d therefore will not hazard either praise
or censure. The highest praise which he has received ought not to
be suppressed: it is said by Lord Lyttelton, in the Prologue to his
posthumous play, that his works contained

"No line which, dying, he could wish to blot."

WATTS.

The poems of Dr. Watts were, by my recommendation, inserted in the late
Collection, the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure
or weariness they may find in the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret,
and Yalden.

Isaac Watts was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father, of
the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common
report makes him a shoemaker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr.
Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate.

Isaac, 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
suppose, at home. He was afterwards taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, by
Mr. Pinhorne, a clergyman, master of the Free School at Southampton, to
whom the gratitude of his scholar afterwards inscribed a Latin ode.
His proficiency at school was so conspicuous that a subscription
was proposed for his support at the University, but he declared his
resolution of taking his lot with the Dissenters. Such he was as every
Christian 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 Essays, supposed to have been
written as exercises at this academy, show a degree of knowledge, both
philosophical and theological, such as very few attain by a much longer
course of study. 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 verses to his brother, in the glyconic
measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and
elegant. Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then
prevailing, and are written with such neglect of all metrical rules as
is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps
not always exactly pure, has such copiousness and splendour as shows
that he was but a very little distance from excellence. His method
of study was to impress the contents of his books upon his memory by
a