Until Watts and Doddridge appeared, England had no popular sacred melodies. Amongst the works of the poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Sandys, George Herbert, and others, a few were scattered up and down; but they mostly lacked the subtle element which constitutes a hymn. For, just as a man may be a great poet, and utterly fail in the power to write a good song, so a man may be a great sacred poet, and yet miss the faculty which makes the hymn-writer. It is singular, it is almost indefinable. The subtle something which catches the essential elements of a great human experience, and gives it lyrical expression, takes that which other men put into creeds, sermons, theological essays, and sets it flying, as we just now said, like “the lark to heaven’s gate.” It ought never to be forgotten that Watts was, in fact, the creator of the English hymn. He wrote many lines which good taste can in no case approve; but here again the old proverb holds true, “The house that is building does not look like the house that is built.” And the great number of following writers, while they have felt the inspiration he gave to the Church, have moulded their lines by a more fastidious taste, which, if it has sometimes improved the metre or the sentiment, has possibly diminished in the strength. We will venture to say that even now there is a greater average of majesty of thought and expression in Watts’s hymns than in any other of our great hymn-writers; although, in some cases, we find here and there a piece which may equal, and some one or two which are said to surpass, the flights of the sweet singer of Stoke Newington. But the hymns of Watts, as a whole, were not so well fitted to a great and popular revival, to the expression of a tumultuous and passionate experience, as some we shall notice. They were, as a whole, especially wanting in the social element, and the finest of them sound like notes from the harp of some solitary angel. One cannot give to them the designation which the Wesleys gave to large sections of their hymns, “suitable for experience meetings.” Praise rather than experience is the characteristic of Watts, although there are noble exceptions. Our readers will perhaps remember a well-known and pleasing instance in a letter from Doddridge to his aged friend. Doddridge had been preaching on a summer evening in some plain old village chapel in Northamptonshire, when at the close of the service was “given out,” as we say, that hymn commencing: “Give me the wings of faith to rise.”