1802.] THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, 193 



On April 12 Count Eumford passed a resolution to 

 increase the payments of life subscribers to forty guineas 

 and of annual subscribers to four guineas, and to elect 

 a new class of subscribers to the lectures only, the 

 payment being two guineas. A requisition had been 

 drawn up and signed to call a general meeting of the 

 proprietors to enlarge the body of managers and visitors 

 to fifteen, and to stop the election of more proprietors. 

 Count Eumford did not sign this requisition. The 

 managers who signed it were Winchelsea, Morton, 

 Pelham, Banks, Sullivan, and Hatchett. 



That the management of the Institution at this time 

 was by no means harmonious is seen by a letter of Mr. 

 Webster to his mother, and by his recollections, 

 written some time afterwards, of the failure of the 

 school for mechanics, of which he was to have been 



master. 



January 8, 1802. 



I wish I could give you a more favourable account of my 

 situation at the Institution. I believe I told you it did not 

 by any means answer my expectations ; the men who conduct 

 it at present cannot always be its managers, and its very 

 system may and probably will be very much altered at some 

 future period. . . . Except some change takes place in the 

 domestic arrangements of the Institution, I do not think 

 that I shall sleep there again ; I am sorry to say that what- 

 ever good qualities the managers possess and they are by 

 no means deficient in them they have shown very little at- 

 tention to the comforts of those employed in it. 



In his recollections he says : 



But this project for improving mechanics, well intended 

 as it was, which promised to be so useful, and which had 







