ed to pronounce with absolute authority, he
never laid down the law, but spoke like any other partaker of
the conversation. I had the happiness of knowing Mr. Watt for
many years, in the intercourse of private life; and I will take
upon me to bear a testimony, in which all who had that
gratification I am sure will join, that they who only knew his
public merit, prodigious as that was, knew but half his worth.
Those who were admitted to his society will readily allow that
anything more pure, more candid, more simple, more scrupulously
loving of justice, than the whole habits of his life and
conversation proved him to be, was never known in society.

The descriptions given by Lords Brougham, Jeffrey, the genial Sir
Walter, and others, of Watt's universality of knowledge and his charm in
discourse recall Canterbury's exordium:

Hear him but reason in divinity
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish consumed,
You would desire the king were made a prelate;
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
You would say--it hath been all in all his study:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle rendered you in music.
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose
Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks,
The air, a chartered libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears
To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences.

If Watt fell somewhat short of this, so no doubt did the king so greatly
extolled, and much more so, probably, than the versatile Watt.

Dr. Black, the discoverer of latent heat, upon his death-bed, hears that
the Watt patent has been sustained, and is for the time restored again
to interest in life. He whispers that he "could not help rejoicing at
anything that benefited Jamie Watt."

The Earl of Liverpool, prime minister, stated that Watt was remarkable
for

the simplicity of his character, the modesty of his nature, the
absence of anything like presumption and ostentation, the
unwillingness to obtrude himself, not only upon the great and
powerful, but even on those of the scientific world to which he
belonged. A more excellent and amiable man in all the relations
of life I believe never existed.

There can be no question that we have for our example, in the man Watt,
a nature cast in the finest mold, seemingly composed of every cre