father of Sir John, died a short time previous to the Restoration, and about this time we find the family removed to London and settled at Stoke Newington. Sir John became an eminent Nonconformist; as he cast in his lot among the Independents, he was a member of the Church of Dr. Owen, with whom he maintained a very close and intimate friendship; and there is in the library of the New College, in St. John’s Wood, a volume of the sermons of Owen, very carefully written down after hearing them, copied, probably for use in the family, in Sir John’s handwriting. Many of Dr. Owen’s manuscripts came into his possession upon his decease, and were contributed by him to the complete collection of the Doctor’s sermons.

Sir John Hartopp was an ardent and active patriot. He was three times chosen representative for his native county of Leicestershire. In 1671 he was high sheriff, and he afterwards distinguished himself by his earnest advocacy of the Bill of Exclusion to bar the Duke of York’s succession to the throne. He became the subject of much persecution, and paid in fines apparently the larger portion of £7,000. He died in 1722, when the affairs of the nation had long, through the active exertions of such men as he was, settled themselves into comparative tranquillity and prosperity. Watts preached in his memory his sermon “On the Happiness of Separate Spirits made Perfect,” and he dwells at some length upon certain personal characteristics, from which we gather that Sir John was an accomplished man, with a taste for universal learning, and the pursuit of knowledge in various forms—mathematics in his younger days, and astronomy in his old age; keeping alive his early knowledge of Greek for an intelligent acquaintance with the New Testament, and so late in life as at the age of fifty entering upon the study of Hebrew. His house became the refuge of the oppressed, while by some happy disposition of Providence he himself was saved from those more severe and painful persecutions to which so many were not only exposed but subjected. His ardent attachment to Dr. Owen assures us of the temper and character of his religious convictions, and altogether he shines out before us as one of those beautiful and luminous examples and illustrations of the men to whom our country owes so much. So far as we can gather from what is left on record of him, he appears to have been a true Christian gentleman, a fine harmonious combination of characteristics blending in him the severity of high principle with a gentle and tenderly affectionate nature.

Sir John Hartopp, as we have seen, became by marriage connected with the family of Cromwell; he married Elizabeth, one of the daughters of the Lord General Fleetwood, and his sister married a son of the old general—thus there was a double connection. When Fleetwood’s house was first built in the village of Stoke Newington it must have been a stately mansion. In his day it was probably divided, and had all the characteristics of the old mansions of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. Hither the General retired after the Restoration, and here, singularly enough, he was permitted to pass his days in tranquil obscurity. He died while Watts was studying at the adjoining academy. Watts no doubt knew the old Ironside, for he was on terms of close intimacy with his son, Smith Fleetwood. Such were some of the collateral connections of the Hartopp family. And there was another. Sir Nathaniel Gould, to whom Watts inscribes a poem, who married Frances, the daughter of Sir John and Lady Hartopp. Such was the circle in which it appears he moved to and fro with a pleasant and indulged affability. All of these people were members of the church over which Dr. Owen had presided, and of which Watts was hereafter, and shortly, to be minister. It was no doubt owing to the intimacy he sustained with all these eminent persons, that he by-and-bye received the invitation to become their pastor, in which relation he preached a funeral sermon, as we have seen, for Sir John, so also for Lady Hartopp, and Lady Gould, of whom he remarks, “I would copy a line from that most beautiful elegy of David, and apply it here with more justice than the Psalmist could to Saul and Jonathan, ‘Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided,’ silent were they and retired from the world, and unknown except to their intimate friends; humble they were and averse to public show and noise, nor will I disturb their graves by making them the subject of public praise.”

It was a house full of daughters and two sons. Two had already gone to the family vault, and one—born the year of Watts’ entrance into the family—was soon to follow. But there were nine daughters in the household; of these two had died before the days of Watts’ residence, seven survived; these were Helen, and Mary, and Martha, and Elizabeth, and a second Anne, and Bridget, and Dorothy, and Frances. Was Watts their tutor? It was a dangerous neighbourhood for a young man, amidst all those bright glances and radiant young faces in the Puritan household; perhaps the danger had been greater had there been fewer of them. Fancy indulges herself in picturing the life of the young student there. As we have seen, Frances married Sir Nathaniel Gould, and died in 1711, six days after her mother, Lady Hartopp. The other six daughters all lived and died unmarried in the family home. How solitary, one thinks, the last of that bright circle must have felt, dying there in 1764, sixty-two years after Watts first took up his abode among them.

Isaac Watts entered the family as the tutor of the future baronet, and many of those pieces which he afterwards gave to the world were the productions of this time, many of his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” the chief portions of his “Logic,” and probably much of his “Improvement of the Mind.” We have said already he furnishes, like John Calvin and some others, an instance of a singular prematurity of intelligence, not however interfering, as is so frequently the case, with future eminence, usefulness, and advancement.

Here, then, was for some time Watts’ home. He studied hard and diligently, drawing forth and putting into shape the results of previous years of scholarship. Behind the house there were extensive gardens and remarkably fine trees, and especially a noble cedar, said to have been planted by General Fleetwood, concerning which Robinson tells a singular story: That long years ago a scythe had been hung up in the fork of the tree, and was left there unnoticed and untouched until years after it was discovered, the body of the tree having completely overgrown it and enclosed the blade so fast that it could not be removed. “And,” says Robinson, “it is at this day to be seen, the point of the blade on the one side, and the end on the other.”[8]

The young man to whom Watts was tutor died at the age of thirty-five. He had succeeded his father in the baronetcy. Watts had given to him a noble training. Upon the publication of his “Logic” it was dedicated to him, and the writer reminds him that it had been prepared for him to assist his early studies. Some of the most animating verses in the “Lyrics” are addressed to him, and many other scholastic pieces also were prepared for his pupil while residing at Stoke Newington. Amidst the shades of its trees were written many of those essays so pleasing to read now, his “Miscellaneous Thoughts” and “Juvenile Relics.” Here the young man was indeed training himself as well as teaching his pupil, when we remember that many, if not most, of his hymns had already been written at Southampton, and that his “Institutes of Logic” and his whole method of thought were matured and written here; truly he appears to have been an industrious athlete. Neither egotism nor egoism seems to shadow his studies by any morbid self-consciousness, or any wondering dreams as to what his future destiny might be. He appears to have been one to whom faith and duty were sufficient. He had found his Saviour, and he believed; he had his work to do, and he wrought at it like a living conscience. By-and-by he left the old house which had yet a singular history. His pupil was very wealthy, and he appears to have given during his life, and to have left upon his death a maintenance, with the family mansion, to his six maiden sisters. There they lived, and there they died; and it is remarkable, as has been already said, that one of them died in 1764, aged eighty-one, ninety years, as the church register shows, after the death of a young sister in 1674, the year in which Watts was born; this, we may be sure, was throughout his life one of the houses he would frequently revisit, and renew his impressions of youthful days amidst its elm and cedar shades. Gradually all the members of the family dropped away, each in turn gathered one by one, till one and all were re-united in the vaults of Stoke Newington Church. But we are stepping on too fast for our life of Watts, whose more obvious and active career was all before him yet.

CHAPTER IV.
Pastor of a London Church.

Watts preached his first sermon on his birthday, July 17th, 1698; he was then twenty-four years of age. He probably mingled with his duties as tutor those of chaplain to the excellent family in which he resided. The ice once broken, he began to preach constantly. Sir John Hartopp and his family were members of the church of Dr. Chauncy, in Mark Lane; and it was, no doubt, greatly in consequence of this friendship that Watts was invited to become the assistant of the doctor.

It is curious to compare the dearth of chapels and preachers in the City in the present day with the many remarkable for their importance at the time when Watts became a pastor. Still a few places stand out, dating from that time; but, for the most part, all have gone, leaving only the memories of certain men of remarkable attainments, wit, and eloquence behind them. To the distinguished circle of ministers, and to the church which had known, before him, men so eminent, Watts, all but unknown, brought a name which was to give to them a crowning reputation. His qualities as a preacher all accounts represent as rather solid than shining. His sermons were beautiful in their clear harmonious symmetry of powers, rather than startling. Surely never a man who poured into his verse so much rich brilliancy of expression—sometimes, it must be admitted, with questionable rhetorical afflatus and pomp of utterance—preserved through all that we know of his public teaching so quiet and equable a flow of language and ideas, so instructive, while so entirely removed from all that can unduly agitate the spirit. In Jeremy Taylor we wonder that the poet seems to abandon every ambitious attempt when he writes verse, while his sermons possess a gorgeous and overwhelming splendour of diction and imagery. In Watts, on the other hand, it is equally surprising that so sprightly and splendid a fancy, so rich a command over sacred verses and images, should express itself with such calmness and modesty in words intended for the pulpit; but this was probably of a piece with his whole character. His hymns are often raptures and ecstasies, but he reserved these for his most private life, for his own heart, for his closet and study. There was nothing in his character bustling, prominent, or obtrusive. In an evening conversation he would shrink as far as possible from taking any prominent part, and would never in ordinary company lead it. In the home circle, among close and well-known friends, he shed around himself a genial atmosphere; but he was too essentially a student and a book-man to be in any high sense a popular preacher. Eminent and eminently honoured, his greatness was not of that order which easily finds itself at home in multitudes. His person was not striking, although we can conceive it to have been very impressive; and his mode of setting forth all things upon which he wrote or spoke was so purely thoughtful, demanded so intimate a sympathy with pensive and meditative moods, and required so close an acquaintance with high and abstract thoughts, that it is not to be wondered at that his fame as a preacher and scholar was rather reserved for the intimate circle than for more extended, not to say vulgar, spheres.

The City of London at present conveys no idea of what it was then; and what it was very materially affects our estimate of the position of Watts as one of its Nonconformist ministers. The City of London was the chief bulwark of English freedom. Happily all the needs and occasions for what it was in those days have long since passed, and England itself has greatly become what London was then. The City of that date calls up the idea of some such spots as the great mediæval cities, the burgher strongholds of the middle ages. Not many years before it had been the refuge of the five members whom Charles I. sought to attach for high treason. It had been committed to the cause of Puritanism, Protestantism, and William; some of its chief men had become martyrs to the cause of civil and religious liberty. The governments of Charles II. and James II. scarcely permitted to active minds and public men a middle way. Nonconformity was imposed by the exactions of tyranny upon spiritually minded men. Hence, leaving the fanes and structures then very pleasantly standing in many a retired close, surrounded by pleasant trees, sequestered places in the midst of the graves of many generations, such persons were compelled to assemble for worship where they best could, in some old guild hall or place of trade, some loft over offices and warehouses.[9] Most of the congregations we now should consider small. No company composed of faithful souls meeting for Divine service beneath the blessing of Him who said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them,”[10] can be held contemptible; but their congregations were largely composed of persons who had figured prominently in the great actions of the immediately preceding years, officers and soldiers of that great army which had overawed the world by their fame, persons to whom Nonconformity was no mere negation, but the profession of all that was dearest to human freedom or to human hopes, men of substance and position, the most eminent merchants, to whose sense religious and civil liberty were so closely related that it was impossible to do injustice to the one without aiming at the heart of the other, and who knew that to injure either was to hurt the lesser, but still eminent interests of trade and commerce, and industry, and national prosperity. Nonconformity in the City of London has grown in representative wealth and importance; but it may be safely affirmed that it could not show such congregations of noble men as those which thronged its contemptible meeting-houses in Watts’ day.

Referring back to those times, entering one of the chapels during the time of service, we should, perhaps, be astonished and chilled by the want of animation and ardour, if these are to be tested by the apparent excitement. Indeed, to our taste, the service must have appeared very formal and frigid; not merely in the fact that no instrumental music of any kind would have been tolerated, no response or chant, but, in many congregations, there was no singing at all. To the stricter Puritan sensibility this would have been merely intolerable. We have instances of ministers who were made uncomfortable in their churches, and compelled to relinquish them, because they desired to introduce some religious melody; in other instances it was the minister who disapproved such extravagant piety in his people. The Society of Friends was not alone in its renunciation of all the adornments and flights of religious song. Even where singing was indulged, it was Patrick’s or the Scotch version, or some such literal translation of the words of Scripture. Paraphrases and more expanded religious sentiments had never been heard of, and were regarded, when first introduced, as seditious and dangerous innovations, disturbing the purity of so reasonable a service, which derived all its life and interest from its most perfect conformity to a spiritual order; the simple voice of the minister in prayer, and in preaching, meandering in many instances through roads of uncommon length. We have instances on record of a prayer itself taking the entire length of that time we now ordinarily allot to a public service. This state of things in the congregation must have greatly influenced the religious life of the times where it existed at all. It became cold, remote, and abstract; not that there were wanting instances, both of ministers and congregations, who maintained, in the midst of so much lifelessness, a high spiritual state and intercourse.

The Nonconformists throughout the country were, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, for the most part men disposed to social quiet. They had now recovered in some measure a state of religious tranquillity, and they were rather interested quietly to preserve what they possessed, than to attempt any occupation of new ground, either in principle or in practice. They made few efforts to correct the vices of men, or to convert them from their life of sin. The round of Nonconformist duty and piety was a quiet, staid, and respectable service; nothing, we suppose, could be more unlike the satires so often pronounced upon it. Most of its ministers were men of considerable scholarly attainments, their minds fed by the rich and strengthening food to be found in some of the oldest fathers and the earliest reformers; at the same time they were accustomed to abstractions and questions, which at once enlarged and strengthened the understanding. They had no acquaintance with our large varieties of nature and language; but they were keen observers of human nature, and they submitted their knowledge to the test and use of daily life. As to their people, in many instances, no doubt, they were humble, perhaps even of obscure rank, but this was not always the case. Nonconformity in those times included others than those we should even call the respectable middle classes; it represented an order of political opinion quite as much as religious doctrine and practice, not only as we have seen in London, but in many districts of the country. Some of the highest and oldest families formed the staff and stay of congregations. It was a respectable but cold piety, in many instances with assured tendencies towards Socinianism and Unitarianism. The Nonconformity into which Watts came, and with which during the whole of his life he mingled, is quite removed from that Nonconformity of Methodism and Revivalism which became the great religious movement of the last century. It was a Nonconformity educated, solid, rooted in certain principles and assurances, inclining too exclusively to a life of thought; the religion of intelligent multitudes who could not conform, especially to what the Church of England was, in that coarse and intolerant time, when her nets gathered fish of every sort, among them some chiefly remarkable for their rapacity and impurity.

It was over one of these old City churches, probably the most famous of them, that the youthful Isaac Watts was called to preside as the pastor. The congregation or church contained a number of eminent persons; its pastors had been eminent men; here a few years before ministered Joseph Caryl. From the pulpit of this place probably were poured forth those prelections on the Book of Job, assuredly in more than one sense a monument to the memory of Patience! Vast and mammoth-like, a megatherium of books, the most huge commentary ever written, but a structure of learning, with eloquence and evangelical truth, if large in bulk almost equal in worth. Over this church, more recently, had presided a greater man in the person of the mighty John Owen, the friend of Cromwell, and, during the Protectorate, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. The place of meeting was in Mark Lane, and in the congregation there were present some whose character and lives might a little daunt any preacher, much more a very youthful one. There were many in that congregation able to carry the memory back through the days of England’s fiery trials, through the years of war and of persecution, and the times when the City was alive in its own defence. They had heard the cry, “To your tents, O Israel!” when, in an ill-omened hour, Charles I. came to the City; they had seen the Thames alive with barge and boat as the members were escorted back to Westminster; some had served in the camp with the Ironsides, and some had seen Sir Harry Vane hailed to the scaffold; there were officers of the old Commonwealth army, members of the old Long Parliament, strong merchants and magistrates who had stood up for the liberties of the City and of England; there, in that congregation, scattered over the place were clustering remnants of the immediate members and descendants of Cromwell’s family, none more remarkable than that most singular woman, Mrs. Bendish, Bridget Ireton, the grand-daughter of Cromwell, of whom all contemporaries spoke as hearing just the same relation to her grandfather in character that Elizabeth bore to Henry VIII.—a woman with a most remarkable life; there was Charles Fleetwood, her mother’s second husband; there was Charles Desborough, the brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell; there was that fine old English gentleman Sir John Hartopp, and Lady Hartopp, who was a daughter of Charles Fleetwood, and thus allied to Mrs. Bendish; there was Lady Vere Wilkinson, and Lady Haversham, a daughter of the Earl of Anglesey, and the wife of John Thompson Earl of Haversham; and there, last as we mention them, but far from least in importance in the life of Watts, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney.

As we have said already, the Independent churches of the City were in that day greatly composed of such characters as these. Look into any one, and you will see such persons of rank and influence, although probably a kind of Cromwell clannishness gave distinctness and importance to the little church in Mark Lane; there was a respectability and dignity about those churches in general which we should in these days but little appreciate. They were snug little spiritual corporations, held together by several bonds which have ceased to be distinctive now; a strong faith in certain great first principles in religion; a strong faith also in certain political principles, quite essential to the freedom of their faith and their religious life and its usages. Nor can we conceal from ourselves that there was also a conservative spirit of an aristocratic flavour; there was nothing in the communion which savoured of our modern more heterogeneous assemblies: the members were usually persons of strong character, considerable culture, and thought. Their idea of liberty was no more cut out after the modern type than was their theology; indeed both were ideal. If the Harringtons and Sidneys dreamed their republics, not upon the wild democratic inclusiveness of complete suffrage, the proclamation of the sanctity of ignorance, and the wisdom of vice, but upon the models of classical times,—these for the most part idealized the republic of the saints, and formed their conceptions of church life and political freedom upon the unattainable standard of the college of the apostles, and the traditions of the community of the saints. Yet it is very easy to perceive how, ensconcing themselves in religious life as in a comfortable arm-chair, while perfectly faithful themselves, they became the parents of that large declension of such churches to Arianism and the cognate Socinian ideas which in the later periods of his life vexed the spirit of Watts, and led his thoughtful philosophic nature into an arena of mild, but not the less earnest conflict.

Watts, accepting the charge of the church, was ordained over it March 8th, 1702, the day on which King William died. The young minister’s immediate predecessor was Dr. Isaac Chauncy, who, like most of his coadjutors in the ministry of that period, was a gentleman of good and ancient family; originally coming over with the Conqueror, settled at Yardley, Berkshire, in the time of Elizabeth, and by the drift of circumstances conducted to considerable eminence among the Puritans and Nonconformists. The father of Isaac Chauncy had been professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge, and vicar of Ware, in Hertfordshire. He took up his testimony for Nonconformity when the “Book of Sports” was published, commanding him to desist from preaching on the Sabbath afternoon, that the people of his parish might indulge themselves in profane amusements; he fell beneath the vengeance of Archbishop Laud, and was twice cited before the Court of High Commission; he made a recantation, which he afterwards so regretted and bewailed that he threw up everything and withdrew to New England. His son Isaac held the living of Woodborough, in Wiltshire, from whence he was ejected, and after ministering a short time in Andover came to London, intending to practise as a physician, when the church in Mark Lane called him to become its minister; but he was not popular as a preacher, however eminent in other qualifications.

The congregation had exhibited signs of decline when Watts was called in, probably as one on whom the eyes of leading Nonconformists were fixed, especially as the friend of Sir John Hartopp. Although so young, his knowledge of mathematics, of the classics, of Church history, of theological science, especially his piety, must have made him already well known in Nonconformist circles. This knowledge extended back to the early part of 1698, so that for nearly two years he must have been the preacher, and it may be presumed very considerably the pastor of the church before, upon the resignation of Dr. Chauncy, he succeeded him in his office: the members of this distinguished church must have invited him with their eyes completely open to all that he was as a preacher and as a man. But he gave no indications of ability to enforce by his bodily powers the manifestations of his genius—his health appeared to be constantly failing. For some months before his ordination he had been laid aside from preaching, and in search of health had, by the advice of physicians, visited Bath. And then again we find him for some time resting at home at his father’s house, now, no doubt, a comfortable residence, a flourishing school, and released from all the terrors which had shadowed it in his infancy. And from thence again by physicians we find him sent to Tunbridge Wells, so that he says, “I was detained from study and preaching five months by my weakness, except one very short discourse at Southampton in extreme necessity.” He was of a slight and most fragile frame throughout his life. His works constitute an amazing monument of industry. But during the years he had been tutor in Sir John Hartopp’s family he must have performed these duties in a spirit of remarkable conscientiousness, for he prepared some of the works which afterwards delighted and instructed the world, as the necessary means of the course he was pursuing in the education of the young man, his pupil. Very remarkably this is the case with his “System of Logic,” which when it was published many years after was adopted and continued to be until recently the text-book for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; this appears also to have been the case with his “Scheme of Ontology.” He refers to many of his writings published at a much later period of his life, as for the most part the productions of these his earlier years. We shall have occasion to speak of these again; at present it is sufficient to refer to this persistency of mental labour and assiduous industry as not only the sufficient cause for the illness which suspended him from labour, but the foundation of future years of painful infirmity which accompanied him through life.

There must have been much about him not only to command respect but to enchain affection. Long hesitating as to whether he should accept the proffered pastorate, he had not long entered upon the real responsibilities of his office before he was again seized with a painful and alarming illness; almost immediately he was compelled again, in July, 1702, to renew his rest in Southampton, and then returning to London he mentions, in the memoranda we have already quoted, that he was “seized with violent gaundise and colic three weeks after my return to London, and had a very slow recovery, eight or nine weeks’ illness. From September 8th, or thereabouts, to November 27th or 28th. This year, viz., 1702, by slow degrees removed from Newington to Thomas Hollis’s, in the Minories.”

During a period of about six years Watts appears to have resided in the family of Sir John Hartopp; in the paragraph above quoted he refers to his removal to the house of Mr. Hollis, in the Minories. The names of the places associated with the ministrations or the residence of Watts and his fellow ministers in the City, sound to our ears now strange and singularly unromantic and uninteresting; but what they are now we must not for a moment suppose they resembled then. Even the Minories—now the last place in which one could wish to reside—lay, at that time, open and fresh towards the pleasant fields of the east end of London, a rather distinguished neighbourhood beneath the shadows of the Tower, and pleasantly refreshed by the breath from the waters of the then really silvery Thames, whose banks were alive with the songs of watermen. The Minories or Minoresses—so called from the nuns of the Order of St. Clair—had once been the region of noble residences; here had been the residence of Sir Philip Sidney, here his body lay in state. The spot was, and is, full of interesting memories. The family of the Hollis’s was from Sheffield, in Yorkshire, and having founded churches in Doncaster and Rotherham, removing to London, the father of Watts’ friend became one of the most helpful representatives of Nonconformity in the City, immediately connected with the church assembling in Pinners’ Hall, beneath the pastorate of Dr. Jeremiah Hunt. To this place, in consequence of the narrow and dilapidated state of the building in Mark Lane, Watts and his people were compelled to remove in the year 1704. Pinners’ Hall had for years been used by Nonconformists, and in their turns Baxter, Owen, Bates, Manton, and Howe had all preached in it to crowded congregations, hence the reason, most likely, of the friendship of the minister and Mr. Hollis.

We have few particulars of Watts in his pastoral work. From the first days of his pastorate his health was a frequent source of interruption to his activity. The hymns and poems frequently expressing the experience of pain, weakness, and weariness are no fancies; they express a very devout spirit of resignation, with regret, as he expresses it, that “many other souls are favoured with a more easy habitation, and he hoped with a better partner, accommodated with engines which have more health and vigour;” but he instantly recovers his spirits to exclaim, “Shall I repine then, while I survey whole nations and millions and millions of mankind that have not a thousand’s part of my blessings?” He was laid aside by sickness for five months soon after he became assistant to Dr. Chauncy, 1698; he was the subject of another illness soon after his settlement in the pastoral charge in 1701; a violent fever seized him in 1712, his constitution was shattered by it, his nerves weakened and unstrung, and he prevented from returning to his public work until October, 1716; we find from his own record that he was confined by illness in 1729; and many other occasions might be discovered of these sharp bodily afflictions. Life around him was usually beautiful and serene; he seems to have possessed a very large revenue of love, but he unquestionably possessed this “thorn in the flesh,” nor can we doubt that such experiences to such a faith as his, gave personal meaning to his hymns. He sung very often as one stretched on a rack, and not the least of his pains must have been that his incessantly active nature, his constant design and desire to carry out some purpose or to pursue some task found itself checked and arrested. Dr. Gibbons quotes a paragraph from a very beautiful letter to a friend, a minister, in affliction, through which there runs a vein of true spiritual friendship, and a pathos which his own experience of trials would very naturally inspire: “It is my hearty desire for you that your faith may ride out the storms of temptation, and the anchor of your hope may hold, being fixed within the veil. There sits Jesus our Forerunner, who sailed over this rough sea before us, and has given us a chart, even His Word, where the shelves and rocks, the fierce currents and dangers are well described, and He is our Pilot, and will conduct us to the shores of happiness. I am persuaded that in the future state we shall take a sweet review of those scenes of Providence which have been involved in the thickest darkness, and trace those footsteps of God when He walked with us through the deepest waters. This will be a surprising delight, to survey the manifold harmony of clashing dispensations, and to have those perplexing riddles laid open to the eyes of our souls, and read the full meaning of them in set characters of wisdom and grace.”

It is not extraordinary, therefore, that even so early as 1703 the church relieved Watts by choosing a co-pastor, Mr. Samuel Price, a native of Wales, but a student from Attercliff, in Yorkshire. As it was necessary to have a co-pastor, he was chosen upon the express desire and earnest recommendation of Watts; but many years appear to have passed between the choice of the church and his ordination as joint pastor, for Watts’ autobiographic memoranda says: “June, 1703, Mr. Samuel Price was chosen by the church to assist me;” but he was not ordained to the office of co-pastor until 1713. This relationship continued until it was dissolved by death. They were colleagues considerably upwards of forty years, and Price succeeded his beloved and amiable friend, whom he survived about seven years; he died in 1756, having been connected with the church fifty-three years. Watts mentions him in his will as his faithful friend and companion in the ministry, and leaves some little legacy, “as only a small testimony of his great affection for him, on account of his services of love during the many harmonious years of their fellowship in the work of the Gospel.” Watts several times, in the course of the prefaces and dedications to his published works, refers affectionately to his colleague; and his colleague when he died expressed a wish that he might be buried as near as possible to his honoured friend. It may be incidentally mentioned that he was uncle to the celebrated Dr. Richard Price.

Although his companion in the ministry neither as a preacher nor man of letters approached the eminence of Watts, it would seem that he was in every way acceptable as a preacher and a pastor, “judicious, and useful, and eminent in his gift of prayer,” says Gibbons. Certainly, the old place in Mark Lane became too small, for, after a temporary sojourn in Pinners’ Hall, in 1708 the congregation removed from Mark Lane[11] to Duke Street, St. Mary Axe.

It had been the site of one of the most celebrated metropolitan ecclesiastical establishments previous to the Reformation, the Priory of the Holy Trinity, the founder of which was Matilda, Queen of Henry I.; it became a huge establishment and enormously wealthy, the richest convent in England, some have said; rich in lands and ornaments, and incomparably surpassing all the other priories in the same county. The prior was always an alderman of London, although, if he happened to be exceedingly pious, he appointed a substitute to enact temporal matters; and on solemn days this clerical alderman rode through the city with the other aldermen, but arrayed in his monastic habit. On the dissolution of the monasteries this became one of the earliest spoils, and it was given by Henry VIII. to Sir Thomas Audley, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and afterwards Lord Chancellor. On the site of the old priory he erected a splendid mansion, in which he resided until his death in 1544. His daughter and sole heiress, Margaret, married Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, so the estate descended to the Howard family, and became the Duke’s place; he lost his head; passing to his eldest son, he sold it in 1592 to the mayor, corporation, and citizens of London. This is a singular piece of history, which Wilson, in his “History of Dissenting Churches,” has gathered from Strype, Maitland, and Pennant.

In the time of Watts the neighbourhood had scarcely fallen from its high estate. Time had been since the period of the Reformation when Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the Earl of Northumberland had their houses here; and Bury Street derived its name from the abbots of Bury, who also had a residence on this spot. Since the time of Cromwell, however, the region had become a kind of Juden Strasse. The Jews, who now form its principal inhabitants, then first settled there. The spot on which the chapel was built was part of a garden, although removed from public observation, a necessity laid upon the Nonconformists of that time, who were compelled to retreat into obscure recesses to escape the vigilance of prowling informers. The building has now entirely passed away, but we very well remember it, one of the old square substantial buildings with its galleries, exactly an ideal conventicle of those times, one of those in which the Nonconformists seemed to teach that there was no beauty in architecture which they particularly desired. The rich furniture and attainments of the ministers’ minds contrasting singularly with the plain and altogether unornamented and even barn-like simplicity of the scene of their ministrations: almost the only buildings which now retain the entirely unornamented architecture of the Puritan times are those of the members of the Society of Friends. Such was the building opened in Bury Street, October 3rd, 1708; it is also interesting to notice that it was erected at the costly sum of £650! In the present year of the publication of this volume a building has been erected in the City of London for the same order of communicants as those in Bury Street, at a cost of £55,000. The two sums are very suggestive of a comparison and contrast between the Nonconformists of the time of Watts and of to-day.

CHAPTER V.
First Publication as a Sacred Poet.

The fact that the first work published by Watts was the “Sacred Lyrics” may justify this early estimate of his character as a sacred poet. It is probable, nay it is certain, that the time bestowed by Watts upon poetry was very slight and insignificant compared with that which he devoted to the graver pursuits of life, and the various studies connected with philosophy, theology, preaching, and education. He first, however, appeared in print as the author of the “Horæ Lyricæ,” the Lyrical Poems: and Dr. Johnson judges that they entitled him to an honourable place amongst our English poets. Watts himself thought very modestly of his claims in this way, and speaks concerning his own compositions in the humblest language. “I make no pretences,” he says, “to the name of a poet, or a polite writer in an age wherein so many superior souls shine in their works through the nation.” In many of his hymns he unquestionably deserves the highest honour: but for the most part it is not in the lyrics we are to seek, as we certainly shall not find, the noblest illustrations of his poetical genius; nor, perhaps, is it probable that we should turn to them with much interest or expectation but that they are the production of Dr. Watts, and that he was the author of those hymns so dear to the Church of Christ, and the “Divine and Moral Songs for Children.” In all our judgments and criticisms upon Watts as a poet, two things must be borne in mind: first, as we have seen above, that he not only disclaimed the character himself, but proved his sincerity by regarding it only as the recreation of grave and serious studies, and the very natural occupation of a man of fine taste and largely cultivated sensibility; and next, we must remember, that the poetry of the age in which he lived was artificial, formed for the most part upon classical models, whose rules were very greatly inapplicable to English verse. The sweetest and most perfect poet in any near approach to those times was Oliver Goldsmith, and he was the writer least imbued with classical lore, and the one who left all classical rules and allusions furthest behind him, content to express himself in simple and pleasing English. Johnson was a poet, and Joseph Addison, but although so much more ambitious and devoted to the pursuit, they neither of them have produced sentiments or expressions which charm us more than those we find in the productions of Watts. Thomas Gray was a poet, but only in two or three instances did the simplicity and purity of the English language, and the simple metre, succeed in winning him from the trammels of classical formularies. Indeed there was something ludicrous in the poetry of the time; and the great genius of Pope, which really was equal to anything in verse, seemed almost to struggle in vain against the pedantic rules he imposed upon himself. It was the age of fantastic ornament and of formal symmetry, of artificial gardening, of trimmed yews, when even Nature herself in her trees, hedgerows, and flower-beds was made to look ridiculous. A sort of tulip-mania, a false admiration in colour and in form, took possession not merely of the speculators in the market, but of the devotees of the fine arts. Years passed on before English poetry liberated itself from these false trammels, and the first great English writer who subsequently gave freedom and freshness, a combination of sublimity and simplicity to English verse, was William Cowper.

We must separate and distinguish between Watts as a poet, the author of the “Lyrics,” and Watts as a hymnologist, and the author of those pieces which, as they have been, so we trust they will continue to be, a precious legacy of the Church, and the expression of its deepest, highest, and tenderest emotions. In a letter to the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” when his judgment was appealed to for a poetical decision, he said, “Though I have sported with rhyme as an amusement in younger life, and published some religious composures to assist the worship of God, yet I never set myself up among the numerous competitors for a poet of the age, much less have I presumed to become their judge.” There is a writer of one or two immortal hymns in our language who sometimes suggests a comparison with Dr. Watts. Watts was capable of poetry. He was not only a poet in his hymns, but a poetic nature often broke through the turgid pindarics he adopted as the vehicle of his expressions. But Ken was no poet at all, and yet, unlike Watts, who disclaimed the character, this was Ken’s one vanity. A writer in the “Quarterly Review,” which may be accepted here as an unexceptionable umpire, says, “If there was any vanity in the good man’s heart, it would seem to have been on the subject of his poetical skill. He expresses, indeed, a belief that his verses are open to the assaults of criticism, but he must have thought something of them, for he left them for publication, and they fill four thick volumes. The contrast is strange between the clear, free, harmonious flow of his prose, and the barbarous, cramped, pedantic language, the harsh dissonance, the extravagant conceits, which disfigure the great mass of his verses. Mr. Anderson has tried the ingenious experiment of reducing some passages from metre to prose, and no doubt they gain considerably! But there is no getting over the fact that these four volumes are altogether a mistake.”[12] Such a criticism as this can never be pronounced on Watts, but it is yet true that some of the vices of Ken disfigure the pages of the “Horæ Lyricæ,” and they are traceable to the same cause—the forsaking simplicity and nature, and following artificial models and straining after affected diction.

He was essentially a hymn writer, and among the lyrics the most beautiful and effective pieces are those which either are hymns or approach nearest to that order of composition. The modern reader will be impatient of the frequent apostrophe, and, although “personification, that is, the transformation of the qualities of the mind, and abstract ideas, and general notions into living embodiments,” has ever been regarded as one of the noblest exercises and proofs of the poetic faculty, we suppose few will be disposed to regard Watts’ excursions in this way with favour. He possessed this power in an eminent degree: instantaneously, apparently, a sentiment became an image, and the image pointed to a tender and pathetic treatment. His elegy on the death of William III. has often been cited as a fine piece of elegiac personification; should it seem extravagant to the reader, it would scarcely seem so to Lord Macaulay; and it must be remembered that Dr. Watts was one who regarded himself and the nation as profoundly indebted, surely not unnaturally, for freedom and prosperity to the arms and government of the deceased king. He was young when he wrote these verses. William, as we have said, died the day on which Watts was ordained to the work of the ministry, 1702. The verses present a picture of the illustrious hero lying in state, surrounded by the weeping arts and graces of society. Dr. Gibbons, not inappropriately, speaks of the piece as “the largest constellation of personifications occurring amongst the Doctor’s Odes:”

Preserve, O venerable pile,

Inviolate thy sacred trust;

To thy cold arms the British isle,

Weeping, commits her richest dust.

Rest his dear sword beneath his head;

Round him his faithful arms shall stand:

Fix his bright ensigns on his bed,

The guards and honours of our land.

High o’er the grave Religion set

In solemn guise; pronounce the ground

Sacred, to bar unhallowed feet,

And plant her guardian virtues round.

Fair Liberty, in sables drest,

Write his loved name upon his urn;

William, the scourge of tyrants past,

And awe of princes yet unborn.

Sweet Peace, his sacred relics keep,

With olives blooming round her head,

And stretch her wings across the deep

To bless the nations with the shade.

Stand on the pile, immortal Fame,

Broad stars adorn thy brightest robe;

Thy thousand voices sound his name

In silver accents round the globe.

Flattery shall faint beneath the sound,

While hoary Truth inspires the song;

Envy grow pale, and bite the ground,

And Slander gnaw her forky tongue.

Night and the grave, remove your gloom;

Darkness becomes the vulgar dead;

But glory bids the royal tomb

Disdain the horrors of a shade.

Glory with all her lamps shall burn,

And watch the warrior’s sleeping clay,

Till the last trumpet rouse his urn,

To aid the triumphs of the day.

But he had a simpler manner, and even in his stronger expressions rose to the majesty of simple strength, as in the following:

Launching into Eternity.

It was a brave attempt! advent’rous he,

Who in the first ship broke the unknown sea:

And leaving his dear native shores behind,

Trusted his life to the licentious wind.

I see the surging brine: the tempest raves:

He on the pine-plank rides across the waves,

Exulting on the edge of thousand gaping graves:

He steers the winged boat, and shifts the sails,

Conquers the flood, and manages the gales.

Such is the soul that leaves this mortal land,

Fearless when the great Master gives command.

Death is the storm: she smiles to hear it roar,

And bids the tempest waft her from the shore:

Then with a skilful helm she sweeps the seas,

And manages the raging storm with ease:

(Her faith can govern death) she spreads her wings

Wide to the wind, and as she sails she sings,

And loses by degrees the sight of mortal things.

As the shores lessen, so her joys arise,

The waves roll gentler, and the tempest dies,

Now vast eternity fills all her sight,

She floats on the broad deep with infinite delight,

The seas for ever calm, the skies for ever bright.

The weight and grandeur of his thoughts, the radiance of his perception, the far-reaching, remote grandeur of the objects of his verse, must always be taken into account, pondered, and allowed an adequate influence over the reader’s mind, whenever attempts are made to estimate what he was as a sacred poet. Not the less was his mind in ready accord with objects of Nature. He had seen, probably, little of Nature in her more grand and exciting moods. Men like him, horn to London life, and only occasionally escaping thence to some near and quiet watering-place, saw little of those ample pages which, in our own or other lands, are now unrolled to almost every designing eye. But his verses abundantly show with what perfect sympathy every object touched him, how all the smaller or greater things of Nature impressed the subtle sense within him, and awoke the mystery and the awe. The following lines, not composed as a hymn, but included in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” have always seemed to us very cogently to illustrate this:

My God, I love, and I adore;

But souls that love would know Thee more.

Wilt Thou for ever hide, and stand

Behind the labours of Thy hand?

Thy hand unseen sustains the poles

On which this huge creation rolls:

The starry arch proclaims Thy power,

Thy pencil glows in every flower;

In thousand shapes and colours rise

Thy painted wonders to our eyes;

While beasts and birds, with labouring throats,

Teach us a God in thousand notes,

The meanest pin in Nature’s frame

Marks out some letter of Thy name.

Where sense can reach, or fancy rove,

From hill to hill, from field to grove,

Across the waves, around the sky,

There’s not a spot, or deep or high,

Where the Creator has not trod,

And left the footstep of a God.

And in the same strain, with what strength and majesty he sweeps every chord of Nature in his sublime version of the 148th Psalm:

Loud hallelujahs to the Lord.

The strong nervousness of his expression, the passionate personification (always the mark of a great poet) with which his verses abound, sometimes, but more especially in his lyrics, give the appearance of inflation to his expressions. But when attempting to describe adequate themes, they only fitly represent the subject, as in the following fine description of the glory of God in the clouds:

Thy hand, how wide it spreads the sky!

How glorious to behold!

Tinged with a blue of heavenly dye,

And starred with sparkling gold.

There Thou canst bid the globes of light

Their endless circles run;

Where the pale planet rules the night,

And day obeys the sun.

The noisy winds stand ready there

Thy orders to obey;

With sounding wings they sweep the air,

To make Thy chariot way.

There like a trumpet loud and strong,

Thy thunder shakes our coast;

While the red lightnings wave along,

The banners of Thy host.

On the thin air, without a prop,

Hang fruitful showers around;

At Thy command they sink, and drop

Their fatness to the ground.