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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

The life of Watts had very little in it at any time which related to the history of the period in which he lived, yet it is impossible not to notice that these first years of his life at Southampton were among the most exciting and memorable of the country’s history. What England was Lord Macaulay has well described in perhaps one of the most charming chapters of his history—the State of England at the death of Charles II. It was the time of England’s Reign of Terror, and circumstances were happening, the conversations upon which must have produced a vivid impression upon the mind of a youth of lively sensibility. The execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the trial of Richard Baxter, the rising of Monmouth, the tremendous descent of Jefferies in the Bloody Assize of the West, the trial of the bishops, the flight of James, the landing of William at Torbay, and his progress to London; these were circumstances such as England had never seen before, such as England can never see again, and they all crowded fast upon each other in the years of Watts’ boyhood and early youth.

The period of the youth of Watts calls up to the mind a singularly contradictory range of associations; it was a wild, wicked, and frivolous time, and yet there were men living then whose names have adorned, and will ever adorn the literature of our land. Watts was fourteen years of age when John Bunyan finished his eventful course. Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles, was just leaving his academy at Stoke Newington and the Dissenters, by whom he had been educated; Henry More, the singular mystic, preceded Bunyan by one year to the grave; Ralph Cudworth was accumulating his immense mass of nebulous scholarship; South was preaching his celebrated sermons, in which coarseness so frequently “kibes the heels” of wisdom; Robert Boyle was, with intense ardour, prosecuting his observations and studies in natural history and science, and blending with equal ardour with them his devotions to revealed religion and Divine truth; Barrow was pursuing his ponderous lucubrations; Newton was expounding the system of the universe, and Locke the system of the mind; Howe was indulging in his seraphic ardours; Dryden was drawing to the close of an inglorious life, and writing some of the pieces which have best served his fame; John Evelyn, the model of an English gentleman, was studying his trees at Wootton, or penning his entertaining diary at Sayn Court; Samuel Pepys, garrulous and silly, was writing a history without knowing it, as the Boswell or the Paul Pry of the court and the town; Lely was flattering a meretricious taste by his paintings, and Christopher Wren preparing his plans for rebuilding London.

The persecutions to which the Nonconformists through this period were exposed of course affected society in Southampton; the avenues to prosperity and peace seemed to lie only in conformity to the Church of England. It was then that, in consequence of his great and promising attainments, his diligence and high character, an offer was made to Watts by Dr. John Speed, a physician of the town, on the behalf of several others, to send him to one of the universities, and very handsomely defray all his expenses there. He did not hesitate for a second, but respectfully and firmly replied that he was determined to take up his lot amongst the Dissenters. Two of his early friends, in every way incomparably his inferiors, conformed, and attained to archiepiscopal dignities. Yet, in spite of all that he afterwards wrote on the relation of the civil magistrate to religion, there would seem to have been little in his faith, feeling, or practice which might not easily have found a home in the Establishment but for the persecuting spirit of the time. It was the same year that in his slight, curious autobiographical memoranda,[4] he mentions concisely how he “fell under considerable convictions of sin;” in the year following, his entry runs on, “and was led to trust in Christ, I hope.” In the same year, 1689, he mentions that he had a great and dangerous sickness; and all these events of his life, which look so brief and cold to us as we put them down on paper, were great and crucial events to him, settling the foundations of his character, probably leading him away from the pursuits of scholarship as a mere charm and recreation of cultivated taste, to regard it as the important means by which an entrance might be obtained to everlasting truths. These events would add to those motives which had determined him to renounce the idea of university training, and to seek an entrance into the ministry through the humbler portal of a Dissenting academy.

CHAPTER II.
In the Academy at Stoke Newington.

The neighbourhood of London, to which Isaac Watts removed from Southampton for the purpose of completing his studies, and preparing for the work of the ministry, was Stoke Newington, and in that neighbourhood he was destined to pass the greater part of his life. It was probably even then pervaded, as for a long time before and ever since, by an atmosphere of mild but consistent Nonconformity; the academy in which he studied was beneath the superintendence of the Rev. Thomas Rowe, the pastor of the Independent Church assembling in Girdlers’ Hall, in the City. It was probably one of the most considerable of the time, and appears to have succeeded to one also well known upon the same spot, of which the principal was the Rev. Charles Morton. Here studied the celebrated Daniel Defoe, also originally intended for the Nonconformist pulpit, as he says in one of his reviews: “It is not often I trouble you with any of my divinity; the pulpit is none of my office. It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of that sacred employ.” The academy had a good reputation, and the effort which old Samuel Wesley had made to sully its fair fame only reflected his own dishonour, and left it untarnished.

Charles Morton was one of those obscure but remarkable men in which our country at that time was so rich. He was descended from a singularly distinguished family—that of Cardinal Morton, Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham, and many other distinguished men. He took his degree of M.A. at Wadham College, Oxford, and became, and continued until the Act of Uniformity, rector of Blisland, in Cornwall; after preaching for a short time at St. Ives he removed to London, and shortly after opened an academy on Newington Green. Defoe pronounces the highest encomiums upon him and his method as a tutor; and Samuel Wesley, in the midst of his bitterness and ungracious flippancy—for he had been maintained on the foundation under the idea of entering the Nonconformist ministry—ceases from his abuse to honour the memory of his master; he, however, after having trained several men who became eminent in their day, teased by continued persecution, passed over to America; there his fame had preceded him; there he became pastor of a church in Charlestown, and Vice-president of Harvard University.[5]

Shortly after the departure of Mr. Morton for America, the academy to which Watts was consigned was founded by the eminently learned Theophilus Gale, M.A., the author of that large medley of scholarship “The Court of the Gentiles.” He also had been deprived of considerable Church preferments. To his charge the eccentric Philip Lord Wharton committed the tutorship of his sons; with them he travelled on the Continent, adding to the stores of his mental wealth, and contracting a friendship with the learned Bochart. He arrived in the metropolis on his return to see the city in the flames of the terrible conflagration, but to learn that the manuscripts he had left in the care of a friend were all saved, while the house in which they had been preserved was destroyed. His mind was so largely stored with every kind of learning that his friends entreated him to settle as a professor of theology, which he did at Stoke Newington, and there he continued till he died in 1678, at the early age of forty-nine. He left his personal estate for the education of young men for the ministry; his library, with the exception of his philosophical books, to Harvard College. Beneath a tutor so distinguished the interests of the two academies had probably merged into one. The successor of Mr. Gale was one of his own students, Thomas Rowe, whom we have already mentioned. He was the son of the Rev. John Rowe, M.A., ejected from Westminster Abbey, and who was called to preach the thanksgiving sermon before the Parliament on the occasion of the destruction of the Spanish fleet, October 8th, 1656. Thomas Rowe very early entered upon the work of the ministry. At the age of twenty-one he succeeded his father as pastor of Girdlers’ Hall in Basinghall Street.