446 JAMES WATT. 
of time and space, this magician whose cloudy machinery has pro- 
duced a change on the world, the effects of which, extraordinary as 
they are, are perhaps only now beginning to be felt, was not only the 
profound man of science, the most successful combiner of powers and 
calculator of numbers as adapted to practical purposes, was not only 
one of the most generally well informed, but one of the best and kind- 
est of human beings. 
“ There he stood, surrounded by the little band I have mentioned 
of northern literati, men not less tenacious, generally speaking, of 
their own fame and their own opinions than the National Regiments 
are supposed to be jealous of the high character which they have won 
upon service. Methinks I yet see and hear what I shall never see or 
hear again. In his eighty-fifth (eighty-third?) year, the alert, kind, 
benevolent, old man had his attention at every one’s question, his 
information at every one’s command. 
“ His talents and fancy overflowed on every subject. One gentle- 
man was a deep philologist—he talked with him on the origin of the 
alphabet as if he had been coeval with Cadmus; another, a celebrated 
critic—you would have said the old man had studied political economy 
and belles-lettres all his life; of science it is unnecessary to speak, it 
was his own distinguished walk. And yet, Captain Clutterbuck, 
when he spoke with your countryman, Jedediah Cleishbotham, you 
would have sworn he had been coeval with Claver’se and Burley, with 
the persecutors and persecuted, and could number every shot the 
dragoons had fired at the fugitive covenanters. In fact we discovered 
that no novel of the least celebrity escaped his perusal, and that the 
gifted man of science was as much addicted to the productions of your 
native country (the land of Utopia aforesaid), in other words, as 
shameless and obstinate a peruser of novels as if he had been a very 
milliner’s apprentice of eighteen.”’ 
If our associate had wished it, he could also have made 
himself a name among novelists. Among his intimate 
friends he seldom failed to improve on the terrible, 
moving, or purlesque anecdotes that he heard related. The 
minute details of his recitals, the proper names with 
which he strewed them; the technical descriptions he 
gave of the castles, the country houses, the forests, the 
caverns, to which the scene was successively transferred, 
gave to these impromptus such an air of veracity, that one 
