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 die terrible, 

 moving, or burlesque 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 



