Can match her; he that beats
The next Thorn-Bush
May raise a Thrush
Would put down all our Wayts.”
Other “clerks” were appointed henceforth to the business of instruction. Rhymed sermons grew up in the midst of hymns of praise; these were marked by a forcible and rousing emphasis. If the voice of the Pharisee be heard no less distinctly than that of the Sluggard, in Dr. Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs[177], it rises at times into something like a glow of patriotism:
“I would not change my Native Land
For rich Peru with all her Gold;
A nobler Prize lies in my Hand
Than East or Western Indies hold.”
Beneath the severity which his doctrine inspired, the learned Doctor had a genuine tenderness for children, a legacy not despised by the greatest and most revolutionary of his successors, William Blake. His Cradle Hymn, beginning: