“When I see such awful appearances in nature, huge and lofty rocks hanging over my head, and at every step of my approach they seem to nod upon me with overwhelming ruin; when my curiosity searches far into hollow clefts, their dark and deep caverns of solitude and desolation, methinks, whilst I stand amongst them, I can hardly think myself in safety, and, at best, they give a sort of solemn and dreadful delight. Let me improve the scene to religious purposes, and raise a Divine meditation. Am I one of those wretches who shall call to these huge impending rocks to fall upon me?” When Watts first visited Tunbridge Wells in search of health and refreshment, it must have been to our modern sense an uncomfortable place; even at the close of his life and in his later visits, it was only just rising into importance as the retreat of the coteries of fashion and letters; it is almost the only spot left now which we may be sure, from some points of view, looks much as it did in the day when Watts, Richardson, or Johnson walked along the Pantiles, and inhaled the breezes from the neighbouring rocks and grounds. Such as it was at the close of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, we find described in the pages of Macaulay and some of the novelists and poets. The waters possessed some real, and acquired an artificial, fame; there was no town, only a few neat and rustic cottages, some of these moveable; moveable cabins and huts were drawn on sledges from one part of the common to another. Fashionable London tradespeople went down and spread out their bazaars under the trees, and near the spring; a fair was daily held, in which were booths where the man of letters and the politician might find his cup of coffee, his newspaper, and his friend; and others, in which the gambler might find his vice and his victim. On the whole, it was a merry place for sated and wearied fashionable loungers, where they might believe that they were becoming rural, and charm themselves into the persuasion that they were the spectators of a poetry of nature, which they would have been indisposed to experience too long or too deeply; but a place where we cannot suppose that Watts found himself for any length of time at home. He was, however, frequently there, and upon one occasion he was guilty of one of the few of what may be called the vanities of verse which fell from his pen. The atmosphere of watering-places is favourable to every kind of literary as well as other lounging. Watts was not altogether insensible, we should suppose, to the charms of female beauty, and certainly a man may well be moved to express himself in verse concerning it, when feeble verses have been erroneously attributed to him. It was in the summer of 1712, when at Tunbridge Wells, that he wrote the following lines in honour of Lady Sunderland, one of the daughters of the Duke of Marlborough; her husband had just been dismissed from the