Biographical Memoir of Mr. James Watt, 137 



branch of industry that has not been indebted to them ; and in all 

 the most material, they have not only widened most magnificently 

 the field of its exertions, but multiplied a thousand-fold the 

 amount of its productions. It is our improved steam-engine that 

 has fought the battles of Europe, and exalted and sustained, 

 through the late tremendous contest, the political greatness of 

 our land. It is the same great power which now enables us to 

 pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the arduous struggle 

 in which we are still engaged, with the skill and capital of coun- 

 tries less oppressed with taxation. But these are poor and nar- 

 row views of its importance. It has increased indefinitely the 

 mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap 

 and accessible all over the world the materials of wealth and 

 prosperity. It has armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with 

 a power to which no limits can be assigned, completed the do- 

 minion of mind over the most refractory qualities of matter, and 

 laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles of mechanic 

 power which are to aid and reward the labours of after genera- 

 tions. It is to the genius of one man too that all this is mainly 

 owing ; and certainly no man ever before bestowed such a gift on 

 his kind. The blessing is not only universal, but unbounded ; 

 and the fabled inventors of the plough and the loom, who were 

 deified by the erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, con- 

 ferred less important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our 

 present steam-engine. 



This will be the fame of Watt with future generations; and it 

 is sufficient for his race and his country. But to those to whom 

 he more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and en- 

 joyed his conversation, it is not perhaps the character in which 

 he will be most frequently recalled — most deeply lamented — or 

 even most highly admired. Independently of his great attain- 

 ments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in 

 many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his 

 age possessed so much and such varied and exact information, — 

 had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accu- 

 rately and so well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, 

 a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising 



