400 



JAMES WATT. 



gentlemen, go and rub yourselves against those untangible 



combinations, as you are pleased to call Watt s engines 



against those pretended abstract ideas ; they will crush 

 you like gnats, they will hurl you up in the air out of 

 sight ! &quot; 



The persecutions which a warm-hearted man meets 

 with, in the quarters where strict justice would lead him 

 to expect unanimous testimonies of gratitude, seldom fail 

 to discourage, and to sour his disposition. Nor did Watt s 

 good humour remain proof against such trials. Seven 

 long years of lawsuits had excited in him such a senti 

 ment of indignation, that it occasionally showed itself in 

 severe expressions ; thus he wrote to one of his friends : 

 &quot;What I most detest in this world are plagiarists. 

 The plagiarists ! They have already cruelly assailed me ; 

 and if I had not an excellent memory, their impudent as 

 sertions would have ended by persuading me that I have 

 made no improvement in steam-engines. The bad pas 

 sions of those men to whom I have been most useful 

 would you believe it ? have gone so far as to lead them 

 to maintain that those improvements, instead of deserving 

 this denomination, have been highly prejudicial to public 

 wealth.&quot; 



practice arising from necessity ; for, in his full acquaintance with our 

 writings, he is exuberant in quotations without always giving chap 

 ter and verse ; and, moreover, many of the cited passages are from 

 letters and other manuscript documents. In the instance before us, 

 the keen satire of Rous was in asking the opposite party whether it 

 could be seriously contended that Watt s invention, which, during the 

 space of nearly thirty years, had been admired in all Europe as the 

 greatest practical advance ever made in the arts, was a mere abstract 

 discovery in science ; and, he observed, that if those who thus pleaded 

 were to approach the untangible substance, as they were pleased to call 

 it, with the same ignorance of its nature that they thus affected, they 

 would be crushed before it like flies, leaving no trace of their exist 

 ence. Translator. 



