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: