There are significant differences in the numerous reprints of
Isaac Watts' "Psalms." The first generation of this Project
Gutenberg file was from an 1818 printing by C. Corrall of
38 Charing Cross, London.
The Index and the Table of First Lines have been omitted for the following reasons: 1. They refer to page numbers that are here expunged; and 2. In this electronic version key words, etc., can be easily located via searches.
Separate numbers have been added to Psalms that have more than one part or version, for example: Psalm 51:1; Psalm 51:2; etc.
The Life of Isaac Watts, D.D.
by
Dr. Johnson.
From his lives of the most eminent English Poets.
The Poems of Dr. Watts were by my recommendation inserted in the late Collection; the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yealden.
ISAAC WATTS was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father of the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common report makes him a shoe-maker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr. Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate.
Isaac, the eldest of nine children, was given to books from his infancy; and began, we are told, to learn Latin when he was four years old, I suppose at home. He was afterwards taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, by Mr. Pinhorne, a clergyman, master of the freeschool at Southampton, to whom the gratitude of his scholar afterwards inscribed a Latin ode.