It was a house full of daughters and two sons. Two had already gone to the family vault, and one—born the year of Watts’ entrance into the family—was soon to follow. But there were nine daughters in the household; of these two had died before the days of Watts’ residence, seven survived; these were Helen, and Mary, and Martha, and Elizabeth, and a second Anne, and Bridget, and Dorothy, and Frances. Was Watts their tutor? It was a dangerous neighbourhood for a young man, amidst all those bright glances and radiant young faces in the Puritan household; perhaps the danger had been greater had there been fewer of them. Fancy indulges herself in picturing the life of the young student there. As we have seen, Frances married Sir Nathaniel Gould, and died in 1711, six days after her mother, Lady Hartopp. The other six daughters all lived and died unmarried in the family home. How solitary, one thinks, the last of that bright circle must have felt, dying there in 1764, sixty-two years after Watts first took up his abode among them. Isaac Watts entered the family as the tutor of the future baronet, and many of those pieces which he afterwards gave to the world were the productions of this time, many of his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” the chief portions of his “Logic,” and probably much of his “Improvement of the Mind.” We have said already he furnishes, like John Calvin and some others, an instance of a singular prematurity of intelligence, not however interfering, as is so frequently the case, with future eminence, usefulness, and advancement. Here, then, was for some time Watts’ home. He studied hard and diligently, drawing forth and putting into shape the results of previous years of scholarship. Behind the house there were extensive gardens and remarkably fine trees, and especially a noble cedar, said to have been planted by General Fleetwood, concerning which Robinson tells a singular story: That long years ago a scythe had been hung up in the fork of the tree, and was left there unnoticed and untouched until years after it was discovered, the body of the tree having completely overgrown it and enclosed the blade so fast that it could not be removed. “And,” says Robinson, “it is at this day to be seen, the point of the blade on the one side, and the end on the other.”[8]