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