On the whole, it is well to refer to this controversy. It is a painful, important item in Watts’ life, and brings out very clearly how singularly he was removed from irritable passions, and it sadly reveals how impossible it seems even for the most gentle natures to escape the venom and the vileness of the “perils of false brethren.” Bradbury unquestionably was firmly attached to evangelical truth, so far as he knew it, and his discourses in the two volumes called “The Mystery of Godliness, Considered in Sixty-one Sermons,” are certainly interesting, suggestive, and even admirable specimens of preaching; but, we have said, he was chiefly known as a political preacher. His printed discourses contain few intimations of that wit which was a favourite weapon with him in the pulpit, and of which we have some indications in the sermon entitled “The Ass and the Serpent,” a comparison between the tribes of Issachar and Dan in their regard for civil liberty—a sermon, like all those in the volume which contains it, devoted to rousing the spirit of the times in which he lived. Regularly as the fifth of November came round, he commemorated the day in a sermon, and afterwards adjourned with his friends to dine at a tavern, where, it is said, he always sung the national song, “The Roast Beef of Old England;” there, no doubt, jest and joke passed round pretty freely, for, as we have intimated, he had a sprightly wit and a copious flow of eloquence. Watts gently remonstrated with him for these displays, to which he replied in his vehement and peppery style. George Whitefield, at a later period, more strongly remonstrated with him on his conduct in this particular, but not apparently with much effect. It is said that upon the death of Queen Anne, an incident to which we have already referred, he took for his text on the occasion of her funeral sermon, “Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter.” The story is exceedingly likely, for he belonged to a race of men not indisposed to misuse Scripture after that unbecoming fashion; and we may surely say, notwithstanding the ominous shadows which brooded over the closing years of a reign commenced with so much promise, the anecdote, even the possibility that it may be true, testifies to the cruel coarseness, the low profane jocularity, and ungrateful injustice of the man. He was a hearty politician, to whom all refinements of speech or sentiment were unknown, and, right or wrong, he plunged on in a reckless kind of fashion. He adopted as his motto, _Pro Christo et patriâ_, For Christ and my country. Charity may be permitted to hope that he, at any rate, thought the motto did not unworthily represent the man, if sometimes in his conduct he seems somewhat unworthily to represent the motto. And while Watts was pursuing his studies in scholarly seclusion, never knowing the happiness of robust health, and, although a firm Nonconformist, on good terms with bishops