In his childhood circumstances happened likely to produce some effect upon his mind. The memory of the terrible plague of 1665, in which between one and two thousand persons were swept away, was still fresh in Southampton for one hundred and fifty years after. The annalists of the town tell us it did not recover from the state of decay into which it fell from that dreadful visitation. The shops were all closed, all who could fled from the town, and the streets were overgrown with grass. When Watts was six years old the great comet flamed over England, with which were associated in many minds such dreadful portents, and it no doubt lent a colour to many of his after most imaginative conceptions. It was an object of singularly marvellous splendour. Several years after he seems to have put the memory of the impressions it produced upon him into the couplets in which he alters Young’s description, and the words sufficiently show how the surprising spectacle had excited his youthful fancy: Who stretched the comet to prodigious size, And poured his flaming train o’er half the skies? Is’t at Thy wrath the heavenly monster glares O’er the pale nations, to announce Thy wars? The life of Watts had very little in it at any time which related to the history of the period in which he lived, yet it is impossible not to notice that these first years of his life at Southampton were among the most exciting and memorable of the country’s history. What England was Lord Macaulay has well described in perhaps one of the most charming chapters of his history—_the State of England at the death of Charles II._ It was the time of England’s Reign of Terror, and circumstances were happening, the conversations upon which must have produced a vivid impression upon the mind of a youth of lively sensibility. The execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the trial of Richard Baxter, the rising of Monmouth, the tremendous descent of Jefferies in the Bloody Assize of the West, the trial of the bishops, the flight of James, the landing of William at Torbay, and his progress to London; these were circumstances such as England had never seen before, such as England can never see again, and they all crowded fast upon each other in the years of Watts’ boyhood and early youth.