One of the most considerable of Watts’ correspondents and apparently intimate friends, was Frances, Countess of Hertford, afterwards Duchess of Somerset. This lady was the daughter of the Honourable Mr. Thynne, brother to Lord Weymouth; she married Algernon, Earl of Hertford, son of Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who succeeded to the honours and estates of his father on December 2nd, 1748, i.e. about a week after the death of Dr. Watts. The Countess appears to have been a woman of great piety, amiability, and accomplishments. Thomson, in his “Seasons,” addresses her:

A collection of select letters, published by Mr. Hull, in two volumes, includes eleven written by the Duchess, and they have been well characterized as exhibiting rectitude of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and a truly classic ease and elegance of style; tinged with an air of melancholy, occasioned by the loss of her only son, Lord Beauchamp, to whom she so frequently refers in her letters to Dr. Watts. His death at Bologna, in 1744, cast a settled gloom over her mind, for he was a youth who seemed to give evidences of superiority and worth of character calculated to confer honour on the exalted station to which he was destined, had his life been spared. Her letters all breathe the spirit of unaffected simple piety and resignation; and from the time of her husband’s elevation to the dukedom, her life was subjected to the experience of intense troubles, first, in the death of her own son, and very shortly after, in 1750, the death of the Duke, her husband; and it is with reference to these occasions of grief that she writes to Lady Luxbrough, September 9th, 1750: “You are very obliging in the concern you express for the scenes of sorrow I have passed through. I have indeed suffered deeply, but, when I consider it is the will of God, who never chastises His poor creatures but for their good, and reflect at the same time how unworthy I was of these blessings, which I now lament the loss of, I lay my hand upon my mouth, and dare not repine, but hope I can with truth appeal to Him in the following words: ‘Such sorrow is sent that none may oppose His holy will. Let me sigh and offer up all my sighs to Him! Let me mourn, and in the meantime bless His name in the midst of my sorrow.’”

She did not herself long survive, only till July 7th, 1754, leaving an only daughter, who subsequently became Duchess of Northumberland. The Countess herself was the great and intimate friend likewise of Mrs. Rowe; and when this lady died, to the Countess and to Dr. Watts she left those confidential letters to which reference may be made in subsequent pages of the present volume. How far she drew the Doctor from his retreat, how often he visited the lady at her various houses, we have no means of knowing; the friendship continued certainly from 1729 to the close of Watts’ life, and it was probably commenced some time before this date, for the terms of the first letters are those of warm friendship. In 1731 she refers to her children, especially to the son, who was to be in after years a source of such grief to the mother’s heart, and she says, “My young people send their services to you; I assure you my little boy has grown a great proficient in your ‘Songs for Children,’ and sings them with great pleasure.” The lady herself secretly cultivated the recreation of verse, and sometimes forwarded her fancies in this way to the Doctor, but she says, “I beg the favour of you not to give any copy of the enclosed verses, for I would wish my excursions of this kind to be a secret from everybody but you, and a friend or two more, who know that I do not aim at the character of a genius by any attempt of this nature, but am led to them merely to amuse a leisure hour, and speak the sentiments of my heart.” She wrote, however, an elegy on Mrs. Rowe, which called forth an epigram from the Doctor, which was published in his posthumous volume of Miscellanies, “Remnants of Time, employed in Prose and Verse”:

Writing from the Hermitage on St. Leonard’s Hill, she says: “I return you thanks for the epigram you were so good as to send me, and should think myself very happy if anything of mine could deserve to show the joy I should feel in being able to imitate Mrs. Rowe in the smallest instance. I have only two meditations of hers, which she gave me with the strongest injunctions not to let anybody see them, lest they should be thought too rapturous; but as I conclude she would not have included you among those from whom she meant they should be concealed, I will have them copied if you desire it.” There are in her letters very pleasing indications of an amiable mind and heart; she writes to him of the books which have met her in the course of her reading, and her remarks are characterized by a quiet wisdom and judgment: “My Lord and Betty (the future Duchess of Northumberland) are in London, so that my son and his governor are my only companions at present; but we pass our time agreeably enough between reading, walking, and such other amusements as this place in which we are and the season of the year afford us; we have been lately reading ‘Leonidas,’[29] in which I think there are many fine thoughts; but I hear the town are much divided in their sentiments about it, since one part are for preferring it to Milton, and others for levelling it to the lowest rank of poetry. I confess neither of these appear to me a just representation of it. If you have read it, I shall be glad to know your thoughts of it.” In another letter she remarks upon the poet Pope: “I think everybody must wish a muse like Mr. Pope’s were more inclined to exert itself on Divine and good-natured subjects; but I am afraid satire is his highest talent, for I think his ‘Universal Prayer’ is by no means equal to some other of his works, and I think his tenth stanza:

an instance how blind the wisest men may be to the errors of their own hearts, for he certainly did not mean to imprecate such a proportion of vengeance on himself as he is too apt to load those with whom he dislikes; nor would he wish to have his own failings exposed to the eye of the world with all the invective and ridicule with which he publishes those of his fellow creatures.” The following is one of the most interesting and favourable letters from the many which Dr. Gibbons has preserved of the correspondence extending over so many years:

It is pleasant in these letters to notice the indications of a quiet and retreating spirit. Upon her return, after a considerable absence, to the family seat near Marlborough, she says: “I have the pleasure of finding my garden extremely improved in the two years I have been absent from it, some little alterations I had ordered are completed; the trees which I left small ones are grown to form an agreeable shade, and I have reason to bless God for the pleasantness of the place which is allotted me to pass many of my retired hours in; may I make use of them to fit me for my last, and that I may do so, allow me to beg the continuation of your prayers.” She several times refers to her “dear old nurse,” the “very valuable old woman” mentioned in the lengthy letter quoted above: “Your good prayers for poor Rothery have met with unexpected success, she is so much recovered that I begin to think she will get entirely well, and if she does I think nothing of that kind has since I can remember looked more like a miraculous operation of the healing power of the Almighty. I hope the same Divine mercy will long preserve you a blessing to the age, and that you will find your strength return with the warm weather.” This was written from Windsor Forest; the next month she writes from Marlborough: “My poor old woman has got hither, contrary to her own and all our expectations; she has the deepest gratitude for your goodness to her, and begs you will accept her thanks; she is still very weak, and I fancy will hardly get over the autumn.”

This lady’s letters exhibit a vein of intelligence and interesting reading in pleasant contrast to the frivolity of most of the courtly ladies of that age. “I have just had the oddest pamphlet sent me I ever saw in my life, called ‘Amusemens Philosophiques sur le Language des Bêtes.’ It was burnt by the hands of the common executioner at Paris, and the priest who wrote it banished till he made a formal retraction of it, and yet I think it very plain by the style that the man was either in jest or crazed. It is by no means wanting of wit, but extremely far from a system of probability.” Again, in another letter: “I have forgotten whether in any of my later letters I ever named to you a little book newly translated from the Italian, by the same Mrs. Carter who has a copy of verses printed in the beginning of Mrs. Rowe’s works, occasioned by her death. The book she has now translated is Sir Isaac Newton’s ‘Doctrine of Light and Colours made easy for the Ladies.’ My daughter and I have both read it with great pleasure, and flatter ourselves that we at least understand some parts of it.” It would be interesting to know who was the lady referred to in the following letter—it was probably Mrs. Elizabeth Carter; the work of the Doctor’s to which so marked a reference is made was undoubtedly his discourses “On the World to Come,” which had only just been published, a copy of which he had forwarded to her, and which had been acknowledged two or three weeks before in a letter from his “faithfully affectionate servant, F. Hertford.”

Upon the death of Mrs. Rowe, as she had left her meditations for the hands of Dr. Watts, when he proposed to publish the volume with his preface, he also very naturally proposed to dedicate it to their friend the Countess. With extraordinary modesty, however, she shrunk from this. She writes: “The sincere esteem I have for you makes it very difficult for me to oppose anything you desire, and it is doubly so in an instance where I might have an opportunity of indulging so justifiable a pride as I should feel in letting the public see this fresh mark of your partiality to me, but as I am apprehensive that the envy such a distinction would raise against me might draw some vexation with it, I hope you will have the goodness to change the dedication into a letter to a friend, without giving me any such appellation.” In another letter, with characteristic modesty, she says: “I can, with the strictest truth, affirm that I do not know any distinction upon earth that I could feel a truer pleasure in receiving were I deserving of it, but as I am forced to see how much I fall below the idea which the benevolence of your nature has formed of me, it teaches me to humble myself by that very incident which might administer a laudable pride to a more worthy person. If I am constrained to acknowledge this mortifying truth, you may believe there are many people in the world who look upon me with more impartial eyes than self-love will allow me to do; and others, who perhaps think I enjoy more of this world’s goods than I either merit or than falls to the common lot, look at me with envious and malignant views, and are glad of every opportunity to debase me or those who they believe entertain a favourable opinion of me. I would hope that I have never done anything, wilfully I am sure I have not, to raise any such sentiments in the breast of the meanest person upon earth, but yet experience has convinced me that I have not been happy enough to escape them. For these reasons, sir, I must deny myself the pleasure and the pride I should have in so public a mark of your friendship and candour, and beg that if you will design me the honour of joining any address to me with those valuable remains of Mrs. Rowe, that you will either retrench the favourable expressions you intended to insert, or else give me no other title at the top of it than that of a friend of yours and hers, an appellation which, in the sincerity of my soul, I am prouder of than I could be of the most pompous name that human grandeur can lay claim to.”

She shrunk from all observation, and in another letter says, “I will trespass so far on your good nature as to beg you will leave out whatever will imply my attempting to write poetry; but if there be any among the things you have of mine which you think worth placing among yours I shall have just cause to be pleased at seeing them come abroad in such company, if you will have the goodness to conceal my name, either under that of Eusebia or A Friend, a title which I shall think myself happy to deserve.” This letter enables us to identify four poetical pieces, entitled “A Rural Meditation,” “A Penitential Thought,” “A Midnight Hymn,” and the “Dying Christian’s Hope,” inserted in Watts’ Miscellanies, and attributed to Eusebia, as the compositions of the Countess. It may not be unpleasant to the reader to have brought before him some of these verses, which will show that the modesty of the Countess need not have been dictated by the poverty of her expression:

This correspondence sets in a very beautiful light the character of this amiable and excellent lady, no doubt one of Watts’ attached friends, and intercourse with whom, through the long period of twenty years, must have been to him a frequent source of rest and enjoyment. When their intimacy commenced she was in immediate attendance on the Queen Caroline, wife of George I. In those days the attempts which subsequently were made by the Countess of Huntingdon to create a feeling of piety and purity in the neighbourhood of the court had not been commenced, the manners of the great were not favourable to goodness and virtue, and the general spirit of the time brings out into strong relief the character of this gentle and noble lady; seldom apparently free from illness, her thoughts usually move round those loftiest sources of consolation in which the highest or the humblest equally find the surest and most abiding alleviation and repose.

In 1737 Watts sustained a loss in the innermost and most intimate circle of his acquaintance by the death of Mrs. Rowe. His early relations with this lady have round them some traditions of a tender mystery; it is generally supposed that upon his side at one time his feelings for Miss Singer, her maiden name, were something more than those of mere friendship. The charms of the lady appear to have been considerable, and procured her previous to marriage many admirers, among others Prior, the poet, who sought the lady’s hand in vain, and in his poem on “Love and Friendship” expresses himself after the most approved fashion of the disconsolate Werthers of that day, informing her that—

It would seem that Watts’ attachment was some time talked about extensively, for Young refers to it in one of his satires:

More respectfully, Mrs. Barbauld appears to allude to the circumstance when addressing Mrs. Rowe, she says:

But there is no reason, beyond the idle chatter of the town, to suppose that there was more than ardent friendship between the two; Watts was not a man ever likely to have been refused in marriage, and the talk appears only to have originated from the fact that people in general suppose that there can be no community of taste, and intellectual intercourse, and high and even ardent friendship between opposite sexes without its pointing to marriage. That it was not so in this instance appears certain, not only from the very high regard Mrs. Rowe always entertained for Watts, but from the terms of the letter addressed to him to be delivered after her death; we would rather suppose it possible, although we do not assert it, that Elizabeth Singer might have been not indisposed to a relationship the idea of which was not encouraged by the Doctor, and which he deferred to the calmer communion of intimate friendship and high esteem. The proofs that this was the case are not very clear if the circumstance is probable. However it might be, it never interfered with their friendship which continued not only unbroken to death, but beyond death.

Mrs. Rowe was a lady quite famous in her own time; to an elevated piety she united in her style of composition many of the faults of the age in which she lived; her works were tinctured by an ardent mode of expression little in harmony with the more frigid expressions of our own day. For Dr. Watts she entertained the highest esteem. She died suddenly, but in her cabinet were found letters for two or three of the friends who held the highest place in her affections, especially for the Countess of Hertford and Dr. Watts; the letter to the Doctor was accompanied by the manuscript of her “Devout Exercises,” which she requested him to publish after a complete and thorough revision. A portion of his correspondence with the Countess upon this we have already quoted; the volume is dedicated to the Countess as Mrs. Rowe’s intimate friend, and Watts, whose mind and heart were now in a state of quiet and holy calm, dispassionately reviews the merits of her various works; he does not altogether vindicate her ardent style, on the other hand, he is far from severely reprehending it; he remarks how in former years even grave divines had expressed the fervours of devout love to the Saviour much in the style of the Song of Solomon, and says, “I must confess that several of my compositions in verse written in younger life were led by those examples unwarily into this track.” Indeed, many of his hymns, especially those which are paraphrases of the Song of Solomon, are quite as ardent as anything we meet with in the writings of Mrs. Rowe. The love of Christ is a principle, but we should be sorry to think that in the heart of the believer it may not glow with all the fervour and force of a great passion; the language of the Apostle Paul shows us that it may, but his language is not coloured by the singular ecstasy of the Oriental mind; it is fervid, but the line is very distinctly marked between the expressions of a merely human passion, which, however pure upon the heart which utters them, may by hearts less holy and elevated seem to be almost the utterance of license, and even to colder though not less holy natures may seem to border on profanity. There are Christians still who delight in this doubtful method of expressing and setting forth the holiest affections. Watts in all his religious works had at all times the ardent and fervent words of a poetic and imaginative nature, but he considerably pruned both thought and speech as the years passed in study and seclusion brought a riper wisdom; he did not repress the ardours of the heart, but he gave to their expression a chastened and colder form; he was not satisfied indeed by light without love, but he clothed that love with a more sacred reticence. Mrs. Rowe’s writings have all an exceedingly unreticent character, but she lived apparently a holy life, realizing very greatly the ardours which gushed so glowingly from her pen, and it says much for all that she was in herself, that through so many long years she retained a close and intimate friendship with a judgment so wisely balanced, and a nature so simple and domestic, as that which evidently shines in the character of the Countess of Hertford.