But there is one name with which that of Watts is constantly united; it is the name of one whose nature in a marked and special manner seemed fitted to produce a perfect harmony and accord, it is the name of PHILIP DODDRIDGE. At what period the friendship commenced cannot be very exactly ascertained. Probably, had the life of Doddridge been spared to pen the biography of his venerable friend, the present biographer might have felt his work a superfluity of naughtiness; but, considerable as the distance was between the ages of the friends, Watts preceded his younger brother by only a short time to the grave. Like Watts, his name is especially associated with the hymnology of England; nor is there a collection of sacred songs which does not contain some strains from the pair of sweet singers. Doddridge is indeed rather known by a few pieces, very sweet and helpful, but limited in the range of their emotions, and never attempting the lofty and dazzling flight of Watts’ nobler pieces. Doddridge’s life is full of interest; it has yet to be written, for there was a variety of incidents in his story which scarcely appears in the biography of Kippis, or the admirable memoir of Job Orton. All things considered, it was a wonderful life: its activity was amazing, the variety of his literary acquirements and spoils was prodigious; one would say he had much more of the poet’s temperament than Watts; he was impulsive, passionate, affectionate, yet we certainly miss in him that indefinable something which constitutes the poet, and which something, Watts assuredly possessed. In some particulars both in his ancestry and earlier career Doddridge resembled Watts; Philip, like Isaac, was the child (he was the twentieth) of a mother whom persecution had drifted to our shores; at his birth his mother seemed so near to death that no attention was given to the almost lifeless little castaway, the infant, and the world almost lost Philip the moment he was born. If Watts probably received his first lessons in biblical knowledge from his grandmother by the fireside of the old house in French Street, the Dutch tiles in the chimney constituting an illuminated and illustrated Bible, from which Doddridge’s mother first initiated her own son into Bible lore, have become a famous tradition. Like Isaac, Philip made so much progress in scholarship, that he had the offer of a training in either University if he would enter the Established Church; it was made generously by the Duchess of Bedford. Philip, like Isaac, declined the temptation, and so he found his _alma mater_ beneath the more modest and obscure roof of a Dissenting academy at Kibworth, in Leicestershire.