No one was more gratified at the issue of the trial than Dr. Black, who, when Robison told him of it, was moved even to tears. “It’s very foolish,” he said, “but I can’t help it when I hear of anything good to Jamie Watt.” The Doctor had long been in declining health, but was still able to work. He was busy writing another large volume, and had engaged the engraver to come to him for orders on the day after that on which he died. His departure was singularly peaceful. His servant had delivered to him a basin of milk, which was to serve for his dinner, and retired from the room. In less than a minute he returned, and found his master sitting where he had left him, but dead, with the basin of milk unspilled in his hand. Without a struggle, the spirit had fled. As the servant expressed it, “his poor master had given over living.” He had twice before said to his doctor that “he had caught himself forgetting to breathe.” On hearing of the good old man’s death, Watt wrote to Robison,—“I may say that to him I owe, in a great measure, what I am; he taught me to reason and experiment in natural philosophy, and was a true friend and philosopher, whose loss will always be lamented while I live. We may all pray that our latter end may be like his; he has truly gone to sleep in the arms of his Creator, and been spared all the regrets attendant on a more lingering exit. I could dwell longer on this subject; but regrets are unavailing, and only tend to enfeeble our own minds, and make them less able to bear the ills we cannot avoid. Let us cherish the friends we have left, and do as much good as we can in our day!”[391]
Lord Cockburn, in his ‘Memorials,’ gives the following graphic portrait of the father of modern chemistry:—“Dr. Black was a striking and beautiful person; tall, very thin, and cadaverously pale; his hair carefully powdered, though there was little of it except what was collected into a long thin queue; his eyes dark, clear, and large, like deep pools of pure water. He wore black speckless clothes, silk stockings, silver buckles, and either a slim green silk umbrella, or a genteel brown cane. His general frame and air was feeble and slender. The wildest boy respected Black. No lad could be irreverent towards a man so pale, so gentle, so elegant, and so illustrious. So he glided, like a spirit, through our rather mischievous sportiveness, unharmed.”[392]
Of the famous Lunar Society, Boulton and Watt now remained almost the only surviving members. Day was killed by a fall from his horse in 1789. Josiah Wedgwood closed his noble career at Etruria in 1795, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. Dr. Withering, distinguished alike in botany and medicine, died in 1799, of a lingering consumption. Dr. Darwin was seized by his last attack of angina pectoris in 1802, and, being unable to bleed himself, as he had done before, he called upon his daughter to apply the lancet to his arm; but, before she could do so, he fell back in his chair and expired. Dr. Priestley, driven forth into exile,[393] closed his long and illustrious career at Northumberland in Pennsylvania in 1803. The Lunar Society was thus all but extinguished by death; the vacant seats remained unfilled; and the meetings were no longer held.
But the bereavements which Watt naturally felt the most, were the deaths of his own children. He had two by his second wife, a son and a daughter, both full of promise, who had nearly grown up to adult age, when they died. Jessie was of a fragile constitution from her childhood, but her health seemed to become re-established as she grew in years. But before she had entered womanhood, the symptoms of an old pulmonary affection made their appearance, and she was carried off by consumption. Mr. Watt was much distressed by the event, confessing that he felt as if one of the strongest ties that bound him to life was broken, and that the acquisition of riches availed him nothing when unable to give them to those he loved. In a letter to a friend, he thus touchingly alluded to one of the most sorrowful associations connected with the deaths of children:—“Mrs. Watt continues to be much affected whenever anything recalls to her mind the amiable child we have parted with; and these remembrances occur but too frequently,—her little works of ingenuity, her books and other objects of study, serve as mementoes of her who was always to the best of her power usefully employed even to the last day of her life. With me, whom age has rendered incapable of the passion of grief, the feeling is a deep regret; and, did nature permit, my tears would flow as fast as her mother’s.”
To divert and relieve his mind, as was his wont, he betook himself to fresh studies and new inquiries. It is not improbable that the disease of which his daughter had died, as well as his own occasional sufferings from asthma, gave a direction to his thoughts, which turned on the inhalation of gas as a remedial agent in pulmonary and other diseases. Dr. Beddoes of Bristol had started the idea, which Watt now took up and prosecuted with his usual zeal. He contrived an apparatus for extracting, washing, and collecting gases, as well as for administering them by inhalation. He professed that he had taken up the subject not because he understood it, but because nobody else did, and that he could not withhold anything which might be of use in prompting others to do better. The result of his investigations was published at Bristol under the title of ‘Considerations on the Medicinal use of Fictitious Airs,’ the first part of which was written by Dr. Beddoes, and the second part by Watt.
But a still heavier blow than the loss of his only daughter, was the death of his son Gregory a few years later. He was a young man of the highest promise, and resembled Watt himself in many respects—in mind, character, and temperament. Those who knew him while a student at Glasgow College, spoke of him long after in terms of the most glowing enthusiasm. Among his fellow-students were Francis, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, and the poet Campbell. Both were captivated not less by the brilliancy of his talents than by the charming graces of his person. Campbell spoke of him as “a splendid stripling—literally the most beautiful youth I ever saw. When he was only twenty-two, an eminent English artist—Howard, I think—made his head the model of a picture of Adam.” Campbell, Thomson, and Gregory Watt, were class-fellows in Greek, and avowed rivals; but the rivalry only served to cement their friendship. In the session of 1793–4, after a brilliant competition which excited unusual interest, the prize was awarded to Thomson; but, with the exception of the victor himself, Gregory was the most delighted student in the class. “He was,” says the biographer of Campbell, “a generous, liberal, and open-hearted youth; so attached to his friend, and so sensible of his merit, that the honours conferred on Thomson obliterated all recollections of personal failure.”[394] Francis Jeffrey was present at the commemoration of the first of May, two years later, and was especially struck with the eloquence of young Watt, “who obtained by far the greatest number of prizes, and degraded the prize-readers most inhumanly by reading a short composition of his own, a translation of the Chorus of the Medea, with so much energy and grace, that the verses seemed to me better perhaps than they were in reality. He is a young man of very eminent capacity, and seems to have all the genius of his father, with a great deal of animation and ardour which is all his own.”[395]
Campbell thought him born to be a great orator, and anticipated for him the greatest success in Parliament or at the Bar. His father had, however, already destined him to follow his own business. Indeed, Gregory was introduced a partner into the Soho concern about the same time as Mr. Boulton, jun., and his elder brother James. But he never gave much attention to the business. Scarcely had he left college, before symptoms of pulmonary affection showed themselves; and, a physician having been consulted, Mr. Watt was recommended to send his son to reside in the south of England. He accordingly went to Penzance for the benefit of its mild climate, and, by a curious coincidence, he took up his abode as boarder and lodger in the house of Humphry Davy’s mother. The afterwards brilliant chemist was then a boy some years younger than Gregory. He had already made experiments in chemistry, with sundry phials and kitchen utensils, assisted by an old glyster apparatus presented to him by the surgeon of a French vessel wrecked on the coast. Although Gregory possessed great warmth of heart, there was a degree of coldness in his manner to strangers, which repelled any approach to familiarity. When his landlady’s son, therefore, began talking to him of metaphysics and poetry, he was rather disposed to turn a deaf ear; but when Davy touched upon the subject of chemistry, and made the rather daring boast for a boy, that he would undertake to demolish the French theory in half an hour, Gregory’s curiosity was roused. The barrier of ice between them was at once removed; and from thenceforward they became attached friends.[396] Young Davy was encouraged to prosecute his experiments, which the other watched with daily increasing interest; and in the course of the following year, Gregory communicated to Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol, then engaged in establishing his Pneumatic Institution, an account of Davy’s experiments on light and heat, the result of which was his appointment as superintendent of the experiments at the Institution, and the subsequent direction of his studies and investigations.
Gregory’s health having been partially re-established by his residence at Penzance, he shortly after returned to his father’s house at Birmingham, whither Davy frequently went, and kept up the flame of his ambition by intercourse with congenial minds. Gregory heartily co-operated with his father in his investigations on air, besides inquiring and experimenting on original subjects of his own selection. Among these may be mentioned his inquiries into the gradual refrigeration of basalt, his paper on which, read before the Royal Society, would alone entitle him to a distinguished rank among experimentalists.[397]
By the kindness of his elder brother James, Gregory Watt was relieved of his share of the work at Soho, and was thereby enabled to spend much of his time in travelling about for the benefit of his health. Early in 1801, we find him making excursions in the western counties in company with Mr. Murdock, jun.; and looking forward with still greater anticipations of pleasure to the tour which he subsequently made through France, Germany, and Austria. We find him afterwards writing his father from Freiburg, to the effect that he was gradually growing stronger, and was free from pulmonary affection. From Leipzig he sent an equally favourable account of himself, and gave his father every hope that on his return he would find him strong and sound.
These anticipations, however, proved delusive, for the canker was already gnawing at poor Gregory’s vitals. Returned home, he busied himself with his books, his experiments, and his speculations; assisting his father in recording observations on the effects of nitrous oxide and other gases. But it was shortly found necessary to send him again to the south of England for the benefit of a milder climate. In the beginning of 1804, his father and mother went with him to Clifton, where he had an attack of intermittent fever, which left him very weak. From thence they removed to Bath, and remained there for about a month, the invalid being carefully attended by Dr. Beddoes. During their stay at Bath, Gregory’s brother paid him a visit, and was struck by his altered appearance. The fever had left him, but his cough and difficulty of breathing were very distressing to witness. As usual in such complaints, his mind was altogether unaffected. “Indeed,” wrote his brother, “he is as bright, clear, and vigorous, upon every subject as I ever knew him to be. His voice, too, is firm and good, and when he enters into conversation I should lose the recollection of his complaint if his appearance did not so forcibly remind me of it. It is fortunate that he does not suffer much bodily pain, or, so far as I can discover, any mental anxiety as to the issue of his complaint.”[398]