Watts, as we have seen, lived so much in retirement and retreat, and was so constant a sufferer from the infirmities of health, that little is known in the way of incident and anecdote of his life. In a sense, indeed, he lived constantly before the eyes of men, for his industry, when he was capable of industry, must have been immense; he must have read extensively, he thought deeply, and he possessed not only an active but a facile pen, which appears to have served him very readily when he desired to translate his thoughts into language. His life belongs to that order we represent by such names as Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and John Howe: we do not here compare or contrast the finer details of their character, but, like them, he appears to have been essentially a man of contemplation; his activity was only the reflection of a contemplative life. In height he was quite beneath the common standard; Dr. Gibbons says not above five feet, or, at most, five feet two inches; we are not accustomed to associate so small a stature with any commanding presence in the pulpit; yet his preaching was greatly admired, and Dr. Jennings says that it was not only weighty and powerful, “but there was a certain dignity and respect in his very aspect which commanded attention and awe, and when he spoke, such strains of truly Christian eloquence flowed from his lips as one thinks could not be easily slighted, if resisted.” He was altogether a very slight figure—thin, an oval face, an aquiline nose, his complexion fair and pale, and, Gibbons says, his forehead low; but this does not appear in his portrait, nor does that which it usually indicates, a want of generosity, mark his character. When unable to preach, it was with difficulty he could be persuaded to accept the stipend of the church of which he was the pastor, saying that, as he could not preach, he had no title to any salary. His refusal was not accepted, but the delicate sense of honour marks the character of the man; while, from the time he lived in the Abney family, he devoted a third part of his income to charitable purposes. His eyes appear to have lighted up his face; they are described as singularly small and grey, and are said to have been amazingly piercing and expressive. His voice was very fine and, slender, but regular, audible, and pleasant. The anecdote is well known of him that when he was in one of those coffee-houses—then the haunts of men who knew what company they might expect to find, for every particular coterie had its own place of rendezvous—he overheard his name given by one person to another, who said in surprise, “What! is that the great Dr. Watts?” Whereupon he wrote down a verse and handed it to him:

We have never thought the anecdote a very likely one; Watts was altogether too quiet, and we may use the word, majestic in his manner to make it possible he would do this. The verse is indeed his, but it occurs in a lengthy poem, and it is possible that it was fitted into a fabulous incident which some inventor of scenic situations thought might be, or ought to be, true. There is another anecdote which has been related of him, although we have seen it attributed to others, how, when once in a coffee-house, and somewhat in the way of a tall giant of a man, he said to Watts, “Let me pass, O giant!” and Watts replied, “Pass on, O pigmy!” “I only referred to your mind,” said the giant; “I also to yours,” replied Watts.

Whatever impression such anecdotes may convey, one of his chief characteristics was a very modest appreciation of himself. “His humility,” said Dr. Jennings, “like a deep shade, set off his other graces and virtues, and made them shine with greater lustre.” And of those attributes of his character of which others thought most highly, he thought very inconsiderably. And to such a character is often allied that which is very noticeable in him, a very grateful sense of all favours conferred upon him. There was nothing narrow in his mind, he had a great width of thought and a great width of love: although, as we have seen, a Nonconformist by strong conviction, judging the communion to which he belonged as favourable to civil and religious freedom, and regarding the service as most in harmony with what he considered the simplicity of the Gospel, he was on terms of friendship with many other communions, and especially with several of the prelates, ministers, and members of the Established Church. It would be expected, although this is not invariably the case, that a mind so richly stored, united to so ready an eloquence, would shine in conversation, and this was the case. It is said that in conversation his wit sparkled; his biographer says, “It was like an ethereal flame, ever vivid and penetrating;” but he had an aversion to satire. Referring to the pictures he sometimes introduces, illustrating the vices and follies of his age, he utterly disclaims the idea that in them he has attempted to portray any personal character. “I would not,” he says, “willingly create needless pain or uneasiness to the most despicable figure among mankind; there are vexations enough among the beings of my species without my adding to the heap. When a reflecting glass shows the deformity of a face so plain as to point to the person, he will sooner be tempted to break the glass than reform his blemishes; but if I can find any error of my own happily described in some general character, I am then awakened to reform it in silence, without the public notice of the world, and the moral writer attains his noblest end.” He was not happy in the friendship of listeners, who took down with any accuracy the sayings which fell from him; and it is probable that in conversation, although rich and full, wide and wise, it was rather remarkable for these characteristics than for either its gaiety or its force.

There were few waste moments for which he had to give an account; he acted like a miser by his time, and permitted few moments to pass without their being garnered and compelled to pay interest. We read of his writing on horseback, and whithersoever he travelled the objects which entered either the eye or the ear seem to have left abiding impressions. It seems even the injustice of his opponents in disputation did not make him angry. Such injustice we know he had to experience; and when, in his later years, he offended on both sides, one writer complaining of him that he had gone too far, and another that he had not gone far enough, he contented himself by saying, “Moderation must expect a box on both ears.” A character like that of Watts inspires confidence in almost all that proceeds from his pen: the men, indeed, who carry what Chalmers called “weight in life,” are usually the tall, the self-assertive, and the strong; none of these attributes mark him, and yet he appears to have carried great weight. It was not by vehemence, but by wisdom; he did not win by the forcible striking of the ball, but by prescience and a judicious calculation.

Watts, like so many of the great wits, poets, and authors of his time, was what we should now consider very slightly versed in the accomplishments of travel: a few places in the neighbourhood of London and Southampton and Tunbridge Wells seem almost to exhaust his excursions. Indeed, England was for the most part an unknown country, and as to the continent of Europe, men of wealth and fashion were expected to perfect their education by the grand tour, but to persons even in Watts’ circle of society, France, Switzerland, and Italy, with their cities, memories, forests, and mountains, were unknown. Gray had not yet discovered Cumberland and Westmoreland, and when discovered, there were no facilities to make travel thither very easy; Yorkshire and Lancashire were almost equally unknown. The place to which we frequently find Watts retreating for the benefit of his health was Tunbridge Wells, and a singular place it must have been for a retreat, judging from the description Macaulay has given us of it in his history; but it furnishes us with a singular sense of the simple things which excited the imagination, to read how Watts regarded it. Many a modern reader is struck with surprise at Shakespeare’s description of the cliffs of Dover—a description of terror and fear arising from precipitous heights, which we could scarcely now persuade ourselves to be just of Helvellyn and Pendle. The rocks of Tunbridge seemed to Watts so wild and fearful that they furnish him with a subject for a sermon, “On the vain Refuge of Sinners,” from the text reciting the condition of those who said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne.” The sermon is expressly called “A Meditation upon the Rocks near Tunbridge Wells,” and he says:

“When I see such awful appearances in nature, huge and lofty rocks hanging over my head, and at every step of my approach they seem to nod upon me with overwhelming ruin; when my curiosity searches far into hollow clefts, their dark and deep caverns of solitude and desolation, methinks, whilst I stand amongst them, I can hardly think myself in safety, and, at best, they give a sort of solemn and dreadful delight. Let me improve the scene to religious purposes, and raise a Divine meditation. Am I one of those wretches who shall call to these huge impending rocks to fall upon me?”

When Watts first visited Tunbridge Wells in search of health and refreshment, it must have been to our modern sense an uncomfortable place; even at the close of his life and in his later visits, it was only just rising into importance as the retreat of the coteries of fashion and letters; it is almost the only spot left now which we may be sure, from some points of view, looks much as it did in the day when Watts, Richardson, or Johnson walked along the Pantiles, and inhaled the breezes from the neighbouring rocks and grounds. Such as it was at the close of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, we find described in the pages of Macaulay and some of the novelists and poets. The waters possessed some real, and acquired an artificial, fame; there was no town, only a few neat and rustic cottages, some of these moveable; moveable cabins and huts were drawn on sledges from one part of the common to another. Fashionable London tradespeople went down and spread out their bazaars under the trees, and near the spring; a fair was daily held, in which were booths where the man of letters and the politician might find his cup of coffee, his newspaper, and his friend; and others, in which the gambler might find his vice and his victim. On the whole, it was a merry place for sated and wearied fashionable loungers, where they might believe that they were becoming rural, and charm themselves into the persuasion that they were the spectators of a poetry of nature, which they would have been indisposed to experience too long or too deeply; but a place where we cannot suppose that Watts found himself for any length of time at home. He was, however, frequently there, and upon one occasion he was guilty of one of the few of what may be called the vanities of verse which fell from his pen. The atmosphere of watering-places is favourable to every kind of literary as well as other lounging. Watts was not altogether insensible, we should suppose, to the charms of female beauty, and certainly a man may well be moved to express himself in verse concerning it, when feeble verses have been erroneously attributed to him. It was in the summer of 1712, when at Tunbridge Wells, that he wrote the following lines in honour of Lady Sunderland, one of the daughters of the Duke of Marlborough; her husband had just been dismissed from the councils of the queen, and she had just withdrawn from the court. We may suppose the little clusters of various loungers and talkers would be surprised to see them in some one of the little local flying “Mercury’s” of the day where these verses appeared and were attributed to Watts; he appears to have felt it was an occasion for some apology for stepping into such a by-way; he does so in the following note, upon which fancy may a little divert itself as to the life he and others led at Tunbridge Wells:

But here are the verses—

Presently appeared the following epigram or impromptu composed by some divine, of which it has been truly remarked that it is difficult to say whether the author or the lady has the greater compliment!—

Tunbridge Wells is still the pleasant resort of those who seek the mild and quiet attractions of charming scenery, refreshing breezes, and crags and downs; but the romantic season of Tunbridge Wells is to be sought for about the period when Watts and his contemporaries were visitors there, scenes open to the fancy which it would be difficult to realize now amidst its splendid palatial residences; even Nature must look less like Nature than it did then, while the superior auxiliaries of comfort and accommodation have, as in almost all such instances, been purchased at the expense of dissipating the charms and rural beauties of a place which still retains so many of them as to make one of the most attractive and satisfying haunts for a sick heart among the sanatories of England.

The life of Dr. Watts must be illustrated rather from his works than from its incidents. It is remarkable that so little is recorded of him; his powers of conversation seem to have been considerable, and his reputation for wit was what we might naturally suppose from the liveliness of many of his prose writings. But he was certainly unfortunate in his first biographer. Dr. Gibbons was an accomplished man, a correct and fine scholar, but surely the last thing for which he was ever intended, either by nature or by grace, was to write a biography. His contains many noticeable and acute remarks, and some passages which almost dilate into beauty; but it is strange that, constant as was his intercourse with his friend, he has preserved scarcely anything either of anecdote, conversation, or description illustrating their intercourse; and it seems certain that Watts’ life would have well repaid the assiduity of a Boswell. His mind was remarkably full, and Gibbons testifies how, on any and every occasion, he was able to express himself at once with great force, propriety, and elegance. But his biographer only tells us how his life, from the time of his earliest studies, afforded little variety, and consequently has few subjects for narration—it “flowed along in an even, uniform tenor; one year, one month, one week, one day being, in a manner, a repetition of the former.” Like some other eminent men, it somewhat appears as if he finished the furnishing of his mind when in his youngest years, and devoted all the after period of his life to the unfolding, amplifying, expounding, and popularizing the stores he had amassed and acquired. Dr. Gibbons refers to the fact that his “Treatise on Astronomy and Geography” was most probably prepared for the tuition of Mr.—afterwards Sir John—Hartopp; when published in 1725, in the dedication to Mr. Eames, he says that: “The papers had lain by him in silence above twenty years;” and as to his “Logic,” we have already referred to it; and the dedication in which he tells his former pupil that “it was fit that the public should receive, through his hands, what was originally written for the assistance of his younger studies, and was thus presented to him.” And thus we are assured that the work which met with so large a reception and distinguished applause was prepared in days when he was himself little more than a youth, to serve his own purposes of tuition. Such was the life of this interesting man—it was a fountain of life and power. In the spacious chapel-walk in Southampton there is a pavement-stone marked with the letter W—it stands for Watts; but, as Mr. Carlyle says in his interesting paper on Watts, it might stand for Watts’ Well; it was once the property of Isaac Watts, and the well has a long story, well authenticated in the church records of the Above Bar congregation. That well of clear, beautiful water was purchased by old Isaac Watts from his friend, Robert Thorner, the founder of the Southampton Charity. It was on, and constituted a part of, the tenement known by the name of the Meeting-house; then it was leased to the church, then it was purchased by the church. It was known in Southampton two hundred years ago. It is now a fountain sealed, but still it is known, and proudly the pastor says, “Our father Isaac gave us this well, and drank thereof, himself and his children.”[44] Watts’ Well is no inapt symbol or emblem of Watts’ life and labours. Even lost to sight, sealed over, its springs still pour along their refreshing, cooling, and transparent streams; nor have the crowds who hurry thoughtlessly by power to interfere with the useful freshness of its pure blessings.

“The last days are the best witnesses for a man.” “Blessed,” says old Robert Harris, “shall he be that so lived that he was desired, and so died that he was missed.” Isaac Watts illustrated in a remarkable manner power in weakness.