The life of Dr. Watts must be illustrated rather from his works than from its incidents. It is remarkable that so little is recorded of him; his powers of conversation seem to have been considerable, and his reputation for wit was what we might naturally suppose from the liveliness of many of his prose writings. But he was certainly unfortunate in his first biographer. Dr. Gibbons was an accomplished man, a correct and fine scholar, but surely the last thing for which he was ever intended, either by nature or by grace, was to write a biography. _His_ contains many noticeable and acute remarks, and some passages which almost dilate into beauty; but it is strange that, constant as was his intercourse with his friend, he has preserved scarcely anything either of anecdote, conversation, or description illustrating their intercourse; and it seems certain that Watts’ life would have well repaid the assiduity of a Boswell. His mind was remarkably full, and Gibbons testifies how, on any and every occasion, he was able to express himself at once with great force, propriety, and elegance. But his biographer only tells us how his life, from the time of his earliest studies, afforded little variety, and consequently has few subjects for narration—it “flowed along in an even, uniform tenor; one year, one month, one week, one day being, in a manner, a repetition of the former.” Like some other eminent men, it somewhat appears as if he finished the furnishing of his mind when in his youngest years, and devoted all the after period of his life to the unfolding, amplifying, expounding, and popularizing the stores he had amassed and acquired. Dr. Gibbons refers to the fact that his “Treatise on Astronomy and Geography” was most probably prepared for the tuition of Mr.—afterwards Sir John—Hartopp; when published in 1725, in the dedication to Mr. Eames, he says that: “The papers had lain by him in silence above twenty years;” and as to his “Logic,” we have already referred to it; and the dedication in which he tells his former pupil that “it was fit that the public should receive, through his hands, what was originally written for the assistance of his younger studies, and was thus presented to him.” And thus we are assured that the work which met with so large a reception and distinguished applause was prepared in days when he was himself little more than a youth, to serve his own purposes of tuition. Such was the life of this interesting man—it was a fountain of life and power. In the spacious chapel-walk in Southampton there is a pavement-stone marked with the letter W—it stands for Watts; but, as Mr. Carlyle says in his interesting paper on Watts, it might stand for Watts’ Well; it was once the property of Isaac Watts, and the well has a long story, well authenticated in the church records of the Above Bar congregation. That well of clear, beautiful water was purchased by old Isaac Watts from his friend, Robert Thorner, the founder of the Southampton Charity.