Orci, quæ omnia bella devoratis!'
"But Catullus was a heathen; let us hope that he (G.) is now rejoicing in another and a better world, free from our cares, griefs, and infirmities. Some one has said, I shall not wholly die; and Gregory's name, his merits and virtues, will live at least as long as those do who knew him. You are not, from this, to conceive that we give way to grief; on the contrary, you will find us as cheerful as we ought to be, and as much disposed to enjoy the friends we have left as ever; but we should approach to brutes if we had no regrets."
Mr. Watt, at the date of these letters, had entered on his seventieth year, a period after which great mental exertions are rarely made. [Pg313]
In the summer of 1819, symptoms of indisposition manifested themselves which soon rendered Watt aware of his approaching dissolution. "I am very sensible," said he to his afflicted friends, "of the attachment you show me, and I hasten to thank you for it, as I am now come to my last illness." He died on the 25th of August, 1819. His remains were deposited in the church of Handsworth, near his estate of Heathfield. His son has raised over his grave a Gothic chapel, in the centre of which is placed a statue by Chantrey.
The personal character of Watt could not fail to excite the admiration and the love of those distinguished persons, whose pride and happiness it was to be admitted to a share in the friendship of the great engineer. Among these were reckoned some of the men who will leave upon the present age the deepest and most lasting impressions of their genius, and such persons have bequeathed to posterity the sentiments with which he inspired them. We cannot here do more justice to the personal character of the subject of this notice than by repeating the portraiture of it which has been given by three of the most distinguished of his friends, and of the most illustrious men of the present age.
At a meeting convened in 1824, for erecting a monument to Watt, Lord Brougham pronounced a speech, from which we extract the following observations:—
"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. One of the most astonishing circumstances in this truly great man, was the versatility of his talents. His accomplishments were so various, the powers of his mind were so vast, and yet of such universal application, that it was hard to say whether we should most admire the extraordinary grasp of his understanding, or the accuracy of nice research with which he could bring it to bear upon the most minute objects of investigation. I forget of whom it was said, that his mind resembled the trunk of an elephant, which can pick up [Pg314] straws, and tear up trees by the roots. Mr. Watt, in some sort, resembled the greatest and most celebrated of his own inventions, of which we are at a loss whether most to wonder at the power of grappling with the mightiest objects, or of handling the most minute; so that, while nothing seems too large for its grasp, nothing seems too small for the delicacy of its touch, which can cleave rocks, and pour forth rivers from the bowels of the earth, and, with perfect exactness, though not with greater ease, fashion the head of a pin, or strike the impress of some curious die. Now, those who knew Mr. Watt, had to contemplate a man whose genius could create such an engine, and indulge in the most abstruse speculations of philosophy, and could at once pass from the most sublime researches of geology and physical astronomy, the formation of our globe, and the structure of the universe, to the manufacture of a needle or a nail; who could discuss, in the same conversation, and with equal accuracy, if not with the same consummate skill, the most forbidding details of art and the elegances of classical literature, the most abstruse branches of science and the niceties of verbal criticism.
"There was one quality in Mr. Watt which most honourably distinguished him from too many inventors, and was worthy of all imitation—he was not only entirely free from jealousy, but he exercised a careful and scrupulous self-denial, and was anxious not to appear, even by accident, as appropriating to himself that which he thought belonged to others. I have heard him refuse the honour universally ascribed to him, of being the inventor of the steam engine, and call himself simply its improver; though, in my mind, to doubt his right to that honour, would be as inaccurate as to question Sir Isaac Newton's claim to his greatest discoveries, because Descartes in mathematics, and Galileo in astronomy and mechanics, had preceded him; or to deny the merits of his illustrious successor, because galvanism was not his discovery, though, before his time, it had remained as useless to science as the instrument called a steam engine was to the arts before Mr. Watt. The only jealousy I have known him to betray, was with respect to others, in the nice adjustment he was fond of giving to the claims of inventors. Justly prizing scientific discovery above all other possessions, he deemed the title to it so sacred, that you might hear him arguing by the hour to settle disputed rights; and if you ever perceived his temper ruffled, it was when one man's invention was claimed by, or given to another; or when a clumsy adulation pressed upon himself that which he knew to be not his own."
In the preface to the Monastery Sir Walter Scott speaks of Watt in the following terms:—
"There were assembled about half a score of our northern lights. * * Amidst this company stood Mr. Watt, the man whose genius discovered the means of multiplying our national resources to a degree, perhaps, even beyond his own stupendous powers of calculation and combination; bringing the treasures of the abyss to the summit of the earth—giving the feeble arm of man the momentum of an Afrite—commanding manufactures to arise as the rod of the prophet produced water in the desert—affording the means of dispensing with that time and tide which wait for no man—and of sailing without that wind which defied the command and threats of Xerxes himself. This potent commander of the elements—this abridger of time and space—this magician, whose cloudy [Pg315] machinery has produced 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 most 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 kindest of human beings.