“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;