Take the life of almost any man who has stood in any relation to the thought and intelligence of his times, in any period of English history, and it is interesting to regard him by the light of the events flowing on around him. Watts was almost a literary solitary; he cannot be referred to as greatly influencing the times in which he lived, but an outline of his life is incomplete if we give no reference to the events of his time. From the last years of the reign of Charles II. to the closing years of George II. constitutes the era of Watts. Every age seems eminently important to its actors—sometimes even to spectators—and yet that age stands out with singular distinctness. How different the times of Watts’ birth and those of his death: the infant in the arms of a weeping mother, beneath the bars of the dungeon of the imprisoned Nonconformist, and the old man, that same infant, passing away, with the great Methodist movement rising into activity over the whole nation. A little room, scarcely tolerated in Southampton, where a few persecuted Nonconformists assembled together, and large chapels, capable of holding thousands, rising amidst the far-off wastes of Northern Yorkshire and Western Cornwall, and a sudden burst of religious vitality finding vent in hymns and meetings over the whole country.

If the change in the aspect of religious life was remarkable, not less remarkable was the change, or rather perhaps we ought to say the changes, which had been brought about in the political. The period of Watts’ childhood was the most ominous, unhappy, and unsettled in English story; men knew not what to expect, they knew not whither they were drifting. Those were the days of the great Monmouth Rebellion and Jeffreys’ “Bloody Assize;” the days of the execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the days of Titus Oates. The mind of England was full of plots, and the fear and the shadow of plots, succeeded by internal discords, and a disunited front to possible external foes. Well has it been said, “It was high time that James should go; it was time that William should come.”

The closing years of Watts’ life Mr. Hallam ventures to speak of, and Earl Stanhope confirms the verdict, as nationally the happiest period of all England’s history, a brief period during which plenty and comfort seemed everywhere to abound. We do not refer to the moral state of the people; that appears to have been low enough, but the nation had reached, and the people were experiencing, the blessedness of a lull of peace after that great storm which had shaken every timber of the national vessel. The period of George II. appears to be that ideal time upon which many look back under the designations of “Happy England” and “Merry England.” Between these two periods how many intervening chapters occur! and it is not a little distressing to a biographer that it seems impossible to lay the hand upon scarcely a letter of the many multitudes of letters which Watts must have written, and many, one cannot but think, illustrating some of the circumstances and the characters of the times, and his interest in them.[34]

Thus, for instance, he was an intimate friend of that David Polhill who was one of the foremost men in the affair of the great “Kentish Petition,” a circumstance which shines brightly among the gallant actions of those who, with daring intrepidity, supported William III. It was at a time when pusillanimity and fear of France would have been fatal. The House of Commons, rent by faction, was very slow in vindicating the king; five Kentish gentlemen, magistrates, interpreting the opinion of their county, signed as deputies a petition calling upon the House to lay aside their own personal differences, to attend better to public affairs, and especially to vote sufficient supplies to sustain the king and his allies. It was a daring step; the five gentlemen who bore the petition to the House all presented themselves as responsible for it; the House instantly voted that it was scandalous, infamous, and seditious, calculated to destroy the constitution of Parliament, and to subvert the established government of the realm. The five gentlemen, of whom David Polhill was one, were, amidst the acclamations of the nation, committed to prison, and there for some time they continued. The pen of Defoe sprang into eloquence on their behalf, and when they were liberated, as they were shortly, one of those demonstrations—not of the mob—but of the strong middle classes of England, greeted them on Blackheath on their way home, bells clanging, bonfires burning, and Kent altogether in such a state as it had not been in since the Restoration of Charles II.

1703—one wonders if Watts went down into the City on the 31st of July that year, to see one whom he must very well have known, who, as we have seen, studied some years before Watts was there, at the Dissenting Academy in Stoke Newington—Daniel Defoe, standing in the pillory; for Defoe’s great and even intimate friend, William III, was dead, and the men who had long winced beneath his wit, and had longed for the time of their reprisals, fancied the time had come at last; but, indeed, the sentence which was intended for punishment turned into a painful kind of triumph. It cannot be a pleasant position for the head and the hands to be fixtures in that fashion for an hour; but if the sentence has to be borne, then it is pleasant to find the rude machine adorned with flowers and garlands, and the odium of the punishment transferred from the sufferer to his judges. However, they ruined Defoe.

This was the year in which, as Watts mentions in his slight autobiographic memoranda, occurred the great storm, one of the most fearful England has ever known. Whole buildings were hurled down, two hundred and fifty thousand timber trees torn up by the roots, spires beaten from the churches, and the lead from the roofs of more than one hundred churches rolled up like scrolls. Eight thousand persons perished by drowning; the Severn overflowed its banks, and fifteen thousand sheep besides other cattle perished; eight hundred dwelling-houses, four hundred windmills, and barns without number, were thrown down. Some people were killed in their beds, among others Dr. Kidder, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and his wife. The damage done in London amounted to about a million of pounds sterling, in Bristol to £150,000. The damage on the sea was still more considerable, many ships of the royal navy were cast away, and innumerable merchant vessels. Imagination quite fails to realize the horrors of that tremendous night; it was as one has said of it, “As if the destroying angel hurried by shrouded in his very gloomiest apparel.”

And side by side with such great national calamities went our great national rejoicings. This was the moment in our history when the genius of Marlborough was rising, and the victories of Blenheim and Ramillies were taking place, holding in check, beyond any question, the audacity of Louis XIV., and exhibiting the power and influence of England in the foreign affairs of Europe in a manner never so remarkably exhibited before.

Such were “the times that went over him.” Watts lived through all those curious transactions round the Court of Queen Anne; lived also through the great Sacheverell riots—and a curious time that was for Dissenters, as he bears testimony again in his little outline of coincidences with his autobiographical memoranda. “March 1st, 1710. The mob rose and pulled down the pews and galleries of six meeting-houses, that is, Mr. Burgess, Mr. Bradbury, Mr. Earle, Mr. Wright, Mr. Hamilton, and Mr. Charles Taylor, but were dispersed by the guards under Captain Horsey, at one or two in the morning.” He passed through all that excitement of public feeling arising from the introduction of the “Schism Bill,” which, beyond anything, covered with gloom the last days of the reign of Queen Anne. When she ascended the throne, Watts wrote a lyric in honour of her happy accession; there was no inconsistency in his expressing almost a burst of gladness and joy at her decease. The “Schism Bill” was worthy of the very worst days of the Stuarts; it was intended to crush all Nonconformist schools, and all Dissenting academies; any Nonconformist teacher was to be imprisoned three months, every schoolmaster was to receive the sacrament and take the oaths, and if afterwards guilty of being present at a conventicle, to be incapacitated and imprisoned. Earl Stanhope, in his quiet, very interesting, and, on the whole, impartial history, speaks of “this tyrannical act,” and well remarks: “It is singular that some of the most plain and simple notions, such as that of religious toleration, should be the slowest and most difficult to be impressed upon the human mind.”[35] It is interesting to notice that this measure was greatly the creation of Lord Bolingbroke, a man who, while “he thought it,” as Earl Stanhope says, “necessary to crush Dissenters,” was himself altogether independent and incapable of any religious faith or conviction. Infidelity has never found its interests on the side of true freedom, but only of lawlessness and licentiousness, to which it is ever fond of applying the glorious term. In the midst of the panic created by this measure the Queen died, died on the very day the Schism Act was to have taken effect, and George I. succeeded to the English throne. He commenced his reign with a noble declaration of liberty of conscience. At his first appearing in council he said, “I take this occasion to express to you my firm purpose to do all that is in my power for the supporting and maintaining the Churches of England and Scotland as they are by law established, which I am of opinion may be effectually done without the least impairing the toleration allowed by law to her Protestant Dissenters, so agreeable to Christian charity.”

Watts lived through that great agitation which consigned Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, first to the Tower, and then to exile, for his complicity with the Pretender, and attempts to bring back the Stuarts. Atterbury was sworn by many oaths to maintain the Protestant succession, but his guilt was soon manifest beyond any doubt, even to the most lenient and doubtful mind. It was greatly to men of Watts’ order of religious conviction that the reigning family owed the stability of its power; and when the fury of the clergy, especially the High Church clergy, was excited by the arrest of the Bishop, one of their own order, and attempts even made to set him forth in the light of a martyr, it is interesting to notice that it was Bishop Gibson, the friend and correspondent of Watts, who allayed the storm.[36]

The intense antipathy to Rome and the Papacy, so manifest in the writings of Watts, and in the wild passions of the times, was not without a cause, and a cause which would make itself especially felt in the City of London. When Watts was ordained over the church in Mark Lane, only fifteen years had elapsed since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; that dreadful act of persecution had poured over many parts of England and of America the noble refugees of freedom and Protestantism; multitudes found their way to the neighbourhood of London; not far from the neighbourhood of Watts’ church, there sprung up a Protestant French colony. They did no harm to this nation by their exile hither,—they brought character, and piety, and invention, and wit; where they rested they reared the unadorned and humble temples of their simple Protestant service. Possessed themselves of the hymns of Clement Marot, they probably suggested a psalmody, sweeter and more elevated than our churches at that time possessed—but in many instances their sufferings in the course of their expatriation had been dreadful. From year to year they still escaped to our shores, and found their way to London; the people and their pastors were aided by the government of William and Mary, and by the succeeding governments. It was not possible but that the dread of honest and quiet thinkers, and the more turbulent passions of the people, should be awakened against that fearful system which seemed so recklessly to strike at all national happiness and prosperity; and in England the Papacy had its agents almost ubiquitous, crafty, cunning, powerful, cruel, and remorseless; it was no time for the indulgence of a mere philosophical calm and dreams of generous toleration. There were frequent wild outbreaks of madness and wrath in heated and excited mobs, and the language indulged by writers, usually so clear and wise, became intense in hatred to Rome; but let the reader transfer his feelings to that time, and interpret his feelings by natural fear, and he will scarcely be able to visit either manifestation with very severe reprehension.

The times through which Watts lived were indeed very remarkable, regarded from many points of view. Well might the nation shudder at the idea of any approach to Popery on the part of our own government; for if the villages and towns of our coast opposite to France, and the neighbourhoods of the little suburban villages of Shoreditch and Spitalfields, were thronged with the refugees of persecution from France, refugees of a similar persecution from Austria also, at a later period, poured into Prussia, into New England, and into some parts of our own country, and especially into London. The Church of Rome did not, in those days, permit many years to pass without refreshing the memory of Protestants as to her power and disposition to persecute. Watts interested himself on behalf of the poor Saltzburgers (£33,000 was raised in London for their relief). Multitudes settled at Ebenezer, in Georgia. The Rev. F. M. Ziegenhagen writes to Watts that “any old rag thrown away in Europe is of service to them, old shoes, stockings, shirts, or anything of wearing apparel from men and women, grown people or children. Wherefore, dear sir, if Baron Oxie’s supposition be true, perhaps you might, by the blessing of God, be the happy instrument to get here and there something of old clothes for them to cover their nakedness.” To this application Watts appears to have responded, as Mr. Ziegenhagen again replies: “The readiness you show in assisting the poor Saltzburgers, nay, your well receiving the mentioning them and their circumstances in my last letter, gave me great satisfaction.” Those of these persecuted ones who passed over to the American plantations appear to have settled surprisingly, aided by England; George Whitefield bears testimony to the great blessings which rested upon them. England made a parliamentary grant of £10,000 to relieve their sufferings. Our readers know the amazing story, the mighty exodus, the march of the exiles, amounting to 20,678, in the depth of winter. The pathos of that story is immortalized in one of the sweetest poems of Goethe, and for us in the prose of Thomas Carlyle. Prussia threw her arms open to receive them; but many perished on the march for want of food, having been obliged to leave their goods behind them. The Count of Warnigrode gave a substantial dinner to 900 of them; the Duke of Brunswick liberally entertained others; the clergy of Leipsic met a number of the wanderers on their way, and led them into the city through the gates, singing Luther’s hymn as they passed in. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to which we have referred, happened a short time before Watts commenced his ministry; this rousing event happened when it was drawing towards its close.

As we turn over some of the hymns of Watts, and some pages of his and other writings of the day, it seems as if the denunciations of Rome were wanting in good taste, and tender charitableness of feeling. The sentiments Watts expressed and indulged in never appear to go beyond the bounds of propriety; his sentiments towards Rome are shared by John Milton, who wrote while the valleys of Piedmont were flaming with burning villages, and covered with the bodies of the slaughtered saints of God. In those years Rome had the power to get up every now and then some such startling spectacle to astonish Europe and mankind. Papists are still surprised that such entertainments were not taken in good part, and that, on the contrary, fervid expressions of indignation were uttered, and loud prayers put up that God would save England from the dominancy of Rome again in the politics of our nation. Men like Watts judged such expressions to be neither unnatural, unholy, nor unwise: they had not reached that stoical calm which contemplates either the insolent outrage and persecution of a hierarchy trampling under foot the holiest rights of men, or the groans of protracted suffering, with indifference; they lived in the neighbourhood of danger, and did not affect a calmness of feeling as they beheld, even in their own neighbourhood, infidelity and priestism working together, as they so often work, forging fetters for a nation.

In several pages of this volume glances have been given at the aspects of the age and its manners, so far as they affected, or were affected by, the subject of this memoir. A large portion of that time may be spoken of as the most dissolute age of England, and even in the later period it was a rude, rough time. In those regions in which vice did not abound, a thick, dark night of ignorance “covered the people.” However we may boast of a few splendid names in literature, and however some character or incident gives effect and pomp to the scenery, still it is only worthy of the apt description of John Foster[37] that “we are only gazing with delight at a fine public bonfire, while in all the cottages round the people are shivering for want of fuel.” It was a time along whose way romance loves to loiter; when the lanthorn lighted the sedan on the neighbourly visit in town as well as country; when, also, no home was exempted from the housebreaker, and every suburb was haunted by highwaymen.

We need not dwell at greater length on the literary characteristics of the age; incidentally we may remind our readers that to Watts, in the later years of his life, we owe the introduction to the world of a poem which has not long ceased to be a very popular one, “The Grave,” by Robert Blair, the minister of the parish of Athelstanford, in Scotland. Blair sent his poem to Watts, and Watts thought so well of it that he sent it to Doddridge, and both advised its author to publish it, and appear to have been able to render him some valuable assistance in making it known. Almost forgotten now, it immediately took the popular taste. It is not wonderful that it did so, for it has all the gloomy magnificence of a body lying in state; but it is gloomy without vulgarity, and has the gorgeousness of the silver shieldings and splendid heraldry on the black velvet. It is short; it perhaps seems to us now almost a sentimental piece of commonplace; but it instantly took possession of the public mind, and is still included in most respectable collections of English poets. It belonged to a class of pieces which appear to have been great favourites with people in those days, and which have furnished abundant materials for sermons ever since—Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs,” and Young’s “Night Thoughts,”—although the last is a very far superior piece of work, and may deserve to be spoken of as one of the finest of purely didactic poems. Blair, in his far-off home among the East Lothians, had everything which to such a nature as his would be likely to press home with a pensive force upon the mind; and the deep reality of James Hervey’s nature, every one at all acquainted with his biography well knows. Edward Young, it may without much indignity to charity be believed, was a man of a very different order, in whom unrealized sentiment considerably dominated the character. He was a man of unquestionable genius, and he so far laid his genius on the altar of religion that he produced not only the poem to which we are referring, but many others, which, if not of equal eminence, had a decided religious influence. But he was a constant haunter of the abodes of fashion, a hanger-on of Courts, and not at all indisposed to avail himself of every kind of help in seeking to further his purposes in life. He was not below the average of men, but the “other-worldliness” of his poem contrasts strangely enough with the worldliness of the author; if, when he wrote of the other world, he wrote like a saint, we cannot forget that, when he wrote of this, he wrote as a keen satirist. In fact, all this belongs to the character of the poetry of the period; it was not real, it was stiff and stilted; it was poetry in brocade; nothing about it looks very real. Of course there are beautiful lines and beautiful passages to be quoted, but its men and women are not real. The poetry of our own times, as compared with those, has gained immeasurably in this, in reality, and a large proportion of the things which were said and admired then would be regarded as simply ridiculous now.

No reference has been made to the States of America. The United States had no existence in Watts’ day—America was regarded then much as we regard Australia now. Watts had many friends there, and much interesting correspondence exists between them; especially interesting it is to find in the history of Harvard University that Watts’ name occurs as one of its early benefactors.