Isaac Watts; his life and writings, his homes and friends

by Edwin Paxton Hood

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