The friends of Watts, at almost any period of his life, form an interesting and very memorable circle, a very striking portrait gallery. Amongst them are some well-known names, and some, comparatively unknown now, famous then. We have said, about a mile from Theobalds, within the parish of Cheshunt, lived Richard Cromwell. He was a member of Watts’ church, although he removed from Cheshunt some short time after Watts’ settlement.

But a more remarkable person than Richard Cromwell was Cromwell’s niece, the granddaughter of the great Protector, Mrs. Bendish, in whom it was said the very Protector himself lived again. Her husband was Thomas Bendish, Esq., a descendant of Sir Thomas Bendish, Baronet, ambassador from Charles I. to the Court of Turkey. He died in 1707, but she survived him till 1728, removing, however, in the latter years of her life, to Yarmouth. She was a piece of astonishing eccentricity. She had a great admiration for Owen as a theologian and Watts as a poet; and very early in his life Watts addressed to her his poem against tears. She was a member of his church. Her admiration for her grandfather was extraordinary, and no one was permitted in her presence to express a doubt concerning his legitimate sovereignty or essential greatness. What she might have been as a man is beyond all power to speculate; as a woman she certainly inherited much of her grandfather’s dreamy, musing, moody, and ruggedly imperative character. Her character and her connections both alike commanded for her great respect, but she was an oddity. She was fond of night walks, even on lonely roads. She would not suffer a servant to attend her, saying God was a sufficient guard, and she would have no other. Visiting at the houses of friends, she would usually set off at about one in the morning in her chaise, or on horseback, chanting as she went one of Watts’ hymns in a key, it is said, more loud than sweet. There are pictures of her, word paintings, which bring her before our eyes in the oddest light. Capable of comporting herself with dignity in the best society, she disdained no menial employment, and very cheerfully turned her hand to the pitch-fork or the spade among her labourers and workmen, working herself with a right ready and forcible good will, from the early morning to declining day, in an attire as mean as the meanest of those with whom she was toiling, giving no account, say some records, of either her character or even her sex. It is a curious thing to find the youthful Isaac Watts talking to this strong-minded creature like a patriarch in his lines addressed to her in 1699, in which occurs the fine verse:

We could have liked a portrait of her from the pen of Watts, or a record of some of his conversations with her or with her uncle, but it does not appear to have been in his way either to sketch the portraits of his friends or to violate private confidences or conferences by putting them on paper. Her son was another of Watts’ intimates, and with him the family of Bendish became extinct. He died at Yarmouth, unmarried, in the year 1753.

Among the ministerial friends of Watts stands the almost forgotten name of John Shower, a very beautiful and eminent man in his day, a man of large learning and extensive travel. He had ministered for some time to an English congregation at Rotterdam, and, returning to England, he passed through the periods of trouble afflicting the communion to which he belonged. Watts was on terms of close intimacy with him, and they must have been congenial in their lives of elevated and profoundly cultured piety.

And there were men around Watts in the ministry with whom he had great congeniality of sentiment. Eminent among these was Samuel Rosewell, the son of Thomas Rosewell, celebrated for his trial for high treason and unjust condemnation before the impious Jefferies. Watts gives an interesting account of his visit to him on his death-bed in one of his sermons preached at Bury Street. “Come, my friends,” says he, “come into the chamber of a dying Christian; come, approach his pillow, and hear his holy language: ‘I am going up to heaven, and I long to be gone, to be where my Saviour is.—Why are His chariot-wheels so long in coming?—I hope I am a sincere Christian, but the meanest and the most unworthy:—I know I am a great sinner, but did not Christ come to save the chief of sinners?—I have trusted in Him, and I have strong consolation.—I love God, I love Christ.—I desire to love Him more, to be more like Him, and to serve Him in heaven without sin.—Dear brother, I shall see you at the right hand of Christ.—There I shall see all our friends that are gone a little before (alluding to Sir T. Abney).—I go to my God and to your God, to my Saviour and to your Saviour.’ These,” observes Watts, “are some of the dying words of the Rev. Mr. S. Rosewell, when, with some other friends, I went to visit him two days before his death, and which I transcribed as soon as I came home, with their assistance.” It was after this visit Watts wrote to his friend the following note:

And among his friends, as we have already seen, he kept up a considerable intimacy with his own fellow-townsman and fellow-student, Samuel Say, son of Giles Say, who was ejected from the parish church of St. Michael’s in Southampton, and one of the first ministers of the Nonconformist church of that town, and with which Watts’ family was connected. He was a kind of smaller Watts, a man of large and varied knowledge in the classics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. For forty-eight years he kept a journal of the alterations of the weather and of his observations of remarkable occurrences in nature. Possessed of an extraordinary genius, it was veiled and shrouded by a modesty as extraordinary; but about two years before his death some of his papers were committed to the press, consisting of poems and essays on the “Harmony, Variety and Power of Numbers, whether in Prose or Verse.” He had a great admiration for Milton, and translated apparently with great elegance the introduction of “Paradise Lost” into Latin verse; and in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” vol. xxxv., is an interesting paper by him, entitled, “The Resurrection Illustrated by the Changes of the Silkworm.” Watts thought highly of his judgment, as the following, among other letters, indicates:

William Coward is the name of one of Watts’ intimate friends, an oddity in his way as great as Mrs. Bendish: he had been a merchant in the city; he lived in retirement at Waltonstow; his name is well known now in Nonconformist circles as the founder of “The Coward Trust,” a useful fountain of benevolence for the education of young, and the assistance of poor decayed ministers. He was a type of man easily realised to the imagination, dogmatical and opinionated, a bundle of eccentricities. Among others, it was his whim to establish a rule that the doors of his house should never be opened, however pressing the emergency, after eight o’clock at night, to any person whatever, visitor or friend. The name of Hugh Farmer is still held in high and deserved respect for manifold attainments, one of Doddridge’s most hopeful students, and who had probably been recommended to Mr. Coward by Doddridge, to whose academy Coward was a munificent helper. Farmer was the chaplain of the eccentric man, but he arrived one evening at the door too late; he found himself without lodging for the night, and was compelled to betake himself to the house of another, perhaps equally eminent, but more courteous friend, Mr. Snell, who not only took him in for that evening, but compelled him to stay with him for thirty years. Nonconformist ministers appear to have possessed some singularly appreciative friends in those days. William Coward, however, was, if a man of singular eccentricity, one possessed of sterling virtues, and especially zealous in the maintenance of the more rigid articles of faith, and was constantly devising some plans of usefulness to assist both metropolitan and country ministers. Watts appears to have had great influence over him, and could comb his rugged asperities into smoothness. Watts it was to whom we are greatly indebted for the shape assumed by the “Coward Trust.” He devoted £20,000, and by Watts’ wise and most judicious advice it was left in such a manner that, unlike many other trusts, it has been saved from the consequence of diversion or litigation; and, largely and most respectably useful, it has furnished a most helpful hand in giving a thorough and most respectable education to many a young minister, and helping many a poor one, even to the present day. The “will” of William Coward is a curiosity, and may be studied, by those who have patience, on the walls of the library of the New College.

Among the friends of Watts, whose names ought to be mentioned, we must not omit that of John Shute, Lord Barrington, a person very interesting in his own times. He moved in that immediate circle of which Watts was a distinguished member; he was nearly of Watts’ age, and his mother was a daughter of that Joseph Caryl who was one of Watts’ early predecessors in the ministry at Mark Lane. He was a thoughtful, scholarly man, as the several works he published abundantly show.[25] His sixth and youngest son became the well-known Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham. In the memoir prefixed to the three volumes of his father’s works, the name of Dr. Watts is never even mentioned, although the verses from the lyrics, referring to the intimacy of Shute with John Locke, addressed to him by Watts, are quoted. He was a member of the Church meeting at Pinners’ Hall, and had previously attended the ministry of Thomas Bradbury; but when that person behaved so indecently to Dr. Watts, and took so turbulent a part in the discussion with reference to the Trinity, Lord Barrington united himself with the Church at Pinners’ Hall, then beneath the ministry of Dr. Jeremiah Hunt. It seems probable that an intimacy commenced early in life between Mr. Shute and Isaac Watts, perhaps before the settlement of Watts in the ministry. It was in 1718 that Swift writes of him, “One Mr. Shute is named for the secretary to Lord Wharton; he is a young man, but reckoned the shrewdest head in England, and the person in whom the Presbyterians chiefly confide; and if money be necessary toward the good work (that is, the repeal of the sacramental test) in Ireland, it is reckoned he can command as far as £100,000 from the body of Dissenters here. As to his principles, he is a truly moderate man, frequenting the church and the meeting indifferently.” He took the name of Barrington about the time this letter was written, a connection of his family, Francis Barrington, Esq., of Tofts, in Essex, leaving to him his estate conditionally upon his taking his name and adopting his arms. The high favour in which he stood with George I. exposed him to the jealousy and enmity of Sir Robert Walpole. He had an interview with the king on the first day after his arrival in London, apparently in order that he might decline certain offices of preferment which were made him, because the Schism and Conformity Bills were as yet unrepealed. Upon this occasion he stated to the king the grievances beneath which Dissenters suffered, although they were amongst the most hearty and faithful friends of the House of Hanover. In the fifth year of this reign he was created a peer. He stood very high in the friendship of the king, and it seems that it was this very friendship which brought about the close of his political life when, in 1723, he was expelled from the House of Commons for his connection with the Harburgh lottery. This was a company formed for carrying on trade between England and the king’s electoral dominions, and it had been proposed that it should be assisted by a lottery to defray the expenses in deepening the River Elbe near the port of Harburgh; the project had not met with the approbation of Lord Barrington, but he received the king’s personal commands to continue as sub-governor of the company, Prince Frederick being the governor. It furnished, however, the occasion which Sir Robert Walpole knew how to use for the removal from his path of a man dangerous to his own unscrupulous ambition. The project itself was simply a means, favoured by the king, for promoting trade between the two countries. But now, in his retirement, he betook himself to pursuits of a very different character, and the volumes of his theological works are most interesting, and show abundantly how he brought to bear upon the department of theology that clearness of judgment which had characterized his political life, united to a keen analytic power of criticism and discrimination very interesting to follow through the subjects he discusses; his essay “On the Dispensation of God to Mankind as revealed in Scripture” is especially entertaining and suggestive.

He was nephew, by his mother, of Sir Thomas Abney, and this would make his intimacy with the family in which Watts resided very natural; but at his house at Tofts he kept round about him much intellectual society, and sometimes even of persons widely differing in opinion from himself, such persons as Antony Collins,[26] the well-known sceptical writer of that day. The Greek Testament was frequently the subject of investigation and criticism, and on one occasion it is said Collins remarked concerning the apostle Paul, “I think so well of him as a man of sense and a gentleman, that if he had asserted he had worked miracles himself, I would have believed him.”

Lord Barrington instantly produced a passage to that effect, when the disconcerted sceptic seized his hat and hastily retreated from the company. Upon another occasion his lordship inquired how it was that although he professed to have no religion himself, he was so careful that his servants should attend regularly at church, when he replied he did this to prevent them robbing and murdering him. This amiable nobleman, moderate, wise, and well informed, if we may not rather speak of him as a man of extensive and varied scholarship, was such a one as could well appreciate and sympathize with Isaac Watts. At the old house at Tofts, or Beckets, in Berkshire, where Lord Barrington died, we may be sure that Watts was a frequent visitor, and it was the frequency of the intercourse probably which permits us so few letters between them, and of those letters none before 1718. We have already quoted the high estimate he formed of Watts’ “View of Scripture History;” his estimate of the “Logic” he rates so highly that he says, “I shall not only recommend it to others, but use it as the best manual of its kind myself, and I intend, as some have done Erasmus or a piece of Cicero, to read it over once a year.” The following note sets every point of his friendship with Watts in a very pleasing light:

Yet another of the circle of friends, whose names occur to the mind when we think of Watts, is the saintly James Hervey. One of Watts’ biographers speaks of “the bloated effusions of Hervey which are now justly discarded, then not only tolerated, but admired.” It is an unjust judgment; James Hamilton was much more fair and faithful when he says of him that “he had a mind of uncommon gorgeousness, his thoughts are marched to a stately music, and were arrayed in the richest superlatives;” and he speaks of Hervey’s “Theron and Aspasia” as “one of our finest prose poems.” James Hervey deserves that his name should be mentioned with great affection and respect. His life was perpetually stretched upon a rack of infirmity and weakness. There is even a kind of pathetic drollery in watching him at Weston Favell living his bachelor’s life, and, while stirring the saucepan which held the gruel constituting his modest meal, turning aside to derive some new fancy, fact, or image from the microscope on his study table. As a writer, he indulged himself too freely in colour, but many of his works are very pleasing; he was not only passionately fond of natural scenery, but in an equal degree delighted in the discoveries of natural history; his copious description of the human frame is one of the most seductive dissertations on anatomy and physiology in our language; and those subjects, not remarkable for being invested with the charms of fancy, certainly do in his descriptions appear to be invested by the fascinations of poetry. He was a friend of both Doddridge and Watts. He lived ever in the neighbourhood of the grave, but his little church of Weston Favell was filled with a loving congregation. It was a small flock, for it was a small church: but the humble villagers felt a large amount of affectionate regard for their feeble and yet famous friend. Into his church he speedily introduced, after their publication, Dr. Watts’ Hymns. So he tells Watts:

There could not be a very long intimacy between these two, or much knowledge of each other; they were both hermits, following, in the midst of much weakness, the calls of duty and the pursuits of a cultivated taste. The letter we have just quoted was written the year before Watts died; Hervey lived ten years longer, but died at the age of forty-seven. He forms one of a cluster of men singularly interesting to contemplate. With Doddridge, from their vicinity in the same county, he was on terms of the closest intimacy. He was a large scholar, a poet by natural temperament, and an intense lover of natural description. His works, once so famous, are almost forgotten, and have fallen into quite an undeserved neglect, partly arising, it may be, from the unfavourable estimate formed of them by those who have not read them, or who may have fixed their impressions from the scanning his “Contemplation of the Starry Heavens,” or his “Reflections in a Flower Garden,” or his “Descant on Creation.” His portrait should be suspended in the gallery of those we are noticing as one, who, if not among Watts’ most intimate friends, yet revered and loved him much.

But there is one name with which that of Watts is constantly united; it is the name of one whose nature in a marked and special manner seemed fitted to produce a perfect harmony and accord, it is the name of Philip Doddridge. At what period the friendship commenced cannot be very exactly ascertained. Probably, had the life of Doddridge been spared to pen the biography of his venerable friend, the present biographer might have felt his work a superfluity of naughtiness; but, considerable as the distance was between the ages of the friends, Watts preceded his younger brother by only a short time to the grave. Like Watts, his name is especially associated with the hymnology of England; nor is there a collection of sacred songs which does not contain some strains from the pair of sweet singers. Doddridge is indeed rather known by a few pieces, very sweet and helpful, but limited in the range of their emotions, and never attempting the lofty and dazzling flight of Watts’ nobler pieces.

Doddridge’s life is full of interest; it has yet to be written, for there was a variety of incidents in his story which scarcely appears in the biography of Kippis, or the admirable memoir of Job Orton. All things considered, it was a wonderful life: its activity was amazing, the variety of his literary acquirements and spoils was prodigious; one would say he had much more of the poet’s temperament than Watts; he was impulsive, passionate, affectionate, yet we certainly miss in him that indefinable something which constitutes the poet, and which something, Watts assuredly possessed.

In some particulars both in his ancestry and earlier career Doddridge resembled Watts; Philip, like Isaac, was the child (he was the twentieth) of a mother whom persecution had drifted to our shores; at his birth his mother seemed so near to death that no attention was given to the almost lifeless little castaway, the infant, and the world almost lost Philip the moment he was born.

If Watts probably received his first lessons in biblical knowledge from his grandmother by the fireside of the old house in French Street, the Dutch tiles in the chimney constituting an illuminated and illustrated Bible, from which Doddridge’s mother first initiated her own son into Bible lore, have become a famous tradition. Like Isaac, Philip made so much progress in scholarship, that he had the offer of a training in either University if he would enter the Established Church; it was made generously by the Duchess of Bedford. Philip, like Isaac, declined the temptation, and so he found his alma mater beneath the more modest and obscure roof of a Dissenting academy at Kibworth, in Leicestershire.

Doddridge was born in the year when Watts first became the co-pastor of Dr. Chauncy, and he died in 1751, scarcely two years after the venerable friend whom he so much honoured and loved. Thus, when Watts died, Doddridge was on his way to the tomb, dying by the slow process of consumption. Great as was the difference in point of age, it is affecting to read the following letter from Watts to Doddridge—indeed, it simply expresses the truth they were “both going out of the world.”

Watts’ life was uniform; we can scarcely point to a period and say the man woke into life and being then and there; but Doddridge reached his period of interior life and labour when he became pastor and tutor at Northampton, and it would almost seem as if disappointment in love made a man of him.

The work accomplished by Doddridge in the academy of which he was tutor was enormous, and it exhibits the thoroughness of the training in the small unostentatious academy where the Dissenting ministers of that day gathered their stores of knowledge, and received their education for the ministry.

And he was great as a preacher—the peasants of the neighbourhood thought so—his usefulness among them was eminent; and Akenside, the poet, thought so. The variety of his correspondence is an amazing characteristic too; various, not only as to the personages with whom he corresponded, but the subjects upon which he corresponded with them. Like Watts, his sweet and gentle nature charmed the most obdurate—he had not even a Bradbury to ruffle the equanimity of his spirit—even the rough and savage Warburton became kind to him; he reviewed the “Divine Legation,” in the “Works of the Learned,” a review of that day; and it was to the English Bishop who quarrelled with everybody, the gentle Nonconformist was indebted for obtaining that easy passage in the sailing vessel, in which the captain gave up his cabin to him, that he might journey to the warm airs of Lisbon to lay aside his labours and to die. Doddridge is known by many of his works. His “Family Expositor” a long time held a place in the family and in the study; but a far more extensive fame has followed the authorship of “The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul.” This work, as its dedication to Dr. Watts shows, owes also its existence to him; two letters exhibit, on either side, the sentiments these admirable men entertain for each other; the first is the dedication to which reference has been made:

This dedication, of which Dr. Watts said, “It is the only thing in that book I can hardly permit myself to approve,” may be appropriately followed by a letter to Mr. David Longueville, minister to the English church at Amsterdam, who had written to Dr. Watts asking his advice with reference to the translation of the works of Doddridge into the Dutch tongue; to this Watts replies:

“The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul” is still the best book of its kind; but, without doing any dishonour to its great merits, it may be said that it is built up too much upon a frame-work like that of Scupoli and A’Kempis, and we have known readers to whom it has rather been a message of despair than of mercy. Salvation and spiritual happiness seem to be rather in the attainment of some subjective condition, than in the finished work of Christ; the soul seems to be invited rather to brood over, or look in upon itself, than to look outward and upward to Christ. Still it has been rendered into all the leading languages in Europe. But it is in his hymns that the influence of Doddridge most resembles that of his friend. His hymns have been spoken of as a kind of spiritual amber: but that term, appropriate as it is, is rather descriptive of hymns in general; are they not all pieces of secreted spiritual electricity, rare and rich in spiritual emotion? And many of Doddridge’s have an ineffable beauty. Logan, the Scotch poet, has the doubtful reputation of the authorship of several very sweet hymns; we say doubtful, because the authorship turns rather ominously towards the more likely genius of Michael Bruce; but, in any case, the famous hymn, so sanctified in almost every Scotch household, as it rises to the old tune of Martyrdom—