Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/452

 old Mr. Hall used to call it Watts’ Jingle. I do not match those [metrical] Psalms with what is now admired in poetry, although time was when no less a man than the Rev. T. Bradbury thought so meanly of Watts’ Hymns as commonly to call them Watts’ Whims. And indeed, compared to the Scripture, they are like a little taper to the sun.”

He wrote to the Hon. and Rev. William Bromley Cadogan, July 30, 1784 :—

“We (i.e., himself and Mrs. Romaine, née Price) set out for the North, in all probability for the last time. I have three sisters alive, all in years as well as myself, and we are to have a family meeting to take our leave, final as to this life. It would be too much for my feelings, if I had not all the reason in the world to believe that our next meeting will be in glory. Mr. Whitfield used often to put me in mind how singularly favoured I was; my father, mother, and three sisters were like those blessed people, ‘Martha and her sister, and Lazarus,’ whom ‘Jesus loved.’”

“When,” says his biographer, “the clergy were called upon to collect in their respective parishes for the French emigrants, he was not a whit behind the chiefest of them in this business, for which he had the honour of being noticed in an anonymous pamphlet, as if to relieve the distresses of a Papist were to encourage the errors of Popery.” Thus, to his father’s persecutors William Romaine returned good for evil. “A cheerful old man,” “praising Jesus,” he died on the Lord’s Day, 26th July 1795. Funeral Sermons were preached by Rev. William Goode, Rev. Thomas Wills, and Rev. Charles Edward de Coetlogon.

The Rev. George Townshend Fox, Prebendary of Durham, sympathising with his principles, and admiring his talents, which were an honour to his native county, erected a tablet to Mr. Romaine’s memory, containing an epitaph, and four extracts from his “Treatises on Faith,” in the parish church of Hartlepool in 1876:—

After a lapse of 80 years, this Tablet is erected by one who reveres his memory, loves the Scriptural doctrine which he embraced, and regards his name as an honour to his native town and county.

