WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



LIVES OF THE ENGINEERS 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON VOL. IV. 



[THE STEAM-ENGINE BOULTON AND WATT] 



" Mr. Smiles has done wisely to link the names of Boulton and Watt together in 

 the volume before tis. The more we read of the correspondence between these two 

 great men during the birth of the new motive power, the more we feel convinced 

 that the world has to be thankful for their happy partnership. Boulton seemed by 

 some happy chance to possess all the qualities of mind that were wanting in Watt. 

 .... From the heaps of dusty ledgers in the counting-house at Soho, the author 

 has drawn the materials for these deeply-interesting lives, and has so handled them 

 as to produce a volume which worthily crowns his efforts in this most interesting, 

 because before untrodden, walk in literature." Times. 



"Boulton was the complement of Watt's active intelligence. . . . His is a 

 memory of which the leaders of industry in Great Britain may well be proud. His 

 virtues were the coinmon virtues which render the English character respected 

 throughout the world, but in him they were combined with admirable harmony, 

 and were unsullied by any of those vices which too frequently degrade the reputation 

 of our countrymen. We cannot read of Mr. Boulton's grand struggle to bring the 

 steam-engine into further use without a feeling of pure admiration. . . . We lay 

 down this volume with a feeling of pride and admiration that England had the 

 honour of producing at the same time two such men, whose labours will contimie 

 to benefit mankind to the remotest generation, and with gratitude to the distin- 

 guished biographist who preserves for the instruction of the times to come 

 pictures of them so full of life and reality." Daily News. 



"Mr. Smiles has been enabled, by the examination of some hitherto unused 

 papers, to throw a new light upon much of Watt's career ; and he has shown much 

 skill in using them so as not to become wearisome, and yet to give us a very full 

 and interesting picture. There is, in fact, a certain dramatic interest about the 

 early history of the great discovery, which Mr. Smiles has well brought out. . . . 

 Boulton is a really noble character, to whom Mr. Smiles has done justice, and 

 whose combination with a man of Watt's marvellous abilities, but defective 

 practical talents, was of the greatest use to themselves and to the country." Pall 

 Mall Gazette. 



" In this volume Mr. Smiles has published a highly interesting and judiciously- 

 condensed joint biography of the two men to whom England owes such an in- 

 calculable development of her wealth and power during the last century. . . . Mr. 

 Smiles carries pleasantly all who choose to read him carefully, through the history 

 of the various improvements engrafted by Watt on his original engine, and of the 

 other scientific inventions upon which his fertile brain was perpetually at work. 

 He gives, also, a curious and interesting account of the part taken by Boulton in 

 the prevention of the frightfully prevalent crime of coining base money, through 

 the application of steam power to the coinage of a far more accurately-struck 

 currency in metal of a more intrinsic value." Saturday Review. 



"That Mr. Smiles's will be the standard life of the great engineer is simply the 

 necessity of his greater art as an industrial biographer. His skill in weaving 

 together anecdote and description, representations of what was known with a 

 distinct specification of what was contributed by his hero ; his dramatic power, in 

 this volume especially, exhibited in the contrast of the two partners, the 

 sanguine, speculative character of Boulton ; the anxious, morbid, cautious temper 

 of Watt, one full of hope in the very darkest circumstances, the other full of fear 

 in the brightest, give the volume a wonderful charm. The life of Watt is a great 

 epic of discovery ; the narrative of it by Mr. Smiles is an artistic and finished poem." 

 British Quarterly Review. 



