schoolmaster, sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow in 1760. About the same time he had the offer of the post of chaplain to the factory at Bencoolen, in the Straits Settlements. “You are too good,” said the master of Trinity, “to die of drinking punch in the torrid zone”; and Watson, instead of becoming, as he had flattered himself, a great orientalist, remained at home to be elected professor of chemistry, a science of which he did not at the time possess the simplest rudiments. “I buried myself,” he says, “in my laboratory, and in fourteen months read a course of chemical lectures to a very full audience.” One of his discoveries led to the black-bulb thermometer. Not the least of his services was to procure an endowment for the chair, which served as a precedent in similar instances. In 1771 he was appointed regius professor of divinity, but did not entirely renounce the study of chemistry. In 1768 he had published Institutiones metallurgicæ, intended to give a scientific form to chemistry by digesting facts established by experiment into a connected series of propositions. In 1781 he followed this up with an introductory manual of Chemical Essays. In 1776 he answered Gibbon's chapters on Christianity, and had the honour of being one of the only two opponents whom Gibbon treated with respect. The same year he offended the court by a Whig sermon, but in 1779 became archdeacon of Ely. He had always opposed the American War, and on the accession of Lord Shelburne to power in 1782 was made bishop of Llandaff, being permitted to retain his other preferments on account of the poverty of the see. Shelburne expected great service from him as a pamphleteer, but Watson proved from the ministerial point of view a most impracticable prelate. He immediately brought forward a scheme for improving the condition of the poorer clergy by equalizing the incomes of the bishops, the reception of which at the time may be imagined, though it was substantially the same as that carried into effect by Lord Melbourne's government fifty years later. Watson now found that he possessed no influence with the minister, and that he had destroyed his chance of the great object of his ambition, promotion to a better diocese. Neglecting both his see and his professorship, to which latter he appointed a deputy described as highly incompetent, he withdrew to Calgarth Park, in his native county, where he occupied himself in forming plantations and in the improvement of agriculture. He also frequently came forward as a preacher and as a speaker in the House of Lords. His advice to the government in 1787 is said to have saved the country £100,000 a year in gunpowder. In 1796 he published, in answer to Thomas Paine, an Apology for the Bible, perhaps the best known of his numerous writings. Watson continued to exert his pen with vigour, and in general to good purpose, denouncing the slave trade, advocating the union with Ireland, and offering financial suggestions to Pitt, who seems to have frequently consulted him. In 1798 his Address to the People of Great Britain, enforcing resistance to French arms and French principles, ran through fourteen editions, but estranged him from many old friends, who accused him, probably with injustice, of aiming to make his peace with the government. Though querulous because of his non-preferment, De Quincey tells us that “his lordship was a joyous, jovial, and cordial host.” He died on the 2nd of July 1816, having occupied his latter years in, the composition and revision of an autobiography (published in 1817), which, with all its egotism and partiality, is a valuable work, and the chief authority for his life.
WATSON, THOMAS (c. 1557-1592), English lyrical poet, was born in London, probably in 1557. He proceeded to Oxford, and while quite a young man enjoyed a certain reputation, even abroad, as a Latin poet. His De remedio amoris, which was perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, and so is his “piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind,” which was also in Latin verse. He came back to London and became a law-student. The earliest publication by Watson which has survived is a Latin version of Antigone of Sophocles, issued in 1581. It is dedicated to Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, who was perhaps the patron of the poet, who seems to have spent some part of this year in Paris. Next year Watson appears for the first time as an English poet in some verses prefixed to Whetstone's Heptameron, and also in a far more important guise, as the author of the Ἑκατομπαθία or Passionate Centurie of Love. This is a collection or cycle of 100 pieces, in the manner of Petrarch, celebrating the sufferings of a lover and his long farewell to love. The technical peculiarity of these interesting poems is that, although they appear and profess to be sonnets, they are really written in triple sets of common six-line stanza, and therefore have eighteen lines each. It seems likely that Watson, who courted comparison with Petrarch, seriously desired to recommend this form to future sonneteers; but in this he had no imitators.[1] Among those who were at this time the friends of Watson we note Matthew Royden and George Peele. In 1585 he published a Latin translation of Tasso's pastoral play of Aminta, and his version was afterwards translated into English by Abraham Fraunce (1587). Watson was now, as the testimony of Nashe and others prove, regarded as the best Latin poet of England. In 1590 he published, in English and Latin verse, his Meliboeus, an elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham, and a collection of Italian Madrigals, put into English by Watson and set to music by Byrd. Of the remainder of Watson's career nothing is known, save that on the 26th of September 1592 he was buried in the church of St Bartholomew the Less, and that in the following year his latest and best book, The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained (1593), was posthumously published. This is a collection of sixty sonnets, regular in form, so far at least as to have fourteen lines each. Spenser is supposed to have alluded to the untimely death of Watson in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, when he says:—
“Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low,
Having his Amaryllis left to moan.”
He is mentioned by Meres in company with Shakespeare, Peele and Marlowe among “the best for tragedie,” but no dramatic work of his except the translations above mentioned has come down to us. It is certain that this poet enjoyed a great reputation in his lifetime, and that he was not without a direct influence upon the youth of Shakespeare. He was the first, after the original experiment made by Wyat and Surrey, to introduce the pure imitation of Petrarch into English poetry. He was well read in Italian, French and Greek literature. Watson died young, and he had not escaped from a certain languor and insipidity which prevent his graceful verses from producing their full effect. This demerit is less obvious in his later than in his earlier pieces, and with the development of the age, Watson, whose contemporaries regarded him as a poet of true excellence, would probably have gained power and music. As it is, he has the honour of being one of the direct forerunners of Shakespeare (in Venus and Adonis and in the Sonnets), and of being the leader in the long procession of Elizabethan sonnet-cycle writers. (E. G.)
The English works of Watson, excepting the madrigals, were first collected by Edward Arber in 1870. Thomas Watson's “Italian Madrigals Englished” (1590) were reprinted (ed. F. J. Carpenter) from the Journal of Germanic Philology (vol. ii. No. 3, p. 337) with the original Italian, in 1899. See also Mr Sidney Lee's Introduction (pp. xxxii.-xli.) to Elizabethan Sonnets in the new edition (1904) of An English Garner.
- ↑ Speaking of the Hecatompathia, Mr Sidney Lee says: “Watson deprecates all claim to originality. To each poem he prefixes a prose introduction in which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotations, the French, Italian or classical poem which was the source of his inspiration” (Elizabethan Sonnets, p. xxviii.). In a footnote (p. xxxix.) he adds: “Eight of Watson's sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell' Aquila (1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, the Ferrarese poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Étienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?-1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl. 1548), and Aeneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic Argonautica); or (among the Latins), Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial and Valerius Flaccus; or (among the modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus.”
