(Should've done my homework before acquiring this particular volume!) The 'life' of Isaac Watts by Samuel Johnson is actually the short article on IW that Johnson included in his 1779-81 'Lives of the Poets' and, as such, takes up perhaps 10 pages of this book. This material is fine so far as it goes (although Johnson praises Watts as a poet, he also castigates him for having been a Dissenter.) The rest is taken up by extended defenses of Watts's views of the Trinity (apparently a source of great controversy and argument in the years after his death); the points were not always easy to follow. The inclusion of Watts's "Solemn Address to the Great and Ever-Blessed God" was a definite plus, however -- the character of the man comes through more clearly in these 12 pages than in most, if not all, of those that precede and follow them. This book is probably only for Watts completists (in whose ranks I seem to be finding myself these days!) -- I should also comment on the edition, which is basically a bound copy of photocopies of the pages of an older volume; I've read/borrowed these Gale ECCO print editions before, but this one seems especially poorly done: some of the pages of the original 'bled through' to complicate the reading, and some of the copies made did not take into account the thickness of the binding of the original; as a result, some of the first words are 'lost' in shadow (although one can usually deduce or make them out). Surprisingly, the use of the 'long s' [ƒ] did not cause as much difficulty as one might imagine -- one gets used to it pretty quickly (in *most* cases, at least!). ( )