e was quick of resentment; but, by his
established and habitual practice, he was gentle, modest, and
inoffensive. His tenderness appeared in his attention to children and to
the poor. To the poor, while he lived in the family of his friend, he
allowed the third part of his annual revenue, though the whole was not a
hundred a year; and for children he condescended to lay aside the
scholar, the philosopher, and the wit, to write little poems of
devotion, and systems of instruction, adapted to their wants and
capacities, from the dawn of reason, through its gradations of advance
in the morning of life. Every man acquainted with the common principles
of human action, will look with veneration on the writer, who is at one
time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in
their fourth year. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is,
perhaps, the hardest lesson that humility can teach.

As his mind was capacious, his curiosity excursive, and his industry
continual, his writings are very numerous, and his subjects various.
With his theological works I am only enough acquainted to admire his
meekness of opposition, and his mildness of censure. It was not only in
his book, but in his mind, that orthodoxy was united with charity.

Of his philosophical pieces, his Logick has been received into the
universities, and, therefore, wants no private recommendation; if he
owes part of it to Le Clerc, it must be considered that no man, who
undertakes merely to methodise or illustrate a system, pretends to be
its author.

In his metaphysical disquisitions, it was observed by the late learned
Mr. Dyer, that he confounded the idea of _space_ with that of _empty
space_, and did not consider, that though space might be without matter,
yet matter, being extended, could not be without space.

Few books have been perused by me with greater pleasure than his
Improvement of the Mind, of which the radical principles may, indeed, be
found in Locke's Conduct of the Understanding; but they are so expanded
and ramified by Watts, as to confer upon him the merit of a work, in the
highest degree, useful and pleasing. Whoever has the care of instructing
others, may be charged with deficience in his duty if this book is not
recommended.

I have mentioned his treatises of theology as distinct from his other
productions; but the truth is, that whatever he took in hand was, by his
incessant solicitude for souls, converted to t