There were few waste moments for which he had to give an account; he acted like a miser by his time, and permitted few moments to pass without their being garnered and compelled to pay interest. We read of his writing on horseback, and whithersoever he travelled the objects which entered either the eye or the ear seem to have left abiding impressions. It seems even the injustice of his opponents in disputation did not make him angry. Such injustice we know he had to experience; and when, in his later years, he offended on both sides, one writer complaining of him that he had gone too far, and another that he had not gone far enough, he contented himself by saying, “Moderation must expect a box on both ears.” A character like that of Watts inspires confidence in almost all that proceeds from his pen: the men, indeed, who carry what Chalmers called “weight in life,” are usually the tall, the self-assertive, and the strong; none of these attributes mark him, and yet he appears to have carried great weight. It was not by vehemence, but by wisdom; he did not win by the forcible striking of the ball, but by prescience and a judicious calculation. Watts, like so many of the great wits, poets, and authors of his time, was what we should now consider very slightly versed in the accomplishments of travel: a few places in the neighbourhood of London and Southampton and Tunbridge Wells seem almost to exhaust his excursions. Indeed, England was for the most part an unknown country, and as to the continent of Europe, men of wealth and fashion were expected to perfect their education by the grand tour, but to persons even in Watts’ circle of society, France, Switzerland, and Italy, with their cities, memories, forests, and mountains, were unknown. Gray had not yet discovered Cumberland and Westmoreland, and when discovered, there were no facilities to make travel thither very easy; Yorkshire and Lancashire were almost equally unknown. The place to which we frequently find Watts retreating for the benefit of his health was Tunbridge Wells, and a singular place it must have been for a retreat, judging from the description Macaulay has given us of it in his history; but it furnishes us with a singular sense of the simple things which excited the imagination, to read how Watts regarded it. Many a modern reader is struck with surprise at Shakespeare’s description of the cliffs of Dover—a description of terror and fear arising from precipitous heights, which we could scarcely now persuade ourselves to be just of Helvellyn and Pendle. The rocks of Tunbridge seemed to Watts so wild and fearful that they furnish him with a subject for a sermon, “On the vain Refuge of Sinners,” from the text reciting the condition of those who said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne.” The sermon is expressly called “A Meditation upon the Rocks near Tunbridge Wells,” and he says: