Isaac Watts. By Arthur Paul Davis.- (Independent Press. 8s. 6d.)
A soon on Isaac Watts, synchronising with the bicentenary of the great hymn-writer's death, arouses hopeful expectations, which unfortunately do• not long survive a study of the volume. What Mr. Davis in fact has given us is one of those industrious but arid compilations which, together with much first-class matter, flow out in considerable volume from the lesser American univer- sities. It may be useful to be reminded that Watts wrote much verse besides hymns, and not a little prose, that he was an assiduous controversialist, that he lived for thirty years in the household of Sir Thomas Abney and that for most of his life he was Minister of Mark Lane Independent Chapel. But none of this is of the essence of the matter. Given a choice between remembering Watts by The Author's Solemn Address to the Great and ever-blessed God on a Review of what he had written in the Trinitarian controversy, prefixed by him to some pieces on that Subject which it was not judged necessary to publish, and remembering him by Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand drest in living green ; So to the Jews old Canaan stood And Jordan roll'd between,
we would not feel disposed to hesitate long. George Sampson's The , Century of Divine Songs and Bernard Manning's Hymns of Wesley and Watts illuminate the one Watts ; Mr. Davis expounds the other.
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