found his invention attended with entire success: the cylinder, though emptied of its steam before every stroke of the piston, maintained an equable temperature at the same height as steam itself-viz. 212°, and consequently the engine was now heated, and kept in operation, with onefourth of the fuel formerly employed.

12. Watt's next great difficulty was the utilisation of the expansive force of the steam; this he effected by dispensing with atmospheric power above the piston, and making use in its stead of alternations of steam and a vacuum in the same manner as they were employed below it. He opened communications from the upper part of the cylinder to the boiler on the one hand, and the condenser on the other, enclosing the whole in an air-tight chamber, in whose cover or roof an aperture was left to admit the rod or shank of the piston, which was, moreover, fully padded round with hemp, the more completely to exclude the air. By various ingenious contrivances it was arranged that while the cylinder showed a vacuum at one end, steam was poured in at the other; the steam so admitted creating the necessary vacuum by its speedy condensation, and impelling the piston by its expansive force.

13. Our space will not permit us to dwell upon the numerous minute but valuable improvements which Watt's inexhaustible ingenuity devised during ten long years of unrewarded toil. Unrewarded, do we say? It is true that, at first, the world little heeded the invention or the inventor, but not the less did he find an exceeding recompense for his labours in the sweet consciousness of success.

But while thus engaged in perfecting the wonderful machine which was destined to effect such marvellous changes in our habits and customs-to revolutionise the relations of classes-to multiply the sources of national wealth-Watt was constrained to a hand-to-hand fight with Poverty, and perplexed by the embarrassments of an increasing family and a precarious avocation. To eke out his scanty income, he added land-surveying to his numerous other pursuits, and gladly executed any species of honest work which fell in his way. For the man had a grand

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ALL BY A SINGLE STRING.

purpose ever fixed before his earnest eyes, and no hardship, no anxiety, no discouragement could turn him from his course. To us there seems something absolutely sublime in Watt's noble perseverance-in his land-surveying and level-taking, in his daily toil for bread, and his silent prosecution of the great idea which he had conceived. Grander, we believe, in the sight of God and the angels, the spectacle of this modest, reserved, but earnest mechanician, brooding over the details of his wondrous engine, than a Marlborough unmoved amid the shock of battle, or a Nelson dying in the hour of victory!

14. Having perfected his engine, Watt now became desirous of making known to the world its powers. But he himself was without pecuniary resources, nor could he easily find a friend disposed to embark his capital in a seemingly hazardous speculation. At length, he met with one Dr. Roebuck, a man of ability and enterprise, who had just then established the famous Carron Iron Works, and who agreed to find the necessary funds upon condition that he received two-thirds of the profits.

Watt immediately took out a patent (1769) and commenced at Kinneal an engine with a cylinder of eighteen inches diameter. Constructed by incompetent workmen, its action was imperfect, but sufficiently demonstrated the value of his improvements. At this time, however, he was a prey to nervous anxiety, not on his own account, but on that of others. It is a sad thing,' he then wrote, 'for a man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme, and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst.' The worst, indeed, seemed to have arrived when Dr. Roebuck, owing to numerous imprudent speculations, found himself unable to carry out his undertaking. Watt quietly abandoned, or at least nourished in secret, his ambitious hopes, and calmly returned to the undivided practice of his profession as a civil engineer. But, about 1774, there came to him, through his friend, Dr. Smale, of Birmingham, a

proposition which finally resulted in the triumph of the Steam Engine, and the imperishable renown of its inventor. Mr. Boulton, the eminent hardware manufacturer, whose immense establishments at Soho, near Birmingham, were then the boast of England and the wonder of Europe, offered to take Watt into partnership with him upon the same terms as Dr. Roebuck had enforced. The liberal proposal was joyfully embraced, and, in 1775, the firm of Boulton and Watt commenced operations as manufacturers of steam engines.

15. Their first step was to obtain a renewal of Watt's patent for five-and-twenty years; their second, to erect an engine at Soho, which they invited men of science and commercial speculators to examine. Its vast merits being immediately recognised, they offered to construct similar engines, wherever required, upon condition that they received as payment one-third of the amount of saving in fuel which they annually effected. Thus they prepared to sell, as Boulton said to Boswell, 'what all the world desires to have, POWER;' and speedily they enjoyed the gratification of seeing that POWER busily at work in many parts of England, exhausting mines of the waters which long had choked them up- lifting enormous weights to hitherto undreamt-of heights-creating new wants, opening new sources of supply, and originating novel and profitable industries! Thus, Watt, by the steady concentration of his powers upon a fixed object, had succeeded in giving to the world the giant of machines-the STEAM ENGINE!

16. The remainder of the great inventor's career was devoted to the perfection of his marvellous invention, and to the development of numerous mechanical contrivances which alone would have made the reputation of any lesser man. Amongst these his biographer names-a method of warming houses by steam; a machine for multiplying busts and statuary from the original models; a new composition for the uses of the sculptor, equalling marble in transparency and durability; and an apparatus for copying letters and other manuscripts. His active mind was never idle; his exhaustless imagination could never rest. At the age of

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DEATH OF JAMES WATT.

seventy, to prove the enduring vitality of his intellectual powers, he devoted himself to the study of the AngloSaxon language, and mastered its intricacies with surprising facility. Meanwhile, the sale of his steam engines produced so large a yearly income that, in 1801, he was happily enabled to retire from any active participation in the business of the firm. His name was honoured throughout the civilised world. France had her Napoleon; but England her James Watt. And more renowned by far the 'victories of peace' which crowned with laurels the brows of the Saxon mechanician, than the blood-red triumphs which had clothed the Corsican hero in Consular purple!

17. In 1785, Watt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The University of Glasgow, in 1806, conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws upon its former mathematical instrument maker. In 1808, he was unanimously elected a member of the French Institute. Thus, rich in honours, in the admiration of his contemporaries, in the assurance of an undying fame, James Watt spent the closing years of a calm and earnest life, passing away, in tranquil hope of a blessed resurrection, on August 25, 1819, in the 84th year of his age.

Watt was a man of no ordinary calibre. He was not possessed by one idea to the exclusion of all others, but had acquired an intimate knowledge of most of the important branches of human learning. It was said of him that 'it seemed as if every subject casually started in conversation had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting.' He understood almost every science, theoretically as well as practically. There was nothing upon which he was not an authority, from the construction of a steam engine to the cure of a smoking chimney. He was an assiduous reader, and had the art of making the best use of what he read—of deriving from even the most worthless book some novel information-of discovering grains of gold where others would have detected only rubbish. Perhaps no individual in his age,' says Lord Jeffrey certainly no incompetent judge-' possessed so much and such varied and exact information-had read

IIS CHARACTER AND PERSON.

17

so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticizing the measures or the matter of the German poetry.'

Watt's personal appearance was that of a grave and reserved student. His head was generally bent forward; he stooped at the shoulders; his chest fell in; his limbs were lank but muscular; his complexion 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' His manners were exceedingly modest and prepossessing; his voice, deep and low; his articulation, measured and distinct. He was a zealous admirer of the graces of fiction, and himself possessed no ordinary powers as a romancist-his stories, told in his own effective and impassioned manner, being the charm and wonder of the circle that gathered round him. Such was JAMES WATT, the inventor of the Steam Engine.