1703—one wonders if Watts went down into the City on the 31st of July that year, to see one whom he must very well have known, who, as we have seen, studied some years before Watts was there, at the Dissenting Academy in Stoke Newington—Daniel Defoe, standing in the pillory; for Defoe’s great and even intimate friend, William III, was dead, and the men who had long winced beneath his wit, and had longed for the time of their reprisals, fancied the time had come at last; but, indeed, the sentence which was intended for punishment turned into a painful kind of triumph. It cannot be a pleasant position for the head and the hands to be fixtures in that fashion for an hour; but if the sentence has to be borne, then it is pleasant to find the rude machine adorned with flowers and garlands, and the odium of the punishment transferred from the sufferer to his judges. However, they ruined Defoe. This was the year in which, as Watts mentions in his slight autobiographic memoranda, occurred the great storm, one of the most fearful England has ever known. Whole buildings were hurled down, two hundred and fifty thousand timber trees torn up by the roots, spires beaten from the churches, and the lead from the roofs of more than one hundred churches rolled up like scrolls. Eight thousand persons perished by drowning; the Severn overflowed its banks, and fifteen thousand sheep besides other cattle perished; eight hundred dwelling-houses, four hundred windmills, and barns without number, were thrown down. Some people were killed in their beds, among others Dr. Kidder, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and his wife. The damage done in London amounted to about a million of pounds sterling, in Bristol to £150,000. The damage on the sea was still more considerable, many ships of the royal navy were cast away, and innumerable merchant vessels. Imagination quite fails to realize the horrors of that tremendous night; it was as one has said of it, “As if the destroying angel hurried by shrouded in his very gloomiest apparel.” And side by side with such great national calamities went our great national rejoicings. This was the moment in our history when the genius of Marlborough was rising, and the victories of Blenheim and Ramillies were taking place, holding in check, beyond any question, the audacity of Louis XIV., and exhibiting the power and influence of England in the foreign affairs of Europe in a manner never so remarkably exhibited before.