VARIOUS PURSUITS. 3859 
porations of arts and of trades regarded the young artist 
from London as an intruder, and obstinately refused him 
permission to open even the most humble workshop. 
Every means of conciliation failing, the University of 
Glasgow interfered, and ceded to young Watt a small 
locality in their own buildings, allowing him to open a 
shop there and honouring him moreover with the title of 
their Engineer.* There still exist some small instru- 
ments of that epoch, of exquisite workmanship, made 
entirely by Watt’s own hands. I will add that his son 
has lately placed before me the first essays of a steam- 
engine, and that they are truly remarkable by the high 
finish of the work, the firmness, the precision of the 
form. It was not then without reason, whatever may 
have been said of it, that Watt spoke with complacency 
of his own manual dexterity. 
Perhaps you have some reason to think, that I carry 
my scruples rather far, in claiming for our associate a 
species of merit which cannot add to his glory. But I 
will acknowledge that I never intend to make a pedantic 
enumeration of the qualities with which superior men 
have been endowed, without recollecting that wretched 
general in the age of Louis XIV. who always carried 
one shoulder very high, because Prince Eugene of Savoy 
was rather deformed, and thought that this sufficed with- 
out his endeavouring to extend the likeness any farther. 
Watt had scarcely reached his one and twentieth year 
when the University of Glasgow attached him to their 
* This was not all. According to Stuart’s Narrative, Watt picked 
up a practical acquaintance with machines from an industrious me- 
chanic at Glasgow; a person “ who was by turns a cutler and a white- 
smith, a repairer of fiddles, a tuner of spinets, and a mender of fish- 
ing tackle,”—in a word, a very useful man at almost every thing.— 
Translator. 
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