Ages differ, and men differ with their age. This is the place neither to compare nor to contrast; but in an eminent sense Watts appears to have fulfilled himself. He drank deep from every kind of learning: we have seen that he wrote upon every kind of subject; and although it is the fashion now to pass him by, and even to underrate many of those pieces in prose and verse which were long held as the most cherished heirlooms of the Church, we shall have to search long and far to discover a more ample and consecrated intelligence, a more conscientious and laborious worker, than the mild, the modest, yet majestic hermit, philosopher, and sweet singer of Theobalds and Stoke Newington.
MONUMENT OF DR. WATTS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Dr. Isaac Watts,” a Lecture by Hermann Carlyle, LL.B., seventh minister of the church of which Dr. Watts’ father was for forty-eight years a deacon.
[2] It is interesting to remember that Isaac Watts the elder was the first local trustee to Robert Thorner’s munificent bequest, which is now the grandest of all the Southampton charities, and has made the name of Thorner in that town a household word.
[3] The soil of Southampton seems to have been favourable to the production of the lyrical faculty, although it is not probable that many of those whose hearts have been stirred by the holy strains of Watts have been acquainted with the melodies of one of the most national of English song-writers, the laureate of sailors, also a townsman of Southampton, Thomas Dibden.
[4] See [Appendix].
[5] Walter Wilson’s “Life of Defoe,” vol. i. pp. 26, 27.
[6] “The Improvement of the Mind,” chap. iv. of “Books and Reading.”