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.

Strong exception has been taken to Watts’ verse, on the score of its frequent, almost passionate, expression of Divine love; in this he frequently writes like Madame Guyon, or like some of those old monastic spirits who passed their days in cloisters; and Watts’ life was almost as cloisteral as that of a monk. Unlike his amiable friend, Philip Doddridge, he was never diverted from any of the solemn pursuits of his life by the claims of human passion or affection, although there are not wanting verses which, perhaps, show that he had not been altogether insensible to female charms:

Virgins, who roll your artful eyes,

And shoot delicious danger thence;

Swiftly the lovely lightning flies,

And melts our reason down to sense.

But perhaps his poem “Few Happy Matches,” reveals some reason why his timid spirit refused to seek its happiness in matrimonial chains, and so he turned to the higher affections, singing—

Life is a pain without Thy love;

Who can ever bear to be

Cursed with immortality,

Among the stars, but far from Thee?

But the author of many of these hymns must often have been wafted away with a true mystic ecstasy. The warmth of this rapture has been objected to; the objection lies, also, against the works of most of the great mystics.

My God, the spring of all my joys,

is one of countless illustrations—

My God, my life, my love,

To Thee, to Thee, I call.

or—

Dearest of all the names above.

In such as these, if the reader feels unable to rise to them amidst the delights of family joys—wife, and children, and society—let him remember how Watts lived, his solitary nights, in a family where, no doubt, his presence was a charm and blessing, but in which he must have been to himself, comparatively, lonely as a monk, feeding his mind with thoughts until they became passions and ecstasies to him, and even found their vent in such words as the following:

His charm shall make my numbers flow,

And hold the falling floods;

While silence sits on every bough,

And bends the listening woods.

I’ll carve our passion on the bark;

And every wounded tree

Shall drop and hear some mystic mark

That Jesus died for me.

The swains shall wonder when they read,

Inscribed on all the grove,

That Heaven itself came down and bled

To win a mortal’s love.

To this same order of sacred personification also belong those verses, which are certainly remarkable, and when properly apprehended among the most tenderly antithetical in our language, on the Death of Moses:

Sweet was the journey to the sky

The wondrous prophet tried;

“Climb up the mount,” said God, “and die;”

The prophet climbed and died.

Softly his fainting head he lay

Upon his Maker’s breast;

His Maker kissed his soul away,

And laid his flesh to rest.

In God’s own arms he left the breath

That God’s own Spirit gave;

His was the noblest road to death,

And his the sweetest grave.

And while remarking upon the poet, we may notice that many of his pieces reflect that quiet scholarly spirit of the age, in which not only Watts, but so many other writers delighted to indulge; that Seneca-like musing and moralizing, that contented dreaming beneath umbrageous woods and by the side of purling streams. It has been said that Samuel Rogers, in his “Human Life,” portrays the Twickenham side of existence. The Stoke Newington side was very much like it, certainly wholly unlike the stir and heat of the vivid passions, the painful introspections, and diseased musings, which have forced their way into modern poetry. If Watts described or dealt with these it was not in his verse, although many of his prose writings seem to reveal that he was not ignorant of them; such is his often quoted piece:

True Riches.

I am not concerned to know

What, to-morrow, fate will do:

’Tis enough that I can say,

I’ve possessed myself to-day:

Then, if haply midnight death

Seize my flesh, and stop my breath,

Yet to-morrow I shall be

Heir to the best part of me.

Glittering stones, and golden things,

Wealth and honours that have wings,

Ever fluttering to be gone,

I could never call my own:

Riches that the world bestows,

She can take, and I can lose;

But the treasures that are mine

Lie afar beyond her line.

When I view my spacious soul,

And survey myself a whole,

And enjoy myself alone,

I’m a kingdom of my own.

I’ve a mighty part within

That the world hath never seen,

Rich as Eden’s happy ground,

And with choicer plenty crowned.

Here on all the shining boughs

Knowledge fair and useful grows;

On the same young flow’ry tree

All the seasons you may see;

Notions in the bloom of light,

Just disclosing to the sight;

Here are thoughts of larger growth,

Rip’ning into solid truth;

Fruits refined, of noble taste;

Seraphs feed on such repast.

Here, in a green and shady grove,

Streams of pleasure mix with love:

There, beneath the smiling skies,

Hills of contemplation rise;

Now, upon some shining top,

Angels light, and call me up;

I rejoice to raise my feet,

Both rejoice when there we meet.

There are endless beauties more

Earth hath no resemblance for;

Nothing like them round the pole,

Nothing can describe the soul.

’Tis a region half unknown,

That has treasures of its own,

More remote from public view

Than the bowels of Peru;

Broader ’tis, and brighter far,

Than the golden Indies are;

Ships that trace the watery stage

Cannot coast it in an age;

Harts, or horses, strong and fleet,

Had they wings to help their feet,

Could not run it half-way o’er

In ten thousand days or more.

Yet the silly wand’ring mind,

Loath to be too much confined,

Roves and takes her daily tours,

Coasting round the narrow shores—

Narrow shores of flesh and sense,

Picking shells and pebbles thence:

Or she sits at Fancy’s door,

Calling shapes and shadows to her;

Foreign visits still receiving,

And to herself a stranger living.

Never, never would she buy

Indian dust, or Tyrian dye;

Never trade abroad for more,

If she saw her native store:

If her inward worth were known,

She might ever live alone.

Nor, much in the same vein, was he indisposed occasionally for a gentle kind of satire, as in the following vigorous paraphrase, which some readers may perhaps be surprised to find falling from the pen of Watts. “When I meet with persons,” he says, “of a worldly character, they bring to my mind some scraps of Horace:”

“Nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati,

Alcinoique juventus

Cui pulchrum fuit in medios dormire dies,” etc.

Paraphrase.

There are a number of us creep

Into this world, to eat and sleep;

And know no reason why they’re born,

But merely to consume the corn,

Devour the cattle, fowl, and fish,

And leave behind an empty dish.

The crows and ravens do the same,

Unlucky birds of hateful name;

Ravens or crows might fill their places,

And swallow corn and carcases.

Then if their tombstone, when they die,

Ben’t taught to flatter and to lie,

There’s nothing better will be said,

Than that “They’ve eat up all their bread,

Drank up their drink, and gone to bed.”

And the following verses are surely very pleasing to the discontented and unquiet:

’Tis a dull circle that we tread,

Just from the window to the bed,

To rise to see, and to be seen,

Graze on the world awhile, and then

We yawn, and stretch to sleep again.

But Fancy, that uneasy guest,

Still holds a longing in our breast:

She finds or frames vexations still,

Herself the greatest plague we feel.

We take great pleasure in our pain,

And make a mountain of a grain,

Assume the load, and pant and sweat

Beneath th’ imaginary weight.

With our dear selves we live at strife,

While the most constant scenes of life

From peevish humours are not free;

Still we affect variety:

Rather than pass an easy day,

We fret and chide the hours away,

Grow weary of this circling sun,

And vex that he should ever run

The same old track; and still, and still

Rise red behind yon eastern hill,

And chide the moon that darts her light

Through the same casement every night.

We shift our chambers and our homes,

To dwell where trouble never comes:

Sylvia has left the city crowd,

Against the court exclaims aloud,

Flies to the woods; a hermit saint!

She loathes her patches, pins and paint,

Dear diamonds from her neck are torn;

But humour, that eternal thorn,

Sticks in her heart: she’s hurried still,

’Twixt her wild passions and her will:

Haunted and hagged where’er she roves,

By purling streams, and silent groves,

Or with her furies, or her loves.

Then our native land we hate,

Too cold, too windy, or too wet;

Change the thick climate, and repair

To France or Italy for air.

Happy the soul that virtue shows

To fix the place of her repose,

Needless to move; for she can dwell

In her old grandsire’s hall as well.

Virtue that never loves to roam,

But sweetly hides herself at home.

And easy on a native throne

Of humble turf sits gently down.

Without claiming then for Watts a pre-eminent place among those who are called poets, these citations will be sufficient to show that however he might disclaim the dignity, he deserved the designation. And there are poets whose eminence is in general more unquestioned, who deserve it less. He was unjust to himself in this particular; verse and rhyme fell from him easily, happily, naturally. Perhaps he succeeded least when he most ambitiously attempted; but he had a remarkable and pleasant power of instantly translating some sentiment which crossed his mind from the classics into English verse, as in those well-known lines,—

Seize upon truth where’er ’tis found,

On Christian, or on heathen ground.

Amongst your friends, amongst your foes,

The flower’s divine where’er it grows,

Neglect the prickle and assume the rose.

In which he elevates the sentiment of Virgil,—

“Fas est ab hoste doceri.”

Referring to his translations, it has been very justly said that he seldom translates or imitates a heathen poet but he either makes him a Christian in the end, or shows his deficiency in not being one. He consistently maintained throughout his writings, as a poet, the determination expressed in the lines—

Thy name, Almighty Sire, and Thine,

Jesus, where His full glories shine,

Shall consecrate my lays.[13]

His familiar method of remembering the signs of the Zodiac is an illustration of the rapid and neat way in which he could bind up knowledge in a verse:

The ram, the bull, the heavenly twins,

And next the crab the lion shines,

The virgin and the scales;

The archer, scorpion, and the goat,

The man that holds the water-pot,

The fish with glittering tails.

And his receipt for the orderly conduct of Divine worship, for sustaining a mental effort in prayer, is useful, beautiful, and perfect:

Call upon God, adore, confess,

Petition, plead, and then declare

You are the Lord’s, give thanks and bless,

And let Amen confirm the prayer.

The devout purpose which ruled and governed the whole life of Watts is of course manifest in his poems. Such as he is, he is always a sacred poet; he never forgets that his life has been consecrated and set apart to religious teaching and to the promulgation of useful knowledge; his moralities are recreation, never mere dreams; and if he never attempts the great flights of poetry in epic or dramatic writing, we may remember that in this, as in his yet more sacred pieces, he was a lyrist, and reserved all his greater efforts for his work in the ministry, seeking thus to make more sweet and serviceable the whole service of the House of God.

Throughout these remarks we have left it to be inferred that the verse-making, great as was the fame it procured the author, was regarded by him merely as the accident of his work; at the same time his nature seems to have been truly in sympathy with all those impulses derived from external scenery, calculated to stir a poetic sensibility. We fancy his modest nature would almost have assented, without a rejoinder, even to some of the very severe criticisms which modern fastidiousness has pronounced upon him; but Dr. Gibbons assures us how swiftly and instantly his spirit caught every impression of natural scenery and life; how he delighted in the rural verdure, or the waving harvest-field, or the resounding grove; how his nature was awed almost equally by the wonderful and subtle labours of the industrious bee, or the sun walking through the heavens in the greatness of his strength. In his lyrics, classical forms, perhaps, rather hampered than aided him; he was fascinated by the majestic roll of the Pindaric Greek; but from this fault the best of his hymns are entirely free.

We have dwelt thus at length upon some of the characteristics of Watts’ verse, feeling that criticism upon it is far from exhausted; and that, amidst its various representatives in our language, in spite of that modern contempt which is creeping even into the circles of those who profess to hold his faith and follow in his footsteps, he still deserves to retain a place in the history of English poetry. We have referred rather to those more striking and obvious marks of his genius; but we must still prefer him in his more quiet and subdued strains of devotion, those peaceful, pensive lines with which his works abound. It is equally certain that he wrote a number of verses and lines perfectly indefensible on the score of good taste: this is the more remarkable, because his taste does seem to have been cultivated to the highest pitch of excellence; and his mind was remarkable, not merely for the plenitude of its ideas, but for the easy elegance with which he ordinarily gave expression to them. However this may be, their bad taste and strange conceits have not greatly repressed the reverence with which we regard the works of George Herbert or of Henry Vaughan; nor does the frequent turgidity of Milton much interfere with the admiration and awe with which we read most of his poems.

ABNEY HOUSE, STOKE NEWINGTON.

CHAPTER VI.
Residence in the Abney family.

It was at that period of Watts’ life, when he felt in a very especial manner his loneliness, and fever and infirmity were reducing him to a painful sense of abiding weakness, that Sir Thomas and Lady Abney invited him to spend a week with them at their magnificent house of Theobalds, in Hertfordshire. He accepted the invitation, and the hosts and their guest seemed to have been so mutually pleased with each other that Watts continued in the family until his death, a period of thirty-six years. Watts must have then been about thirty-eight years of age. Johnson remarks upon this friendship that “it was a state in which the notions of patronage and dependence were overpowered by the perception of reciprocal benefits; it deserves a particular memorial;” and he refers to Dr. Gibbons’ interesting account, which is, indeed, one of the most pleasant pieces of his biography, and compels the wish that he had more frequently broken the monotony of the book by pages so pleasing. The event was one of those kind providences which those who watch the lives of eminent men, who have served their generation and the cause of God, will not fail to perceive. Think of the solitary student, the shrinking, sensitive man, the modest and fearful spirit who could not command service, and recoiled from giving trouble, how fearfully life might have dragged along through a few years of languor and pain, unequal to much service, unable to gather round him any, or but few, of the comforts of life, suddenly transferred to all the affluent comforts of this magnificent abode, to its rooms, capacious and luxurious, the abode of order, and harmony, and holiness, not only a pious household, but entirely after the type favoured by the thoughtful guest. There were the rich rural scenes, the delightful garden, the spreading lawn, and the fragrant and embowered recess, all wooing the body back to health and the heart to peace; and although a few years after his entrance into the household Sir Thomas Abney dies, yet the guest cannot be permitted to depart. The same affection and respect are continued by Lady Abney and her daughter. Lady Abney was the sister of the chief friend of Watts’ younger days, Thomas Gunston; her wealth was very great, and, says Gibbons, “her generosity and munificence in full proportion.” There must have been a pleasant fellowship and community of tastes, certainly a fitting harmony of character; reminding us of Robert Boyle with his sister Lady Ranelagh, or William Cowper with Mary Unwin; such relationships are very beautiful in their serene, unselfish character. Beneath the roof of Lady Abney Watts died. Within two months of his departure to Bunhill Fields, she was taken to her resting-place in the vaults of Stoke Newington Church. But the family in which Dr. Watts was for more than half his life an honoured guest merits some more particular mention.

Sir Thomas Abney was descended from an ancient and respectable family in Derbyshire. His father was James Abney, Esq., of Wilsley, whose ancestors had enjoyed that estate upwards of five hundred years. The son came to the City of London, and appears to have passed through the honours of Alderman, Sheriff, and Lord Mayor. For the services he rendered to King William he received the honour of knighthood, and was chosen chief magistrate some years before his turn. He appears to have had in those troublesome times great influence in the City, though holding at that time a strong opinion adverse to the Stuarts. He was chosen in 1701 to represent it in Parliament; he was a director of the Bank, and president of St. Thomas’ Hospital; and when, upon the death of the exiled James, the King of France, Louis XIV., caused the Pretender to be proclaimed at St. Germains King of Great Britain, and by the recall of the Earl of Macclesfield war seemed to be unavoidable, Sir Thomas Abney, in the Court of Common Council, proposed, in opposition to the majority of his brethren on the bench, an address to William III., declaring that they would support him against France and the Pretender: it was carried and transmitted to the King, who was then on the Continent. It is impossible now to estimate the vigour this imparted to the King’s affairs—it was the note which roused the nation. It was said that this act of Sir Thomas Abney served the cause of the King more than if he had raised for him a million of money.

It is a singular circumstance that although Watts received such marks of favour from the Abney family, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney do not appear to have, in the first days of their acquaintance, belonged to the church of which Watts was pastor. Sir Thomas was a member of that church during the pastorate of Mr. Caryl, whose daughter was his first wife. After Mr. Caryl’s death he united himself with the church of which John Howe was the minister. Nonconformists were at that time, as they have been frequently since, Lord Mayors of the City, usually complying by occasional conformity so far as to attend one part of the Sunday at church, the other at their own place of worship. When Sir Humphrey Edwin, who was a member of Pinners’ Hall congregation, was Mayor, he very unwisely caused the regalia of the City to be carried to his meeting-house, and it created a vehement storm.

But it is remarkable that Mr. Milner, usually very accurate, in his life of Dr. Watts quotes a paragraph from “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” speaking of it as a piece of High Church vituperation, apparently unaware that this was the very production of Defoe, the satire for which he was put in the pillory; Mr. Milner, misled by the heartiness of the composition, like many of Defoe’s day, came to the conclusion that it was the work of an enemy to those whose interests the pamphlet was intended to serve. The paragraph points immediately to Sir Thomas and his friend Watts, as the reader will perceive by the designations italicized: “But a lady, Queen Anne, now sits on the throne, who though sprung from that blood which ye and your forefathers spilt before the palace-gates, puts on a temper of forgiveness, and, in compassion to your consciences, is not willing that you should lose the hopes of heaven by purchasing here on earth. She would have no more Sir Humphreys tempt the justice of God, by falling from his true worship and giving ear to the cat-calls and back-pipes at St. Paul’s; would have your Sir Thomas’s keep to their primitive text, and not venture damnation to play at long spoon and custard for a transitory twelvemonth; and would have your Sir Tom sing psalms at Highgate Hill, and split texts of Scripture with his diminutive figure of a chaplain, without running the hazard of qualifying himself to be called a handsome man for riding on horseback before the City trainbands.”

It may be noticed now how much the interest of King William and the Hanover succession to the throne of England were served by the Protestant dissenters of the City of London, and by no one more than by Sir Thomas Abney. He lived to a good old age, dying at his house at Theobalds in the year 1722. Nor can we wonder that his friend should pay a high tribute to his memory in a funeral sermon, and seek to give it a more durable place in a sketch in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts.”

Theobalds was a fine old palace, and has been celebrated in the verses of poets and the pages of novelists, and the memoirs of historians; but no biography of Watts gives any specific account of the magnificent old building in which he spent the greater number of the years of his life. It was as much Watts’ home as if it had been his own property; and he was in the habit of saying his poetical contributions would have been much more numerous had he, in his early life, been privileged with the means of retirement among such shades and gardens, and ample grounds. Theobalds was, and had been, everything that could excite the memory, or stir or soothe and lull the imagination. Situated a little more than a mile from Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, and within an easy ride from the metropolis, on the borders of Enfield Chase, it possessed a very remarkable history; it had been the favourite residence of the mighty Cecil, Lord Burleigh; to this place he fled with eagerness to enjoy his short intervals of leisure; amidst its shades he planned and plotted schemes in which the whole future of England’s history was interested; he laid out immense sums of money upon the grand pile, and kept up great state with extraordinary magnificence, while he might be seen ambling along upon a mule through the groves of his magnificent domains, overlooking his workmen or the parties of pleasure he had gathered around him. Here, at this old house, Queen Elizabeth had repeatedly rested in the course of her great progresses. Here, when Burleigh and his mistress had both passed away, came James I., and held his masques, written by Ben Jonson, and enjoyed his pleasures. It was in his reign that it was given up by the Earl of Salisbury to Queen Anne of Denmark, amidst such strange pageantries of most intemperate folly that Sir John Harington writes, contrasting the days of James I. with what he remembered of the same place in the days of Queen Elizabeth, “I never did see such lack of good order, discretion, and sobriety, as I have now done.”

In Watts’ day there was living in the neighbouring village of Cheshunt that remarkable man, also a member of Watts’ church. Richard Cromwell, although, somewhat to shroud himself in obscurity, he usually went by the name of Mr. Clarke. An eminent novelist[14] has woven into his fiction very naturally one of the most striking incidents of his story from the casual meeting of his hero and the son of the Protector on this very spot, when Cromwell became his host and entertainer. Richard Cromwell died probably before Watts became a constant resident at Theobalds; and indeed Cromwell removed from Cheshunt some time before his death.

Cheshunt churchyard once contained a number of inscriptions upon the tombs from the pen of the poet; most of them have probably long been obliterated, but two or three have been snatched from oblivion; an inscription for the tomb of Thomas Pickard, Esq., citizen of London, who died suddenly, probably a member of Watts’ church:

A soul prepared needs no delays,

The summons comes, the saint obeys;

Swift was his flight and short the road,

He closed his eyes and saw his God.

His flesh rests here till Jesus come

And claims the treasure from the tomb.

Another epitaph:

Beneath this stone Death’s prisoner lies.

That stone shall move, the prisoner rise

When Jesus with Almighty word

Calls His dead saints to meet their Lord.

The following lines were not long since in existence, written upon a ceiling dial at a western window of Theobalds:

Little sun upon the ceiling

Ever moving, ever stealing

Moments, minutes, hours away;

May no shade forbid thy shining

While the heavenly sun declining

Calls us to improve the day.

There was another, indeed there appear to have been several; it was the taste of the times to line the avenues with these moralities in verse:

Thus steal the silent hours away,

The sun thus hastes to reach the sea,

And men to mingle with their clay.

Thus light and shade divide the year,

Thus till the last great day appear

And shut the starry theatre.

If we are able to discriminate Watts in his various abodes here and at Stoke Newington, certainly it is not his biographers we have to thank for it. They have jumbled up his residences in a very heterogeneous fashion, and leave us very much in doubt whether their descriptions of his rooms apply to his earlier or later abode. Assuredly he lived in a mansion large enough for him. One of the smallest of mortals, he had one of the largest homes. We can readily believe that good Sir Thomas was very well pleased from such a pile to deliver up a suite of apartments to such a guest. His own rooms were a kind of true literary hermitage, adorned with paintings from his own pencil, and his collection of portraits of eminent persons he had known, or great contemporaries he admired; at the entrance of his study on the outside were the fine lines from the first book of Horace’s satires, in which he denounces the faithless friend: “He who reviles his absent friend, who does not defend him while another defames him, who aims at the groundless jeers of people, and the reputation of a wit, who can feign things not seen, who cannot keep secrets, he is the rancorous man.” The spaces within, where there were no shelves, were filled up with prints of distinguished friends, or eminent persons. Of course, there was a spacious old Elizabethan fireplace, panelled on either side, and in each panel an inscription from the beloved Horace. On the one side:

Locus est pluribus umbris.

And on the other:

Quis me dolorum propria dignabitor umbra.

There we are permitted to fancy him. Such were his haunts among those pleasant and sequestered shades, and such was his home. His rooms well arranged and tasteful, as one biographer has depicted them. The lute and the telescope on the same table with the Bible, a treatise on logic in one hand, and hymns and spiritual songs in the other. Few writers in our language seem to suggest a finer illustration of the mingled powers of faith and reason.

With so small a family what a silent household it must have seemed, sustained in its grand and memorable stateliness. There passed what we may believe to have been the happiest years of Watts’ life, amidst scenes inviting to rest, and with little to disturb the equanimity of his quiet spirit, receiving and reflecting its own peace, peace not to be disturbed even by much bodily restlessness and pain. Those numerous allusions in his hymns to the wakeful hours of night were not mere poetic fancies, “the comforts of my nights” were not unneeded; for many years he knew little of sleep, except such as could be obtained by medicine; intense mental application, working upon a weak and nervous constitution, brought about the consequences of insomnia, or sleeplessness yet his mind seems to have been too calm, too equally balanced, and too completely under the control of highest principles, ever to know such agitations as shake to their centre some poetic natures. Even public agitations did hot disturb him much. Almost the severest trial he knew was the vehement and intolerant persecution he sustained from the tongue and pen of Thomas Bradbury; but to him we may refer in subsequent pages.

CHAPTER VII.
Hymns.

So early as the year 1700 Watts’ brother, Mr. Enoch Watts, wrote a letter to him from Southampton, urging upon him the publication of his hymns. It sets not only the mind of the writer as a member of the Doctor’s family in a favourable light, as well as it expresses the probable general feeling of desire for some hymns suitable for Divine service. We quote it here:

“Southampton: March, 1700.

“Dear Brother,—

“In your last you discovered an inclination to oblige the world by showing it your hymns in print, and I heartily wish, as well for the satisfaction of the public as myself, that you were something more than inclinable thereunto. I have frequently importuned you to it before now, and your invention has often furnished you with some modest reply to the contrary, as if what I urge was only the effect of a rash and inconsiderate fondness to a brother; but you will have other thoughts of the matter when I first assure you that that affection, which is inseparable from our near relationship, would have had in me a very different operation, for instead of pressing you to publish, I should with my last efforts have endeavoured the concealment of them, if my best judgment did not direct me to believe it highly conducing to a general benefit, without the least particular disadvantage to yourself. This latter I need not have mentioned, for I am very confident whoever has the happiness of reading your hymns (unless he be either sot or atheist) will have a very favourable opinion of their author; so that, at the same time you contribute to the universal advantage, you will procure the esteem of men the most judicious and sensible. In the second place, you may please to consider how very mean the performers in this kind of poetry appear in the pieces already extant. Some ancient ones I have seen in my time, who flourished in Hopkins and Sternhold’s reign; but Mason now reduces this kind of writing to a sort of yawning indifferency, and honest Barton chimes us asleep. There is, therefore, a great need of a pen, vigorous and lively as yours, to quicken and revive the dying devotion of the age, to which nothing can afford such assistance as poetry, contrived on purpose to elevate us even above ourselves. To what may we impute the prevalency of the songs, filled with the fabulous divinity of the ancient fathers, on our passions? Is it, think you, only owing to a natural propensity in us to be in love with fable, and averse to truth in her native plainness? I presume it may partly be ascribed to this, that as romance has more need of artifice than truth to set it off, so it generally has such an abundance more, that it seldom fails of affecting us by making new and agreeable impressions. Yours now is the old truth, stripped of its ragged ornaments, and appears, if we may say so, younger by ages, in a new and fashionable dress, which is commonly tempting.

“And as for those modern gentlemen who have lately exhibited their version of the Psalms, all of them I have not seen I confess, and, perhaps, it would not be worth while to do it unless I had a mind to play the critic, which you know is not my talent, but those I have read confess to me a vast difference to yours, though they are done by persons of no mean credit. Dr. Patrick most certainly has the report of a very learned man, and, they say, understands the Hebrew extremely well, which, indeed, capacitates him for a translator, but he is thereby never the more enabled to versify. Tate and Brady still keep near the same pace. I know not what sober beast they ride (one that will be content to carry double), but I am sure it is no Pegasus: there is in them a mighty deficiency of that life and soul which is necessary to raise our fancies and kindle and fire our passions, and something or other they have to allege against the rest of adventurers; but I have been persuaded a great while since, that were David to speak English, he would choose to make use of your style. If what I have said seems to have no weight with you, yet you cannot be ignorant what a load of scandal lies on the Dissenters, only for their imagined aversion to poetry. You remember what Dr. Speed says:

So far hath schism prevailed they hate to see

Our lines and words in couplings to agree,

It looks too like abhorred conformity:

A hymn so soft, so smooth, so neatly drest,

Savours of human learning and the beast.

And, perhaps, it has been thought there were some grounds for his aspersion from the admired poems of Ben. Keach, John Bunyan, etc., all flat and dull as they are; nay, I am much out if the latter has not formerly made much more ravishing music with his hammer and brass kettle.

“Now when you are exposed to the public view these calumnies will immediately vanish, which, methinks, should be a motive not the least considerable. And now we are talking of music, I have a crotchet in my brain, which makes me imagine, that as chords and discords equally please heavy-eared people, so the best divine poems will no more inspire the rude and illiterate than the meanest rhymes, which may in some measure give you satisfaction, in that fear you discover, ne in rude vulgus cadant, and you must allow them to be tasteless to many people, tolerable to some, but to those few who know their beauties, to be very pleasant and desirable; and, lastly, if I do not speak reason, I will at present take my leave of you, and only desire you to hear what your ingenious acquaintance in London say to the point, for I doubt not you have many solicitors there, whose judgments are much more solid than mine. I pray God Almighty have you in His good keeping, and desire you to believe me, my dear brother,

“Your most affectionate kinsman and friend,

“Enoch Watts.”

But notwithstanding this and other solicitations, the first edition was not published until 1707. The copyright of the hymns was sold to Mr. Lawrence, the publisher, for £10; about half a century before the same sum was given to Milton for his “Paradise Lost;” the volume instantly obtained a very large acceptance, and he then directed his attention to his version of the Psalms; this was only completed by him during the painful and distressing illness from which he suffered about 1712 and the following years, but the Psalms were not published until the year 1719.

“Dr. Watts,” says James Montgomery, in his introduction to the “Christian Psalmist,” “may almost be called the inventor of hymns in our language, for he so far departed from all precedent that few of his compositions resemble those of his forerunners, while he so far established a precedent to all his successors that none have departed from it otherwise than according to the peculiar turn of mind in the writer, and the style of expressing Christian truths employed by the denomination to which he belonged.” And, again, he says, “We come to the greatest name among hymn-writers, for we hesitate not to give that praise to Dr. Isaac Watts, since it has pleased God to confer upon him, though one of the least of the poets of this country, more glory than upon the greatest either of that or of any other, by making his ‘Divine Songs’ a more abundant and universal blessing than the verses of any uninspired penman that ever lived. In his ‘Psalms and Hymns’ (for they must be classed together) he has embraced a compass and variety of subjects which include and illustrate every truth of revelation, throw light upon every secret movement of the human heart, whether of sin, nature, or grace, and describe every kind of trial, temptation, conflict, doubt, fear, and grief, as well as the faith, hope, charity, the love, joy, peace, labour, and patience of the Christian in all stages of his course on earth, together with the terrors of the Lord, the glories of the Redeemer, and the comforts of the Holy Spirit, to urge, allure, and strengthen him by the way. There is in the pages of this evangelist a word in season for every one who needs it, in whatever circumstances he may require counsel, consolation, reproof, or instruction. We say this without reserve of the materials of his hymns; had their execution only been correspondent with the preciousness of these, we should have had a Christian Psalmist in England next (and that only in date, not in dignity) to the ‘Sweet Singer of Israel.’ Nor is this so bold a word as it may seem. Dr. Watts’ hymns are full of ‘the glorious Gospel of the blessed God;’ his themes, therefore, are much more illustrious than those of the son of Jesse, who only knew ‘the power and glory’ of Jehovah as he had ‘seen them in the sanctuary,’ which was but the shadow of the New Testament Church, as the face of Moses holding communion with God was brighter than the veil he cast over it when conversing with his countrymen.”

His attention was very early awakened to the importance and necessity for some improvement in this department of Divine service. Our readers will remember that after he had closed his academical studies at Stoke Newington, before he entered on the ministry, he returned home and lived during the years 1695 and 1696 in the old house with his father; he devoted those years, the twenty-first and twenty-second of his life, to systematic reading, meditation, and prayer; and during those years he appears to have composed the greater number of his hymns. Thus, if they are among the first effusions of his poet’s pen, they are among the best, and in this circumstance they resemble the first and chief volume of one of his successors in the art of sacred poetry in our own day, John Keble, whose “Christian Year” was the production of his earliest manhood, and all whose subsequent efforts in verse seem to be a vain striving to overtake the beauty and harmony of his first performances. Many of Watts’ later hymns are very noble and beautiful, but the greater number appear to have been composed in those early Southampton days. Dr. Gibbons says, “Mr. John Morgan, a minister of very respectable character now living at Romsey, Hants, has sent me the following information: ‘The occasion of the Doctor’s hymns was this, as I had the account from his worthy fellow-labourer and colleague, the Rev. Mr. Price, in whose family I dwelt above fifty years ago. The hymns which were sung at the Dissenting meeting at Southampton were so little to the gust of Mr. Watts, that he could not forbear complaining of them to his father. The father bid him try what he could do to mend the matter. He did, and had such success in his first essay that a second hymn was earnestly desired of him, and then a third, and fourth, etc., till in process of time there was such a number of them as to make up a volume.’”

It is remarkable that in England the power of the popular hymn was so late in discovering itself. It does not appear to have been known here in the old Roman Catholic days as assuredly it was in other countries, while in Germany the Reformation was born and brought forth amidst the chanting of noble and triumphant hymns. It appears to be impossible to realise the services of the Church without the hymn. Canon Liddon, curiously analyzing the texts of several of the Pauline Epistles, seems to demonstrate that those “faithful sayings” quoted by the apostle as the embodiment of the belief of the Church, were apostolic hymns sung in the Redeemer’s honour. And certainly the early Church expressed its faith and its best aspirations in hymns. Of this we have many and very beautiful illustrations; as we descend from that time along the line of the ages, the great Divine truths united themselves to experiences and hopes in the hearts of many, and as we read the great hymns of the Church we behold her travelling along as beneath a series of triumphal arches reared out of the service of sacred song, expressing the emotion of multitudes of spirits. For the history of holy hymns is really the history of the Church. Our sacred hooks carry us back, indeed, to the airs of Palestine; the voices of the soul strong, intuitional, and clear, rising from the sands of Arabia; from the tabernacle in Shiloh, from the forests of Lebanon, from Moses and David, from Asaph to the sons of Korah, from the majestic antiphones of the temple; the murmur of captives by Babylonish streams; and then rich and strong the raptures of the apostles, touched from the altar flame of heaven, they were not less than sacred hymns; and from their times what gushes and wails of sacred song come sounding to us, clear and shrill, over the roar of persecuting multitudes, or from desert caves or the lonely Churches of the catacombs! The rich hymns of the early Fathers are still amongst the most treasured legacies of the Church. Christian hymnology is the treasure-house into which all the best devotions of the men “of whom the world was not worthy,” exiled kings, bishops, confessors, and seers, and souls of lowlier state, have been poured, giving to us in some instances the doxology of a life-time, and associating through all ages the martyr’s or the musician’s name with that one particular chord. We have no collection yet, at all such as we desire to see, in which the varied tones of human hearts through all times are collected; the surges of old cathedral aisles; low, thrilling tones of old monks; thunder-peals of the wild, old, rugged people; chants of the ancient martyrs at the stake; the glorious and wonderful hymns of the Greek Church; the treasuries of Latin hymns, and even many of the more popular of the great vernacular German chants. For the hymns of the Church are the lamps of the Church; they are the myriad lights which stream through the darkness of the dark centuries, and they furnish the fresher beam of the new illumination, lighting the shrines and altars and chapels of modern times. What is a hymn? St. Augustine has, in a well-known passage, defined a hymn to have necessarily a threefold function. It must be praise; it must be praise to God; it must be praise in the form of song. These limitations, essential as they seem, would perhaps curtail many of our selections. We should then have to exclude much of that meditative devotion with which our best books abound; much also of that too painful and curious self-anatomy which many of our best hymn-writers permit their strains to exhibit. Yet we are very far from thinking that to be the test of sacred song which Augustine has supplied, and with which a very able writer in the “Quarterly Review,” in an article on hymnology, has quoted with approbation.[15] This test, applied to the great hymnals and hymnologists of the Church of the middle ages, would, we apprehend, be quite a failure. It is true that praise, and praise to God, and praise to God through Christ, in the form of song, should be the grand criterion for the structure of sacred verses for the use of congregations; but to what extent should these be mixed with the strains of simple devotion, the dwelling of the spirit upon the perfections of the Almighty; and with confession, the laying bare of the heart—its wants and its woes—in no morbid tone or strain, before the Divine and searching eye? Our impression surely is that hymns should represent all that the spirit desires to express in its moods of praise and prayer. By a more earnest appeal to the senses, the soul is opened; and it has been well said that so closely and mystically knit together are our higher and lower natures, that to neglect the one is to neglect the other. In prayer—the long, earnest, extemporaneous prayer—the spirit becomes abstracted, and, perhaps, even in the highest states, in the most subduing states of ecstacy, there are few of the congregation who rise as the preacher rises, or rest as he rests. The hymn, in its throbbings and tremulous and pendulous vibrations, breaks through the monotony and ennui the body imposes on the soul, and, therefore, we are quite away from that increasing number in our more immediate midst who are indisposed to avail themselves of the bursts of sensuous song. We remember that it is not long since grave exception was taken by some among us to the singing—

There is a land of pure delight,

on the ground that it contains no recognition of, or praise to, the Redeemer. But, surely, as long as beautiful sights and beautiful sounds, the solemn gloom and glory of the everlasting hills, and the endlessness of the pure sky are to be apprehended by men, so long it must be not only a desirable, but an imperative thing, that they should all be transferred to the keys of the Christian organ and of Christian speech. We are not unaware of the danger of the defence of æsthetic beauty, to spiritual Christianity, but a wise and balanced nature will know how far to advance and when to stop, and we quite believe that our doxologies, and thanksgivings, and moments of Christian fervour should lay under contribution every faculty of the soul, and that each faculty may be moved by a Divine affection, speak to the heart’s inner chambers, and relate them to the most consecrated heights.

For song being a natural expression of inflamed emotion, man must become an unnatural creature if he disdain to sing, and those who cannot themselves sing do not therefore always the less delight in the happy jubilant expressions attained by others; for man, happily, can enjoy that to which he cannot attain, and in this consists one of the great moving powers of his soul. Unconverted people sing. They have airs and melodies wafted from the ground of the nature in which they live and have their being; and when they learn and feel their heritage of salvation and immortality, the joy in God through Jesus Christ demands its appropriate expression in suitable elevated strains and tones. And Christians feel their unity, not so much in reading or in preaching as in those great expressions which rise above the colder forms of the understanding, and touch each other at the centre of some great affection of faith or hope. It is, we must think, to Protestantism that the Church is indebted for the ample and sweeping robes of spiritual melody. Papists indignantly deny this. Cardinal Wiseman has told us in a well-known article, that Protestantism is essentially undevotional. Our devotional practices and services might be improved and increased; but for the multitudes of its hymnologists, and the multitude of their songs, and for the fulness and the fervour of those same songs Protestantism seems to leave Western and Eastern Churches far behind. Although some of our spiritual airs and aspirations need the hallowing touch of time before they can receive the consecration of affection which crowns the words of Basil, and the hymns of Ambrose, and the chants of Gregory.

Thus, the history of the hymn, and of hymns from the earliest ages, their originals, their writers, their associations, would form one of the most charming chapters of Church history. To read how the great hymns grew, what study of Church history can be more delightfully entertaining? Down the long line of the ages the hymns pass on, and they, more than the creeds of councils and the clangour of warriors, seem to shape the spandrels from whence leap up the great arches of the Church. The great Church hymns, by these greatly its unity of faith is proclaimed. In what simple incidents many of the chords arose. That is a very sweet, solemn, pathetic line in our wonderful Burial Service, “In the midst of life we are in death”—in fact, it seems to be the adaptation of the first line of the rare old Latin hymn, the “Media Vita,” composed by Notker Balbulus, born of a noble family of Zurich. He attained to great eminence at St. Gall by his learning and skill in music and poetry, and his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. No one ever saw him, say the old stories of him, but he was reading, writing, or praying. The faint sound of a mill-wheel near his abbey, moved him to compose a beautiful air to some pious verses, and looking down into a deep gulf, and the danger incurred by some labourer in building a bridge over the abyss, suggested the celebrated hymn, the “Media Vita.” What a singular and interesting history there is in the hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home.” Through what generations of variations it has passed!

The history of hymns, from the earliest to the latest times, furnishes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the Church. In the hymn the spirit seems to bound into a higher life, and expressions which are scarcely admitted in cold conversation, which almost seem like exaggerations in an essay, or inflated even in a sermon, are felt to be a sweet, fitting, and natural utterance; in some happy moment a nature gifted by genius, subdued by sorrow, but lifted up to a region of serene vision and glowing consolation, found itself caught and compelled to utter an experience which to itself was not always abiding, but which often became afterwards an exceeding joy to it to remember, and which the Church at large retained as the expression of what it believed, and desired yet more fervently to believe through all subsequent ages. Thus the great hymns grew, and the Church has never been without them. Thus many of the portions of the Common Prayer Book of the Church of England and many of its collects are “the golden fruit in a network of silver;” and we in the present day are singing hymns of the holy men of old, who were moved by the Divine Spirit to utter forth the words of prayer and praise. In his Life of Dr. Watts, Dr. Johnson has many remarks which have been the subjects of criticism and exception, but in none are his remarks more open to exception than when he says that “his religious poetry is unsatisfactory.” “The paucity of its topics,” he continues, “forces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction; it is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.” If this is kindly said, still it is not true; perhaps Johnson was confining his observation, which he ought not to have done, to sacred poetry as belonging to that order represented by Milton or Phineas Fletcher; and yet this could scarcely be the case; and if he referred to his productions as a hymn-writer, then, through the long ages past, men innumerable had done well, as many a noble Latin and German hymn abundantly shows. In the first ages of the Church, the whole city of Milan was alive with hymns, and Augustine tells us how his soul was moved by the power of sacred psalms; the passage is well worth remembering. “The hymns and songs of the Church,” he says, “move my soul intensely; by the truth distilled by them into my heart the flame of piety was kindled, and my tears flowed for joy. The practice of singing had been of no long standing in Milan, it began about the year when Justinian persecuted Ambrose; the pious people, watched in the church, prepared to die with their pastor; there my mother sustained an eminent part in watching and praying; then hymns and psalms, after the manner of the East, were sung, with a view of preserving the people from weariness; and thence the custom has spread through Christian Churches.” Johnson was a pious man, the truth as it is in Jesus was held by him very heartily, but we are compelled to believe that, with all his amazing knowledge, he had not seen the innumerable hymns which through the successive ages had rained down their beautiful influences on the Church.

Luther, as is well known, ushered in his great Reformation with a voice of joy and singing. There is a pretty little anecdote telling how one day he stood at his window and heard a blind beggar sing. It was something about the grace of God, and it brought tears into his eyes, and then the good thought rushed into his soul, and it wrought its results there. “If I could only make gospel songs which would spread of themselves among the people.” And he did so. The songs were fashioned, and flew abroad like singing birds—“like a lark singing towards heaven’s gate,” says one writer; “the song shot upward, and poured far and wide over the fields and villages; and though the snare of the fowler sometimes captured the preacher, and military mobs dispersed the congregation—like the little minstrel among the clouds, too happy to be silenced, too airy to be caught, and too high to dread man’s artillery—the little song filled all the air with New Testament music, with words such as ‘Jesus,’ ‘Believe and be saved,’ ‘Gospel,’ ‘Grace,’ ‘Come unto Me,’ ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,’ and thus they became the passwords and watchwords of the Church.”[16]

Watts has been styled the Marot of England; he must receive far higher praise than could be implied by this designation; but there are resemblances between the two. Clement Marot was the favourite poet of Francis I. of France; Bayle ascribes to him the invention of modern metrical psalmody. He was a free and even profane writer, but Vatable, the Hebrew professor, suggested to him the translation of the Psalms into French verse. He did so, or rather he translated fifty-two Psalms “from the Hebrew into French rhyme.” They quite took the taste of Paris; they found universal reception, and became favourites with Francis I., who sent a copy to Charles V. Most of the pieces were set and sung to the tunes of the gay ballads of that day. They were quite the favourites of the court of Henry II. and Catherine de Medicis, especially they became the favourites of the Huguenot party; Marot, it is said, had himself belonged to the party of the Reformation. Ere long, however, the dangerous tendency of the pieces was perceived by the Sorbonne, the book was denounced; Marot fled to Turin, where he closed in poverty a life which had passed in singular vicissitudes, but which only just before had been sunned in the rays of the courtly magnificence of Paris in that splendid time. Marot’s small collection was completed by Theodore Beza, and the pieces continued long in use among the Reformed Churches; some, we believe, are, with many additions, still sung.

Our chief concern at present is with our own country, but the other reforming peoples of Europe appear to have preceded us in this holy art, although some indications are given of the existence of a very hearty and earnest religious song; in the Zurich Letters, published by the Parker Society, we find, even so early as 1560, the following letter from Bishop Jewel to Peter Martyr; he says: “Religion is now somewhat more established than it was; the people are everywhere exceedingly inclined to the better part; the practice of joining in church music has very much conduced to this; for as soon as they had commenced singing in public in one little church in London, immediately, not only the churches in the neighbourhood, but even the towns far distant, began to vie with each other in practice. You may sometimes see at St. Paul’s Cross, after the service, 6,000 persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and praising God. This sadly annoys the mass priests and the devil, for they perceive that by this means the sacred discourses sink more deeply into the minds of men, and that their kingdom is weakened and shaken at almost every note.”

As time went along in our country, there appeared a race of poets of the highest order; we need scarcely mention such names as Quarles, Vaughan, Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, John Norris, Thomas Ken, and with these names we certainly ought to include John Milton, who attempted a version of several of the Psalms, one of which is a great favourite with us to this day. Poets not remarkable for sanctity, like John Dryden, were compelled to the service of sacred song, as in the instance of his fine hymn,

Creator, Spirit, by whose aid.

Richard Baxter leaves a beautiful testimony as to the power of sacred hymns over himself; he says, “For myself I confess that harmony and melody are the pleasure and elevation of my soul; I have made psalms of praise in the holy assembly the chief delightful exercise of my religion and my life, and have helped to bear down all the objections which I have heard against church music and against the 149th and 150th Psalms. It was not the least comfort I had in the converse with my late dear wife, that our first in the morning and last at night was a psalm of praise, till the hearing of others interrupted it. Let those that savour not melody leave others to their different appetites, and be content to be so far strangers to their delights.”

With all this it is singular that an amazing prejudice existed until the time of Watts against the indulgence of congregational psalmody. Josiah Conder simply expressed the fact, when he says, “Watts was the first who succeeded in overcoming the prejudice which opposed the introduction of hymns into our public worship.” It is quite remarkable that the prejudice against congregational singing was quite as great with many of our English Churches as amongst the Papists themselves; among the Presbyterians especially, this prejudice obtained a considerable hold and lingered long. “No English Luther,” says Conder, “had risen to breathe the living spirit of evangelical devotion into heart-stirring verse adapted to the minds and feelings of the people. Are we to suppose the want was not felt, or was there anything in the aristocratic genius of the Presbyterian polity that forbade or repressed the free expression of devotion in the songs of the sanctuary?”[17]

It was about the time that Isaac Watts came to London that some of the assemblies of the saints were shaken by the innovation, of singing. The Baptists appear to have been most indisposed to the doubtful practice; and in the church of the well-known Benjamin Keach, of Southwark, the pastoral ancestor of Charles Spurgeon, when the pastor, after long argument and effort, established singing, a minority withdrew and “took refuge in a songless sanctuary,” in which the melody within the heart might be in no danger of disturbance from the perturbations of song.[18] The Society of Friends was not alone in regarding with distaste all the exercises of song in the house of the Lord. Those who are interested in the curious literature of that time may easily discover pamphlets and lectures which show “great searchings of heart” upon the question “whether Christ, as Mediator of the New Covenant, hath commanded His churches under the Gospel in all their assemblies to sing the Psalms of David, as translated into metre and musical rhyme, with tunable and conjoined voices of all the people together, as a Church ordinance, or any other song or hymn that are so composed to be sung in rhyme by a prelimited and set form of words?” The dispute was mainly confined to the Baptist churches. But in 1708 one of the Eastcheap lectures, in a discourse by Thomas Reynolds, replied to the “objections of singing.” A few years before the controversy had run strong and high. Isaac Marlow very angrily maintained the ordinary songless usage, in the year 1696, in his “Truth Soberly Defined” and in the “Controversies of Singing Brought to an End.” Benjamin Keach seems to have been the first to lead on in this suspicious diversion by the publication of his “Breach Repaired in God’s Worship; or, Singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, proved to be an Holy Ordinance of Jesus Christ.” This appeared in 1691.[19] The controversy is forgotten now, except by those who explore the more curious nooks and corners of Church history. Among the followers of Christ the Quakers are the only people who have consistently maintained their first profession, a profession, however, in which they do not imitate their founder, George Fox, of whom we especially read that he sometimes led his services with singing.

It was into this state of things that Isaac Watts was introduced. “I almost think,” says Alexander Knox, “that he was providentially appointed to furnish the revived movement of associated piety, which Divine Wisdom foresaw would take place in England in the 18th century, with an unexampled stock of materials for that department, which alone needed to be provided for, of their joint worship. Examine his poetry, and you will find that, though ability to converse with God in solitude is not absolutely overlooked, the sheet-anchor is what he calls the sanctuary. In particular in the Psalms you will find him generally applying to Christian assemblies what David said of the Temple services, as if public ordinances occupied the same supreme place in the inward and spiritual as in the outward and carnal dispensation.” This judgment of Knox is curiously involved, and its latter portion seems to contradict its former. Acquaintance with Watts’ hymns will show that Knox was quite wrong, that Watts by no means overlooked the inward and the spiritual; but his object seems to have been to provide a congregational, joint, and united service. And for this it does seem as if he in an especial manner was raised up by the providence of God; and this becomes more evident as we notice how it is from his day, and apparently very greatly from the method he created that the popular hymnology of our country, which is now surely—may we not dare to say?—the noblest, of any church or of any nation in the world, dates its true original.

We have claimed for Watts already a far higher rank than is implied by the Marot of England, but it is certain that exception will be taken to our judgment when we say that no other writer of this order approaches near to him in the elevation, not merely of expression, but of sentiment; the very grandeur, the majesty of his epithets, the inflamed utterances may be to some more quiet natures a ground of exception. To them they seem sometimes to be open to the charge of inflation. Yet every order and variety of expression, from the loud swelling jubilant rapture to the softest and sweetest strains of tenderness, find fitting utterance in them.

The efforts he made to create a sacred congregational psalmody exposed him, as we know, in his own times to obloquy, singular as it seems, even to contempt, and this contempt has been renewed in our own day. In a paper, understood to be from the pen of John Keble, in the “Quarterly Review,” it is said, “Watts was an excellent man, a strong reasoner, of undoubted piety, and perhaps—a rarer virtue—of true Christian charity; but in our opinion he laboured under irreparable deficiency for the task he undertook—he was not a poet! He had a great command of Scriptural language, and an extraordinary facility of versification; but his piety may induce us to make excuses for his poetry—his poetry will do little to excite dormant piety.” The writer then goes on to remark upon the rude, homely, and unequal strains of Watts, there follows something like a history of psalmody in England, but not another word about our author.[20] George Macdonald, the novelist, has condescended to sneer at Watts and to travesty his verses, while another writer in a fierce attack upon evangelicalism—the predominance of which in Watts’ verses we presume to be the spring of the hatred they often inspire—informs us that “most of Dr. Watts’ hymns are doggerel;” and after quoting some passages he considers to deserve this appellation—and which some of them do—he closes by saying, “These may possibly be poetry, but if they are, it is extremely plain that ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘In Memoriam’ are not poetry.” Thus by many it has come to be settled that Watts must take a very low place in English literature, if, indeed, he can be considered in any sense worthy of a place at all. Let us see how the case stands. The man who has no sympathy with Nature is not to be expected to find beauty or melody in the poetry of Burns or Wordsworth. Men who have no sympathy with evangelical truth can scarcely be expected to have much admiration for Watts; yet the gifted nobleman, who was the Mecænas of the past age, was not an indifferent critic, and when called on to cite the most perfect verse in the language he immediately instanced

There shall I bathe my weary soul

In seas of heavenly rest,

And not a wave of trouble roll

Across my peaceful breast.

A friend who, to his other attainments adds those of scholar and a critic, suggests how interesting it would be to analyze the verses of Watts, for the purpose of noting how often he evidently thought in foreign languages, and especially the Latin, with which he was so familiar; and hence we have lines which, while to some readers they appear to be doggerel, are indeed illustrations that he was using words in their real etymological sense, and thus imparting to his verse a singular beauty; thus:

How decent and how wise,

How glorious to behold,

Beyond the pomp that charms the eyes

And rites adorned with gold.

Thus, again, of God:

He sits on no precarious throne,

Nor borrows leave to be.

And thus again:

Let every creature rise and bring

Peculiar honours to our King.

Every poet is to be judged by what he is on the average. Homer has been said to nod; Milton is frequently very turgid, and innumerable passages sink quite below the usual sustained magnificence of the poem; in Shakespeare there are lines, conceits, and redundances which all good taste would wish away. The reader who judged of Keble’s capacity for poetry by his version of the Psalms, or many of his later pieces, would not form a very lofty estimate of his powers. And there are many more expressions and passages than we shall care to count among the psalms and hymns of Watts which are wholly indefensible by any standard of good taste, good sense, or good theology. Upon these, critics, like those to whom we have referred, have pounced, these they have quoted, and to the crowds of passages sublime or pathetic, strong or tender, they have most adroitly closed their eyes or their ears.

Watts has suffered in many ways. Accused by one class of critics of bad taste, and sneered at for the absence of poetic gifts by another class, his theology has been called in question as leaning towards heresy. How this charge could ever have been made by any man who had read for himself Watts’ hymns passes all our conception. But the Unitarians, with a mendacity singularly their own, have in many instances taken his hymns and garbled them to suit their own theology. The Unitarians are clever at taking possession of other people’s property, their churches, their endowments, their books, their great names, and, in Watts’ instance, their hymns. We have even seen the Te Deum adapted to a Unitarian service. The Unitarians are regarded as an exceedingly moral people, and it has often been supposed that what they lack in doctrine they make up in duty, but it is quite true that they are singularly dishonest; and the most eminent Unitarian minister in England in our day, the Rev. James Martineau, does not hesitate to charge such dishonesty upon his community; he shows how the term Unitarian has to be kept out of sight in order that certain property may be obtained. He says, “How could an organization with a doctrinal name upon its face, the Unitarian Association, go into court and plead our right to our chapels, on the ground of their doctrinal neutrality? Accordingly, another association had to be got up specially for the purpose, the Presbyterian Association, in order to evade the inconsistency; and I know it to have been the opinion of the two founders of the Unitarian Association that they committed a disastrous mistake in giving a doctrinal name to the society.” And he says to Mr. Macdonald, to whom he is writing, “Upon what ground can you claim a rightful succession, as you have so nobly done, to Matthew Henry and the founders of Crook Street, if you place the essence of your Church in doctrines which he did not hold!”[21] And thus Unitarians have constructed a science of equivocations, and tread a plank of double meanings; it expunges the term Unitarian as designative of their creed, and it takes the words representative of the creed of the great Church through all ages, and, reversing the miracle of our Lord, they use them as vessels in which the wine is turned into water. This is the principle which has governed in Unitarian hymn-books. The selection of many of the hymns from Watts, even his sacramental hymns, have in several instances not been permitted to pass unmutilated; and then, putting the top stone upon the column of injustice, the further indignity, amounting to insolence, of claiming him as a Unitarian.

It is a curious thing to find a writer in the “Wesleyan Magazine” for 1831 boasting that none of the Wesleyan hymns have ever been used for the purpose of Unitarian or Socinian worship, while Watts’ have been thus frequently employed. The writer admits that in such instances they have been altered, but says that “Charles Wesley’s hymns are made of too unbending materials ever to be adapted to Socinian worship.” He was quite mistaken in the fact, they have often been “bent” for this purpose; but it is the very peculiarity of Watts that he rises to the pre-existent and uncreated realms of majesty, of which our Lord speaks as “the glory I had with Thee before the world was.” It would be interesting to know how any Socinian or Unitarian could “bend” that magnificent hymn,

Ere the blue heavens were stretched abroad,

From everlasting was the Word:

With God He was; the Word was God,

And must divinely be adored.

By His own power were all things made;

By Him supported all things stand;

He is the whole creation’s Head,

And angels fly at His command.

Ere sin was born or Satan fell,

He led the host of morning stars:

Thy generations who can tell,

Or count the number of Thy years?

But lo! He leaves those heav’nly forms,

The Word descends and dwells in clay,

That He may hold converse with worms,

Dressed in such feeble flesh as they.

Mortals with joy beheld His face,

The Eternal Father’s only Son;

How full of truth! how full of grace!

When through His eyes the Godhead shone.

Archangels leave their high abode

To learn new myst’ries here, and tell

The loves of our descending God,

The glories of Immanuel.

But, indeed, the sum of the matter is that the theology—the evangelical theology of Watts’ hymns—is the chief reason of the exception taken to the poetry. He is in a very eminent sense the poet of the Atonement; he saw the infinite meanings in that great expression “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” We have heard some quote and speak of what they have called that dreadful verse!—

Blood hath a voice to pierce the skies,

Revenge the blood of Abel cries;

But the dear stream, when Christ was slain,

Speaks peace as loud from every vein!

He saw infinite attributes in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God manifested in the flesh, and he saw infinite consequences involved in the sacrifice of Christ. It was all to him “the wisdom of God in a mystery,” it was all the great power of God. Thus we have called him the evangelical poet, the poet of the Atonement. Hence those who have a distaste for his doctrine will dislike his verse.

It was the nature of Watts’ theology that it entered more into the heavenly places, the timeless, and the unconditioned purposes of the Infinite and Eternal Mind. He was a student, a real and a hard student, and the speculations of his intellect whenever he betook himself to verse, presented themselves to his mind suffused in the glowing but ineffable lights of eternity; he seemed to be fond of revolving eternal truths. We hope not to be misunderstood if we speak of him as a mystic. Although in his prose writings so little of the mystic appears, in his hymns he is perpetually moving amidst the adumbrations of uncreated mind. What an illustration of this is in that extraordinary hymn,

Lord we are blind, we mortals blind.

Much of the mystic spirit which pervades his verse is perceptible in the fine paradox in the following expressions of the last verse:

The Lord of Glory builds His seat

Of gems unsufferably bright;

And lays beneath His sacred feet

Substantial beams of gloomy night!

It is quite vain work to argue with those who take exception to these expressions. If they are not felt they will not be seen. If we say Watts was a mystic, the expression will astonish some of our readers. The hard abstract lines of cold creeds, and bodies of theology, suddenly in his verse flashed out radiant and visible as planets in southern heavens; and his words expressing truths which seem cold in the creed of Calvin or the rigid framework of the confessions and catechisms of Puritanism, became like wings of ardent fire, tipped with seraphic light. There was even an oriental splendour about his expressions. He was mighty in the Scriptures, and we believe it will not be possible to find a verse or phrase which is not justified by Scriptural expression. His verse—the verse of the man who has been claimed as a Unitarian—was incessantly struggling up to express in glowing metre those sublime flights of thought which have always been at once the prevailing glory and gloom of what is called the Calvinistic theology. We note this in such pieces as

What equal honours shall we bring

To Thee, O Lord, our God, the Lamb?

Since all the notes that angels sing

Are far inferior to Thy name.

Or,

When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of Glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride.

Or,

Up to the fields where angels lie,

And living waters gently roll,

Pain would my thoughts leap out and fly,

But sin hangs heavy on my soul.

Thy wondrous blood, dear dying Christ,

Can make this load of guilt remove,

And Thou canst hear me where Thou flyest,

On Thy kind wings, celestial Dove!

Or,

Descend from heaven, immortal Dove,

Stoop down and take us on Thy wings,

And mount and hear us far above

The reach of these inferior things.

Or the hymn commencing

Oh the delights! the heavenly joys!

Or that,

Now to the Lord a noble song!

Watts, we have said, has suffered in many ways. No hymns, we will be bound to say, in our language have suffered so much from garbling and mangling; many of them have passed through a perfect martyrdom of maltreatment. Dr. Kennedy, of Shrewsbury, in his “Hymnologia Christiana,” will not admit “When I can read my title clear” to be a hymn, because it is gravely wrong in doctrine; and “There is a land of pure delight” is not admitted, because it is seriously faulty in style. But if an impartial reader should desire to sum up the great merits of Watts, it will perhaps be found that there is no doctrine of the great Christian creed and no great Christian emotion which does not find happy and frequently most faultless expression. His hymns of Praise to God, are frequently among the most noble in our language; for instance:

Sing to the Lord who built the skies,

The Lord that reared this stately frame;

Let all the nation sound His praise,

And lands unknown repeat His name.

He formed the seas, He formed the hills,

Made every drop, and every dust,

Nature and time, with all her wheels,

And pushed them into motion first.

Now from His high imperial throne

He looks far down upon the spheres;

He bids the shining orbs roll on,

And round He turns the hasty years.

Thus shall this moving engine last

Till all His saints are gathered in,

Then for the trumpet’s dreadful blast,

To shake it all to dust again!

Yet, when the sound shall tear the skies,

And lightning burn the globe below,

Saints, you may lift your joyful eyes,

There’s a new heaven and earth for you.

He was fond of singing the uncreated glories of the Son of God, His official and mediatorial Majesty, as in that complete and glowing hymn,

Join all the glorious names.

Or,

Go worship at Immanuel’s feet.

He had to vindicate himself during his life for the use of doxologies, or hymns of praise to the Holy Spirit, as in

Eternal Spirit, we confess

And sing the wonders of Thy grace.

Or the invocation,

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove!

There is an intense and immediate objectiveness about Watts’ hymns; praise, like a clear and glowing firmament, encompasses them all, and the objects of adoration revolve, like the firmamental lights, clear and distinct to the vision; they are often interior and meditative, but they never indicate a merely morbid introspection; they seem to glow in the light of the objects of their adoration: again and again we are impressed by their reverent effulgence. They are not the singular rapture over the worshipper’s own state of feeling, they are not even rapture so much on account of what is seen; they are praise and honour to the objects themselves, and they have indeed to be perverted before they can express any other sentiments than those they originally utter.

Few writers more affectingly set forth the death of Christ:

He dies! the Friend of sinners dies!

Lo! Salem’s daughters weep around;

A solemn darkness veils the skies,

A sudden trembling shakes the ground.

Break off your tears, ye saints, and tell

How high our great Deliverer reigns;

Sing how He spoiled the hosts of hell,

And led the monster Death in chains.

Say, “Live for ever, wondrous King!

Born to redeem and strong to save;”

Then ask the monster, “Where’s thy sting?”

And “Where’s thy victory, boasting grave?”

The hymn, indeed, contains some weak lines, but the first and the three last verses have even great dramatic vigour and strength.

But hymns are not always to shine with splendid lights, they are to soothe and comfort; hence such words as—

Come hither, all ye weary souls.

We remember a venerable minister eighty-eight years of age, who filled a conspicuous place in the Church of his day; while he was dying his daughter said to him:

Jesus can make a dying bed

As soft as downy pillows are,

While on His breast I lean my head,

And breathe my life out sweetly there.

The old man listened as well as he could to the verse, then turned his head on the pillow, repeated the words “my head,” and so died. Perhaps some critic would remark that the versification is slightly inaccordant or defective, but its tenderness has propitiated many a dying pang.

Devotion is the eminent attribute of these hymns,—ardent, inflamed rapture of holiness. Well has it been said “to elevate to poetic altitudes;” every truth in Christian experience and revealed religion needs the strength and sweep of an aquiline pinion; and this is what Isaac Watts has done; he has taken almost every topic which exercises the understanding and the heart of the believer, and has not only given to it a devotional aspect, but has wedded it to immortal numbers; and whilst there is little to which he has not shown himself equal, there is nothing he has done for mere effect. Rapt, yet adoring, sometimes up among the thunder-clouds, yet most reverential in his highest range, the “good matter” is in a song, and the sweet singer is upborne as on the wings of eagles; but even from that triumphal car, and when nearest the home of the Seraphim, we are comforted to find descending lowly lamentations and confessions of sin—new music, no doubt, but the words with which we have been long familiar in the house of our pilgrimage.

Religion never was designed

To make our pleasures less.

Thou art the sea of love

Where all my pleasures roll,

The circle where my passions move,

And centre of my soul.

To Thee my spirits fly

With infinite desire,

And yet how far from Thee I lie!

Dear Jesus, raise me higher.

I cannot bear Thy absence, Lord,

My life expires if Thou depart;

Be thou, my heart, still near my God,

And Thou, my God, be near my heart.

Such are the streams of devotion on which we are borne in the verses of Watts.

Some of his hymns are like collects, the compact, comforting little watchwords and creeds of the Church—

Firm as the earth Thy Gospel stands.

Or—

Our God, how firm His promise stands.

Sometimes we have a fine bold trumpet-like tone of Faith:

Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme,

And speak some boundless thing;

The mighty works, or mightier name

Of our eternal King.

His very word of grace is strong

As that which built the skies;

The Voice that rolls the stars along

Speaks all the promises.

He said, “Let the wide heaven be spread,”

And heaven was stretched abroad:

“Abra’m, I’ll be thy God,” He said,

And He was Abra’m’s God.

How well he has expressed the depths of contrition in his version of the 51st Psalm, what plaintive compassion—

O Thou that hear’st when sinners cry!

And equally well he has depicted the happiness and serenity of “a heart sprinkled from an evil conscience:”

O happy soul that lives on high!

Or—

Lord, how secure and blest are they

Who feel the joys of pardoned sin.

Then how vigorously his notes rouse and stir to the activities of the Christian life:

Are we the soldiers of the cross,

The followers of the Lamb?

Or—

Stand up, my soul, shake off thy fears!

The patriotic lyrics and hymns of Watts have sounded, how in his day they throbbed, with that pulse of prayer for our country:

Shine, mighty God! on Britain shine

With beams of heavenly grace;

Reveal Thy power through all our coasts,

And show Thy smiling face.

Amidst our isle, exalted high,

Do Thou our glory stand;

And, like a wall of guardian fire,

Surround the favoured land.

And when the Americans held their great “Thanksgiving Day,” Watts’ hymn, always sung to the venerable old tune of St. Martin’s, was, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, the national hymn of the Puritans.[22]

Let children hear the mighty deeds

Which God performed of old,

Which in our younger years we saw,

And which our fathers told.

Our lips shall tell them to our sons,

And they again to theirs,

That generations yet unborn

May teach them to their heirs.

The extent to which the verses of Watts entered into all the incidents of the social life of the United States is well illustrated in the “Pearl of Orr’s Island:” in a very striking and pathetic manner the following stanzas often interlace the conversations of that charming story:

Our God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

Under the shadow of Thy throne

Thy saints have dwelt secure:

Sufficient is Thine arm alone,

And our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,

Or earth received her frame,

From everlasting Thou art God,

To endless years the same.

Thy word commands our flesh to dust—

“Return, ye sons of men;”

All nations rose from earth at first,

And turn to earth again.

A thousand ages in Thy sight

Are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night

Before the rising sun.

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,

With all their lives and cares,

Are carried downwards by the flood,

And lost in following years.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

Like flowery fields the nations stand,

Pleased with the morning light;

The flowers beneath the mower’s hand

Lie withering ere ’tis night.

Our God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Be Thou our guard while troubles last,

And our eternal home.

And we are reminded that this grand hymn, which we have heard sung in barns and meeting-houses, in kirks and cathedrals, also comes with tender pathos in one of the affecting scenes of Charlotte Brontë.

What grand expressions of personal faith abound among these verses, what a radiant casting back of the blunted arrows of doubt and unbelief!

Questions and doubts are heard no more;

Let Christ and joy be all our theme;

His Spirit seals His Gospel sure,

To every soul that trusts in Him.

Learning and wit may cease their strife,

When miracles with glory shine;

The Voice that calls the dead to life

Must be almighty and Divine.

What faith in the Saviour’s glorious resurrection and second advent!—

With joy we tell this scoffing age,

He that was dead hath left His tomb;

He lives above their utmost rage,

And we are waiting till He come.

Sabbath songs, songs for the social service at the close of the day, songs for every variety of Christian ordinance, songs especially for the Lord’s Supper, songs of grief as the soul realises the death of the Redeemer, songs of rapture as the salvation becomes apprehensible—

Salvation! O the joyful sound!

Or—

Plunged in a gulf of dark despair.

The first Elegies in our language are among Watts’ hymns. When early manhood has been smitten down in its green prime, how finely swells aloft that grand elegy with its triumphant close, the paraphrase of the text, “He weakened my strength in the way. He shortened my days:”

It is the Lord our Saviour’s hand

Weakens our strength amidst the race:

Disease and death at His command

Arrest us and cut short our days.

Spare us, O Lord, aloud we pray,

Nor let our sun go down at noon;

Thy years are one eternal day,

And must Thy children die so soon?

Yet in the midst of death and grief,

This thought our sorrow shall assuage,

“Our Father and our Saviour live;

Christ is the same through every age.”

Before Thy face Thy church shall live,

And on Thy throne Thy children reign:

This dying world shall they survive,

And the dead saints be raised again.

And when some form more than ordinarily venerable or beautiful, holy or beloved, has been lowered into its resting-place, while they laid wreaths of camellias and evergreens on the coffin, uprose that wonderful elegy:

Hear what the Voice from heaven proclaims

For all the pious dead!

Sweet is the savour of their names,

And soft their sleeping bed.

And how often, in similar circumstances, that other sweet requiem:

Why do we mourn departing friends?

Amidst trembling prayers, in the darkened room, in the presence of some sweet shrouded and coffined form, the memory of some soft sealed face and folded hands, and spirit for ever at rest, has rose the hymn into pensive rapture:

Are we not tending upward too,

As fast as time can move?

Nor would we wish the hours more slow

To keep us from our love.

Contrasting the evanescence of man, not merely with the eternity of God, but with the eternity of Christ, and the promised prevalence of His salvation everywhere, who has not seen large meetings leap into hearty fervour at the announcement of that noble prophecy:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

Does his successive journeys run.

Who has more triumphantly followed the spirit of the believer into its glorious home and rest? Watts had a singularly bold and majestic manner in striking in the very first words of a hymn the key-note of the whole piece; indeed there was usually a singular fitness and force in the first line.

Give me the wings of faith to rise

Within the veil, and see

The saints above; how great their joys,

How vast their glories be!

Some critics have objected to what seems to us the sweet natural pathos of that verse:

How we should scorn the clothes of flesh,

These fetters and this load,

And long for evening to undress,

That we may rest with God.

Or that fine piece:

Absent from flesh! O blissful thought!

And the following verses, not so often quoted, or so well known:

And is this heaven? and am I there?

How short the road! how swift the flight!

I am all life, all eye, all ear;

Jesus is here my soul’s delight.

Is this, the heavenly Friend who hung

In blood and anguish on the tree,

Whom Paul proclaimed and David sung,

Who died for them, who died for me?

Creator-God, eternal light,

Fountain of good, tremendous power,

Oceans of wonders, blissful sight!

Beauty and love unknown before.

Thy grace, Thy nature, all unknown

In yon dark region whence I came,

Where languid glimpses from Thy throne

And feeble whispers teach Thy name.

I’m in a world where all is new,

Myself, my God; O blest amaze!

Not my best hopes or wishes knew

To form a shadow of His grace.

Fixed on my God, my heart, adore;

My restless thoughts, forbear to rove;

Ye meaner passions, stir no more;

But all my powers be joy and love.

And one of the most touching of his funeral pieces is that magnificent funeral march for some departed saint, and worthy of the grand air to which it has often been sung—Handel’s Dead March in “Saul:”

Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb!

Take this new treasure to thy trust,

And give these sacred relics room

Awhile to slumber in the dust.

Nor pain, nor grief, nor anxious fear

Invade thy bounds: no mortal woes

Can reach the forms which slumber here,

And angels watch their soft repose.

So Jesus slept! God’s dying Son

Passed through the grave and blessed the bed:

Rest here, dear saint, till from His throne

The morning break and pierce the shade!

Break from His throne, illustrious morn!

Attend, O earth, His sovereign word;

Restore thy trust—a glorious form

Called to ascend and meet the Lord.

A judicious and compendious arrangement in order of the hymns of Watts, would thus show that every form of expression apparently necessary for public service finds some adequate representation: worship, confession, prayer, expression of faith; and those churches which for nearly a century had no other volume to assist them in their public devotions, do not deserve so much pity as has very frequently been expressed for them. Soon after their publication they came to be used outside of the communion for which they were designed. Ralph Erskine, of Dunfermline, drew a great number of the verses into his most remarkable volumes of divine drollery, sometimes in a most remarkable manner debasing the metre. Should the reader care to see an instance of this he may find it in “Scripture Songs,” Book III., Song III.; but there are many other instances.

Admirers of Wesley are fond of citing against Watts the well-known saying attributed to him, that he would have given all he had written for the credit of being the author of Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Come, O thou Traveller unknown.” It has been truly said, his excessive modesty often gloomed his greatness; Gibbons makes some such remark; it, at any rate, kept all power and disposition to self-assertion in the shade; but it is no reason why his admirers now should imitate, with reference to himself, that virtue, and be indifferent to his great powers as a sacred poet.

No hymn-writer has suffered so much from mutilation as Watts. Sometimes the attempts at improvement have been ludicrous. We remember a specimen of many:

The little ants, for one poor grain

Exert themselves and strive.

Instead of—

Labour and tug and strive.

But such emendations are innocent when compared with those in which the entire doctrine of the hymn has been expelled.[23] Lord Selborne (Sir Roundell Palmer) has said, “Watts altered some of Charles Wesley’s hymns, much to his brother John’s discontent, as he testifies in the preface to his Hymn Book.” We have very little hesitation in assuring his lordship that he is mistaken, and that he will find no instance in which Watts altered, however slightly, Wesley’s hymns. In two or three instances he altered and appropriated from Tate and Brady and Patrick, and acknowledged the extent of his alterations in notes, a courtesy never extended to himself.

Before Jehovah’s awful throne,

is Watts altered, and admirably altered, by two words in the first line, but the entire hymn was appropriated; but indeed it was impossible that Watts could alter Wesley. Watts’ work was all done, and had long been done, before Wesley appeared. Literary plagiarism we believe to be a much less common sin than many suppose. Minds on the same plane of thought and feeling are likely to discover the same images, and to indulge in the same expressions. Certainly Mr. Milner, in his “Life of Watts,” is wrong when he says (page 276) that Watts’ well-known lines:

The opening heavens around me shine

With beams of sacred bliss,

were probably suggested to Watts by Gray’s—

The meanest flow’ret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening paradise.

Watts’ lines were published nine years before Gray was born!

Comparing the two great hymn-writers, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, an adequate sense may be arrived at, if the very important distinctions are noticed between the work proposed in the verses of the two admirable men. It is our conviction that while Watts has, in the stricter term of the word poet, included in himself Charles Wesley, the purpose of Wesley’s verse was especially to describe frames, feelings, and experiences, to set these to a sweet strain of popular melody, such as might rouse the thousands for whom they were intended. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrasted sense Watts and the Wesleys entertained of their performances. The preface published to the Wesleyan Hymn Book, in 1779, is one of the most extravagant efforts of conceit in our language; it is somewhat wonderful that the good taste of the Wesleyan Conference does not omit it from the editions now in the course of circulation. “Here,” it says, “is no doggerel, no botches, nothing put in to patch up the rhyme, no feeble expletives; here is nothing tinged or bombast, or low and creeping; here are no cant expressions, no words without meaning; those who impute this to us know not what they say.” “Here are,” it continues, “the purity, elegance, and strength of the English language, and the utmost simplicity and plainness suited to every capacity.” It goes on to assert that “in the following hymns is to be found the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art or labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour a man may become a tolerable imitation of Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, and may heap together pretty compound epithets, such as pale-eyed, meek-eyed, and the like; but unless he be born a poet he will never attain to the genuine spirit of poetry.” How remarkably all this is in contrast to the spirit of the writer whose hymns had been before the world nearly half a century before this first collected edition of the Wesleys’ hymns was published. John Wesley included many of Watts’ hymns in his own hymn book, but their authorship was not acknowledged; and many others were vigorous translations from the German of Zinzendorf, Paul Gerhardt, etc.; Watts’ hymn book was entirely and wholly his own.

It is ungracious work to bring into the rivalry of comparison or contrast two singers who have so sacredly served the Church. Yet we will dare to say it here, in the hymns of Watts there is that peculiar accent, that note of pain, that majesty and melody of the deep minor chord—that sounding of a deeper experience—that ineffable something which testifies to a capacity of agony, as well as to the assurance of ecstasy which is the true poet’s prerogative and power. We would even say the very test of Watts’ genius and experience is that many of his pieces, and some of his very highest, are unfitted for more than the select experience. Wesley’s are more easy, common-place, and popular. The hymns of Watts, however, will stand a far higher test than that of the suffrages of large congregations or ecclesiastical communities—the sighs of the sick-room, the death-bed, the bereaved chamber, the private closet of heart devotion. With these verses on their lips refreshing their hearts, how many pilgrims have approached the

Land of pure delight

Where saints immortal reign.

Most of what has gone before applies to the hymns; but some especial reference should be made to the version of the Psalms. Palmer, in his “Life of Watts,” says, “This is generally allowed to be his capital production in poetry, with which, in point of utility, none of his other pieces will bear comparison.” From this verdict there will be many dissentients. It is certainly true that in some of the pieces he rises to the highest rendering of the evangelical sense of the Psalter. His object was to interpret the Psalms of Christ; it is not therefore very remarkable that when a young minister inquired of an elder which was the best commentary on the Psalms, he replied, “Watts’ version of them.” This judgment was not so singular as it seems.

Watts’ may be called the Messianic version of the Psalms; he felt that without this construction they must be very greatly inexplicable. The unfolding this idea popularly was an immense boon to the churches. We are to remember that the Book of Psalms was the great Hebrew Psalter; it was the Book of Common Prayer and Praise, and when the Christian Church arose, it still continued the use of these divine airs for the expression of its experiences and its faith. Jerome says: “The labourer, while he holds the handle of the plough, sings Alleluia, the tired reaper employs himself on the Psalms, and the vine-dresser, while lopping the vines with his curved hook, sings something out of David; these are our ballads in this part of the world; these, to use the common expression, are our love songs.” Chrysostom has a noble panegyric upon the use of the Psalms in the service of the Church. “If we keep vigil in the Church, David comes first, last, and midst. If early in the morning, David is first, last, and midst.” Again, he goes on to declare how, “in the funeral solemnities for the dead, or when the girl sits at home spinning, and not in cities alone, and not alone in churches, but in the forum and in the wilderness, and even in the uninhabitable desert, David excites to the praises of God.” And this has continued true ever since.

The case being so, why was it that, alike in Hebrew and in Christian days, the Book of Psalms has had such a sovereign power over holy souls? The personality of David has even obscured the higher personality and the Messianic symmetry; it is forgotten that in the Hebrew language David signifies the beloved, the darling, the chosen one, and that many of the Psalms, regarded as personal to him, are rather to be apprehended in the same manner in which his name occurs in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in which we have “the key of David,” “David, a leader and commander to the people,” in “the sure mercies of David,” terms the fulness of which is lost sight of by their being associated with the Hebrew prince, rather than with Him who is the infinitely beloved of God and man. Thus in numerous Psalms to which the prefix is given, “A Psalm of, or by, David,” a stricter reading would be, “A Psalm to, or for, David;” in some instances this sense comes out with great force, and thus they illustrate that text in Ezekiel, penned hundreds of years after David’s death, “I will set one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David (i.e. the Beloved). He shall feed them and be their shepherd.” What a different fulness of meaning is given to such innumerable passages as those in the 123rd Psalm, “For thy servant David’s sake turn not away the face of thine anointed;” “The Lord hath sworn unto David, Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne:” if we substitute the Beloved one for David in many such passages, and what a rich meaning is unfolded! David was perhaps the author of all these; but in that wonderful spirit of the Hebrew playing upon words, just as he rose from his own occupation to exclaim, “The Lord is my shepherd,” so he rose from his own name, transforming it into a Divine synonym, searching for its origin and filling it out with divine and elevated ideas.[24] This was the spirit in which Watts in his version restored the Psalms to Christ, and removed them from the lower and more contracted circle of human personality to the suffering and reigning Messiah. Most readers were thankful for the noble restoration of the evangelical regalia to their rightful owner; and only here and there one or two, like the indecent and insolent Bradbury, took exception to the performance as “robbing them of their book of Praise,” as that rash and vehement man, referring to the version of Watts, said, “David is no longer suffered to be our Psalmist.”

This, then, is the spirit in which Watts translated the Psalms, to the Christian sense preserving, as we have said, the Messianic idea throughout, as in that stirring call to Christian service:

Arise, O King of Grace, arise

And enter to Thy rest!

Lo! Thy church waits with longing eyes

Thus to be owned and blest.

Enter with all Thy glorious train,

Thy Spirit and Thy word;

All that the Ark did once contain

Could not such grace afford.

The aim of Watts in his Book of Psalms was to translate the Old Testament phraseology into a New Testament language and experience. James Hamilton has illustrated this by an anecdote which it can scarcely be impertinent to quote here; he says: “I cannot tell it accurately, but I have heard of a godly couple whose child was sick and at the point of death. It was unusual to pray together except at the hours of ‘exercise;’ however, in her distress, the mother prevailed on her husband to kneel down at the bedside and offer a word of prayer. The good man’s prayers were chiefly taken from the best of liturgies, the book of Psalms; and after a long and reverential introduction from the 90th and elsewhere, he proceeded, ‘Lord, turn again the captivity of Zion; then shall our mouth be filled with laughter and our tongue with singing.’ And as he was proceeding, ‘turn again our captivity,’ the poor agonized mother interrupted him: ‘Eh, man, you are aye drawn out for thae Jews, but it’s our bairn that’s deein’,’ at the same time clasping her hands and crying, ‘Lord, help us; oh, give us back our darling, if it be Thy holy will; and if he is to be taken, oh take him to Thyself!’ And fond as I am,” continues James Hamilton, “of scriptural phrases in prayer, I am fonder still of reality. It is a striking fact that the prayers addressed to Christ in the Gospels are hardly one of them in Old Testament language; just as New Testament songs embed in a language of their own Old Testament phrases;” and, as we may add, just as the woman and her husband had the same purpose in their prayers.

And it is in this way Watts seems to apologize for his attempts when he says, in his introduction to his version of the Psalms:

HEBREW MELODIES CHRISTIANIZED.

“But since I believe that any Divine sentence, or Christian verse, agreeable to Scripture, may be sung, though it be composed by men uninspired, I have not been so curious and exact in striving everywhere to express the ancient sense and meaning of David, but have rather expressed myself as I may suppose David would have done, had he lived in the days of Christianity; and by this means, perhaps, I have sometimes hit upon the true intent of the Spirit of God in those verses farther and clearer than David himself could ever discover, as St. Peter encourages me to hope (1 Peter i. 11, 13) where he acknowledges that the ancient prophets, who foretold of the grace that should come to us, were, in some measure, ignorant of this great salvation; for though they testified of the sufferings of Christ and His glory, yet they were forced to search and inquire after the meaning of what they spake or wrote. In several other places I hope my reader will find a natural exposition of many a dark and doubtful text, and some new beauties and connections of thought discovered in the Jewish poet, though not in the language of a Jew. In all places I have kept my grand design in view, and that is to teach my author to speak like a Christian. For why should I now address God my Saviour in a song, with burnt sacrifices of fatlings, and with the fat of rams? Why should I pray to be sprinkled with hyssop, or recur to the blood of bullocks and goats? Why should I bind my sacrifice with cords to the horns of an altar, or sing the praises of God to high-sounding cymbals, when the Gospel has shown me a nobler atonement for sin, and appointed a purer and more spiritual worship? Why must I join with David in his legal or prophetic language to curse my enemies, when my Saviour in His sermons has taught me to love and bless them? Why may not a Christian omit all those passages of the Jewish psalmist that tend to fill the mind with overwhelming sorrows, despairing thoughts, or bitter personal resentments, none of which are well suited to the spirit of Christianity, which is a dispensation of hope and joy and love? What need is there that I should wrap up the shining honours of my Redeemer in the dark and shadowy language of a religion that is now for ever abolished, especially when Christians are so vehemently warned in the Epistles of St. Paul against a Judaizing spirit in their worship as well as doctrine? And what fault can there be in enlarging a little on the more useful subjects in the style of the Gospel, where the psalm gives any occasion, since the whole religion of the Jews is censured often in the New Testament as a defective and imperfect thing?”

And, again, he says on the—

SPIRIT OF THE HEBREW PSALMS.

“Moses, Deborah, and the princes of Israel; David, Asaph, Habakkuk, and all the saints under the Jewish state, sung their own joys and victories, their own hopes, and fears, and deliverances, as I hinted before; and why must we, under the Gospel, sing nothing else but the joys, hopes, and fears of Asaph and David? Why must Christians be forbid all other melody but what arises from the victories and deliverances of the Jews? David would have thought it very hard to be confined to the words of Moses, and sung nothing else on all his rejoicing days but the drowning of Pharaoh of the fifteenth of Exodus. He might have supposed it a little unreasonable, when he had peculiar occasions of mournful music, if he had been forced to keep close to Moses’ prayer in the ninetieth Psalm, and always have sung over the shortness of human life, especially if he were not permitted the liberty of a paraphrase; and yet the special concerns of David and Moses were much more akin to each other than ours are to either of them, and yet they were both of the same religion; but ours is very different. It is true that David has left us a richer variety of holy songs than all that went before him; but, rich as it is, it is still far short of the glorious things that we Christians have to sing before the Lord; we and our churches have our special affairs as well as they. Now, if by a little turn of their words, or by the change of a short sentence, we may express our own meditations, joys, and desires in the verse of those ancient psalmists, why should we be forbidden this sweet privilege? Why should we, under the Christian dispensation, be tied up to forms more than the Jews themselves were, and such as are much more improper for our age and state too? Let us remember that the very power of singing was given to human nature chiefly for this purpose, that our own warmest affections of soul might break out into natural or divine melody, and that the tongue of the worshipper might express his own heart.”

The following well expresses his modest estimate of his work: “I must confess I have never yet seen any version or paraphrase of the Psalms, in their own Jewish sense, so perfect as to discourage all further attempts. But whoever undertakes the noble work, let him bring with him a soul devoted to piety, an exalted genius, and withal a studious application; for David’s harp abhors a profane finger and disdains to answer to an unskilful or a careless touch. A meaner pen may imitate at a distance; but a complete translation or a just paraphrase demands a rich treasury of diction, an exalted fancy, a quick taste of devout passion, together with judgment, strict and severe, to retrench every luxuriant line, and to maintain a religious sovereignty over the whole work. Thus the psalmist of Israel might arise in Great Britain in all his Hebrew glory, and entertain the more knowing and polite Christians of our age. But still I am bold to maintain the general principle on which my present work is founded; and that is, that if the brightest genius on earth, or an angel from heaven, should translate David and keep close to the sense and style of the inspired author, we should only obtain thereby a bright or heavenly copy of the devotions of the Jewish king; but it could never make the fittest psalm-book for a Christian people. It was not my design to exalt myself to the rank and glory of poets, but I was ambitions to be a servant to the Churches and a helper to the joy of the meanest Christian. Though there are many gone before me who have taught the Hebrew psalmist to speak English, yet I think I may assume this pleasure of being the first who hath brought down the royal author into the common affairs of the Christian life, and led the Psalmist of Israel into the Church of Christ, without anything of a Jew about him. And whensoever there shall appear any paraphrase of the Book of Psalms that retains more of the savour of David’s piety, or discovers more of the style and spirit of the Gospel, with a superior dignity of verse, and yet the lines as easy and flowing and the sense and language as level to the lowest capacity, I shall congratulate the world, and consent to say, Let this attempt of mine be buried in silence.”

This chapter must not be closed without some slight reference to the wonderful history and anecdote connected with these hymns; verses from them have been murmured from innumerable death-beds, have shone out as memorial lines on innumerable tombstones, and have proved, in how many instances, to be the converting word, the power of God unto salvation. When the great orator and statesman of the United States, Daniel Webster, lay dying, almost the last words which fell from those eloquent lips which had so often moved in the Senate with thrilling and overwhelming power, were those words of Watts’ 51st Psalm; and he repeated them again and again:

Show pity, Lord: O Lord, forgive;

Let a repenting rebel live;

Are not Thy mercies large and free?

May not a sinner trust in Thee?