CLAIMS FOR A PEERAGE. 4638 
highest reward. You will naturally suppose that Watt 
was made a peer. 
Such a thing was not even thought of! 
To speak honestly, so much the worse for the peer- 
age, which would have been honoured by the name of 
Watt! 
Such a neglect, however, in a nation so justly proud 
of its great men, might well astonish me. And when I 
inquired the cause, what do you think they answered ? 
“The dignities of which you speak are reserved for 
officers of the army and navy, for influential orators in 
the House of Commons, for members of the nobility. 
It is not the fashion (I do not invent, I quote precisely,) 
it is not the custom, to grant them to learned men, to 
literary men, to artists, to engineers!” I know well 
that it was not the fashion under Queen Anne, since 
Newton was not made a peer of England.* But after 
a century and a half of progress in science and in phi- 
losophy, when each of us during the short course of his 
life has seen so many wandering kings cast off, proscribed, 
succeeded on their thrones by soldiers without genealogy, 
sons of their sword, was it not allowable to think that it 
had become obsolete to divide men into folds; that none 
would any longer say to their faces, as in the inflexible 
code of the Pharaohs—“ Whatever be your services, 
* The whole truth should have been told. Newton, though unfor- 
tunately not made a peer, was never hidden under a bushel. He was 
knighted by Queen Anne, and courted by King George I. and by the 
Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline. He was President of 
the Royal Society, a Member of Parliament, a Master of the Mint; 
and at his interment the pall was supported by the Lord High Chan- 
cellor, the Dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh, and the Earls of Pem- 
broke, Sussex, and Macclesfield. Moreover, our author seems to 
have excluded the host of lawyer-peers from the class “learned 
men.’’— Translator. 
