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 ! ” ot 
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: 
—“ 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.” 
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. 
