The Psalms of David

Synopsis

The Poems of Dr. Watts were by my recommendation inserted in the late Collection; the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yealden.

ISAAC WATTS was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father of the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common report makes him a shoe-maker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr. Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate.

Isaac, the eldest of nine children, was given to books from his infancy; and began, we are told, to learn Latin when he was four years old, I suppose at home. He was afterwards taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, by Mr. Pinhorne, a clergyman, master of the freeschool at Southampton, to whom the gratitude of his scholar afterwards inscribed a Latin ode.

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