The closing years of Watts’ life Mr. Hallam ventures to speak of, and Earl Stanhope confirms the verdict, as nationally the happiest period of all England’s history, a brief period during which plenty and comfort seemed everywhere to abound. We do not refer to the moral state of the people; that appears to have been low enough, but the nation had reached, and the people were experiencing, the blessedness of a lull of peace after that great storm which had shaken every timber of the national vessel. The period of George II. appears to be that ideal time upon which many look back under the designations of “Happy England” and “Merry England.” Between these two periods how many intervening chapters occur! and it is not a little distressing to a biographer that it seems impossible to lay the hand upon scarcely a letter of the many multitudes of letters which Watts must have written, and many, one cannot but think, illustrating some of the circumstances and the characters of the times, and his interest in them.[34] Thus, for instance, he was an intimate friend of that David Polhill who was one of the foremost men in the affair of the great “Kentish Petition,” a circumstance which shines brightly among the gallant actions of those who, with daring intrepidity, supported William III. It was at a time when pusillanimity and fear of France would have been fatal. The House of Commons, rent by faction, was very slow in vindicating the king; five Kentish gentlemen, magistrates, interpreting the opinion of their county, signed as deputies a petition calling upon the House to lay aside their own personal differences, to attend better to public affairs, and especially to vote sufficient supplies to sustain the king and his allies. It was a daring step; the five gentlemen who bore the petition to the House all presented themselves as responsible for it; the House instantly voted that it was scandalous, infamous, and seditious, calculated to destroy the constitution of Parliament, and to subvert the established government of the realm. The five gentlemen, of whom David Polhill was one, were, amidst the acclamations of the nation, committed to prison, and there for some time they continued. The pen of Defoe sprang into eloquence on their behalf, and when they were liberated, as they were shortly, one of those demonstrations—not of the mob—but of the strong middle classes of England, greeted them on Blackheath on their way home, bells clanging, bonfires burning, and Kent altogether in such a state as it had not been in since the Restoration of Charles II.