We have dwelt thus at length upon some of the characteristics of Watts’ verse, feeling that criticism upon it is far from exhausted; and that, amidst its various representatives in our language, in spite of that modern contempt which is creeping even into the circles of those who profess to hold his faith and follow in his footsteps, he still deserves to retain a place in the history of English poetry. We have referred rather to those more striking and obvious marks of his genius; but we must still prefer him in his more quiet and subdued strains of devotion, those peaceful, pensive lines with which his works abound. It is equally certain that he wrote a number of verses and lines perfectly indefensible on the score of good taste: this is the more remarkable, because his taste does seem to have been cultivated to the highest pitch of excellence; and his mind was remarkable, not merely for the plenitude of its ideas, but for the easy elegance with which he ordinarily gave expression to them. However this may be, their bad taste and strange conceits have not greatly repressed the reverence with which we regard the works of George Herbert or of Henry Vaughan; nor does the frequent turgidity of Milton much interfere with the admiration and awe with which we read most of his poems. [Illustration] [Illustration: ABNEY HOUSE, STOKE NEWINGTON.] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. Residence in the Abney family. It was at that period of Watts’ life, when he felt in a very especial manner his loneliness, and fever and infirmity were reducing him to a painful sense of abiding weakness, that Sir Thomas and Lady Abney invited him to spend a week with them at their magnificent house of Theobalds, in Hertfordshire. He accepted the invitation, and the hosts and their guest seemed to have been so mutually pleased with each other that Watts continued in the family until his death, a period of thirty-six years. Watts must have then been about thirty-eight years of age. Johnson remarks upon this friendship that “it was a state in which the notions of patronage and dependence were overpowered by the perception of reciprocal benefits; it deserves a particular memorial;” and he refers to Dr. Gibbons’ interesting account, which is, indeed, one of the most pleasant pieces of his biography, and compels the wish that he had more frequently broken the monotony of the book by pages so pleasing. The event was one of those kind providences which those who watch the lives of eminent men, who have served their generation and the cause of God, will not fail to perceive. Think of the solitary student, the shrinking, sensitive man, the modest and fearful spirit who could not command service, and recoiled from giving trouble, how fearfully life might have dragged along through a few years of languor and pain, unequal to much service, unable to gather round him any, or but few, of the comforts of life, suddenly transferred to all the affluent comforts of this magnificent