Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, July 17th, 1674, the same year in which John Milton died. He was the eldest of nine children, and was named after his father, Isaac. His father was a truly worthy and respectable man. In the course of the future years of his very long life, he became the master of a school of considerable reputation in the town. Dr. Johnson says it was reported that Watts’ father was a shoemaker. In the year 1700 Isaac Watts, of 21, French Street, Southampton, was a clothier or cloth factor; so he is described in legal documents which still exist in that town; so he is described in another deed of 1719; while in 1736 he is described as “Isaac Watts, of the town and county of Southampton, gentleman:”[1] this was the year in which he died. At the time, however, of Isaac’s birth, deep grief was round, and heavy distress over the household. The father was a Nonconformist, and a deacon of that which is now the Above Bar Congregational Church in Southampton. It was a cruel time; the laws were very bitter against Nonconformists, and the traveller through Southampton in many months of the year 1674-75 might have seen a respectable young woman, with a child at her breast, sitting on the steps of the gaol seeking and waiting for admission to her husband. It was the mother of Watts, and the daughter of Alderman Taunton. Tradition says, she was French in her lineage, of an exiled Huguenot family, driven over to England by intolerance and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Thus Watts was the child of persecution, and through all the earliest years of his life his mind must have been habituated to such impressions and associations as were well calculated to draw out and give sharpness and distinctness to his convictions. The old prison remains very nearly the same as when the young mother sat with her child looking up to the barred room in which her husband was confined. It stands upon the beach of the sweet Southampton waters, which then rolled much further in, and almost washed the prison doors. Legend asserts that it was only a few steps from this spot that Canute fixed his chair when, in order that he might rebuke the adulation of his courtiers, he commanded the waves to retire. Perhaps the imprisoned man turned to the incident, and thought of One who is able to still the noise of the waves and the tumult of the people, and to say to all billows, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further.” If able to climb to the tower of his prison, a lovely scene opened to his view: the charming hills of Bittern on the left; the “sweet fields beyond the swelling floods” opposite, on the right of the Southampton waters; at his foot the old houses of the quaint little town, and his own persecuted abode.