Take the life of almost any man who has stood in any relation to the thought and intelligence of his times, in any period of English history, and it is interesting to regard him by the light of the events flowing on around him. Watts was almost a literary solitary; he cannot be referred to as greatly influencing the times in which he lived, but an outline of his life is incomplete if we give no reference to the events of his time. From the last years of the reign of Charles II. to the closing years of George II. constitutes the era of Watts. Every age seems eminently important to its actors—sometimes even to spectators—and yet that age stands out with singular distinctness. How different the times of Watts’ birth and those of his death: the infant in the arms of a weeping mother, beneath the bars of the dungeon of the imprisoned Nonconformist, and the old man, that same infant, passing away, with the great Methodist movement rising into activity over the whole nation. A little room, scarcely tolerated in Southampton, where a few persecuted Nonconformists assembled together, and large chapels, capable of holding thousands, rising amidst the far-off wastes of Northern Yorkshire and Western Cornwall, and a sudden burst of religious vitality finding vent in hymns and meetings over the whole country. If the change in the aspect of religious life was remarkable, not less remarkable was the change, or rather perhaps we ought to say the changes, which had been brought about in the political. The period of Watts’ childhood was the most ominous, unhappy, and unsettled in English story; men knew not what to expect, they knew not whither they were drifting. Those were the days of the great Monmouth Rebellion and Jeffreys’ “Bloody Assize;” the days of the execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the days of Titus Oates. The mind of England was full of plots, and the fear and the shadow of plots, succeeded by internal discords, and a disunited front to possible external foes. Well has it been said, “It was high time that James should go; it was time that William should come.”