“ISAAC WATTS.” Troubled as were the early years of his life, the subject of our biography furnishes one of those rare instances in which the precocity of infancy was not purchased at the expense of power in maturity; it is said that before he could speak plainly, when any money was given to him, he would cry, “A book! a book! buy a book!” He began to learn Latin at the age of four years, and in the knowledge of this language and in Greek he made swift progress; it is probable that of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew he had considerable knowledge while yet a child. He is one of those who have been said to “lisp in numbers.” His utterances of infant rhyme are not astonishing, but every biography of him has repeated the story how, when he was seven years of age, his mother after school-hours one afternoon offered him a farthing if he would give her some verses, when he presented her with the well-known couplet: I write not for a farthing, but to try How I your farthing writers can outvie. It was about the same time that, some verses of his falling into the hands of his mother, she expressed her doubts whether he could have written them, whereupon he immediately wrote the following acrostic; and if some of the lines seem to falter, the last two are certainly remarkable as the expression of a mere child, and have even a kind of prophecy in them of his future years: I am a vile polluted lump of earth, S o I’ve continued ever since my birth; A lthough Jehovah grace does daily give me, A s sure this monster Satan will deceive me, C ome, therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me. W ash me in Thy blood, O Christ, A nd grace Divine impart, T hen search and try the corners of my heart, T hat I in all things may be fit to do S ervice to Thee, and sing Thy praises too. It was perhaps from the uncertainty of tuition at home, or from the youthful student outstripping the attainments of his father, that he was early sent to the grammar-school at Southampton, of which the Rev. John Pinhorne was the principal. He was a man of good character and attainments, rector of All Saints Church in Southampton, prebendary of Leckford, and vicar of Eling, in the New Forest. The Nonconformist relations of his young pupil appear to have produced no uncharitable effect upon the master’s mind. From the first he prophesied the future eminence and celebrity of the young scholar. He died in 1714, when these were in their dawn. Watts held him in most reverent and grateful memory, and illustrated these feelings in a Pindaric Latin ode, which, in its recapitulation of the classical authors, to whose pages the master had guided his knowledge, certainly shows at once the abundant scholarship of the worthy pair.