CLAIMS FOR A PEERAGE. 463 



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 Qyeen 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 — "Wliatever be your services, 



* The whole truth should have been told. Newton, though unfor- 

 tunatel}' 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. 



