Though now within a short walk of the great city, it seemed a sequestered village when Watts resided there. The roads were probably not of the best, and there were no lights upon them. The woods intervening and in the neighbourhood, would furnish shelter for many social annoyances, and even dangers. But it was nearer to London than the more stately and palace-like abode of Theobalds, and, noble as it was, it was altogether a plainer habitation. Watts was probably, after the death of Sir Thomas Abney, very much the modest master of both abodes. Until within a short period of its dissolution the house contained such memories of Watts as adorned the walls of Theobalds. We have seen that he was a painter, and the fashion at that time was to adorn the wainscoting and walls and panels. There were noble rooms in the mansion, and thus were they relieved, mostly by subjects of a classical, mythical, and allegorical character. He painted four characters of Youth and Age, Mirth and Grief, for two of the parlours, “where,” says Dr. Robinson, “they are at this present day.” To the time of its fall the mansion testified to the taste and elegance with which it was fitted up, the painted room displaying costly ornaments, and altogether a fine specimen of the age in which it was arranged; the mouldings gilt, and the whole of the panels and sides painted with subjects from “Ovid,” and on the window-shutters pictorial decorations, supposed to have been the production of the pencil of Watts, emblematical of Death and Grief, and evidently alluding to the decease of Mr. Gunston. The elms, to which reference has been already made, continued to excite attention to the last. Planted long before the building was commenced, they continued to wave their widowed branches after it had passed away. Dr. Robinson mentions a portrait of Watts which long continued in the house, an indifferent portrait of him when a young man, in a blue night-gown, wig and band, and three or four duplicate mezzotinto prints of him when older by G. White, 1727, clerically habited, with a Bible in his right hand, and under him in capitals:
ISAAC WATTS
“In Christo mea vita latet, mea gloria Christus, hunc lingua, hunc calamus celebrat nec magis, tacebit. In uno Jesu omnia.”
And on the upper corner “To live is Christ, to die is gain.”
Here his last days were passed; Dr. Gibbons does not mention in what year the family left Theobalds to return to Stoke Newington, but it must have been about thirteen years before his death; and during this time, although his life was clouded by many pains and infirmities, he still continued the active operations of his pen, and, as we shall have occasion to see, the active operations of his mind, employing himself especially in attempting to solve what seems to many the insolvable question of the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead. But as he descended towards the closing years it seems that he suffered greatly from some members of his own family. In a letter from the Rev. John Barker to Dr. Doddridge, written nearly two years before Watts’ death, we read: “The behaviour of Dr. Watts and the wretch Buckston towards Dr. Isaac is a most marvellous, infamous, enormous wickedness; Lady Abney, with inimitable steadiness and prudence, keeps our friend in peaceful ignorance, and his enemies at a becoming distance, so that in the midst of the persecution of that righteous man he lives comfortably; and when a friend asks him how he does, answers, ‘Waiting God’s leave to die.’”[40]
