While Dibdin’s Tom or Jack is for ever seeing, after his fashion, a merciful Providence, Watts’s model child can discern only one armed with terrors and tortures. Isaac had no idea of one of Charley’s ‘sweet little cherubs’ sitting aloft watchful to preserve; the Nonconformist’s feverish eye beheld only a demon:-- ’Tis dangerous to provoke a god! His power and vengeance none can tell: One stroke of his Almighty rod Shall send young sinners quick to hell. In the sailor’s philosophy all is harmony; but Watts finds discord where other men find none. Jack does not believe that ‘dogs delight to bark and bite,’ nor that ‘God hath made them so.’ A pat on the head from a master’s hand is the supreme delight of the ever-faithful dog. And if ‘bears and lions growl and fight,’ it is not that ‘it is their nature to;’ any more, at least, than it is the nature of man. It was Nelson who told the young midshipman, as part of his duties, to ‘hate a Frenchman like the devil!’ Dibdin only allowed such feeling in the heat and fury of battle:-- ’Tis a furious lion in battle, so let it! But, fury appeased, ’tis in mercy a lamb! Watts is always readiest with unpleasant figures. Ordinary parents forgive lovingly the faults of children, but Watts tells each little angelic rebel that-- The ravens shall pick out their eyes, And eagles eat the same! Moreover, Watts forgets grace, occasionally, for chance, as in the couplet:-- If we had been ducks, we might dabble in mud, Or dogs, we might play till it ended in blood, So foul and so fierce are their natures. But Thomas and William, and such pretty names, Should be cleanly and harmless, as doves or as lambs, Those lovely, sweet, innocent creatures. Watts’s intentions were as honest as Dibdin’s, and both, no doubt, often erred; but the silversmith’s son was never so loose in logic, philosophy, truth, and metre, as the dwarfish son of the schoolmaster is in the sample just given. It must have been some such sample that soured the spirit of ‘bold Bradbury,’ another dissenting minister, who suspected Watts of not being a good Trinitarian. Once Bradbury’s clerk gave out one of Watts’s hymns, to be sung before the sermon. The minister looked down from the pulpit and said: ‘No, sir, none of Watts’s whims here, if you please.’ In one of the anniversaries of 1688 Bradbury sang, at a public dinner, ‘The Roast Beef of Old England!’ Had he lived long enough he would have sung with equally loyal zest, Tom Dibdin’s famous anti-invasion song, ‘The tight little Island.’