WAT T S HE Poems of Dr. WATTS were by TH my recommendation inferted in the late Collection; the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in the perufal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yalden. ISAAC WATTS was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father, of the fame name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common report makes him a fhoemaker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr. Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate. Ifaac, 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 fuppofe, at home. He was afterwards taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, by Mr. Pinhorne, a clergyman, mafter of the Free-school at Southampton, to whom the gratitude of his scholar afterwards infcribed a Latin ode. His proficiency at school was fo confpicuous, that a fubfcription was propofed for his fupport at the Univerfity; but he declared his refolution to take his lot with the Diffenters. Such he was as every Chriftian Church would rejoice to have adopted. He therefore repaired in 1690 to an academy taught by Mr. Rowe, where he had for his companions and fellow-students Mr. Hughes the poet, and Dr. Horte, afterwards Archbishop of Tuam. Some Latin Effays, fuppofed to have been written as exercises at this academy, fhew a degree of knowledge, both philofophical and theological, fuch as very few attain by a much longer course of study. He He was, as he hints in his Miscellanies, a maker of verses from fifteen to fifty, and in his youth he appears to have paid attention to Latin poetry. His verfes to his brother, in the glyconick measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably eafy and elegant. Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindarick folly then prevailing, and are written with fuch neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has fuch copioufnefs and splendour, as fhews that he was but at a little distance from excellence. very His method of ftudy was to imprefs the contents of his books upon his memory by abridging them, and by interleaving them to amplify one fyftem with fupplements from another. With the congregation of his tutor Mr. Rowe, who were, I believe, Independents, he communicated in his nineteenth year. At the age of twenty he left the academy, and spent two years in ftudy and devotion |