Memorials of the lineage, early life, education and development of the genius of James Watt

JAMES WATT. 183
Jishment at Birmingham several years, and had the happiness of
seeing more than the commencement of his public usefulness and
fame, — unalloyed, probably, by any very minute knowledge of many
of the painful harassments to which the new outset in life subjected
him. The tranquil prolongation of the old man's life, on the other
hand, was a subject of qujet satisfaction to the son. Family trial,
however, — which, it would seem, in the sovereign appointments of
Providence, could not be, at any period of Mr. Watt's life, far distant,
— was again at hand, and, in the death of his father, a new shock was
given to the delicate framework of that spirit that so often already
had quivered under the infliction of very near and peculiar bereave-
ments. To the sensitive and affectionate nature of Watt, dispensa-
tions of this afflictive kind were occasions of a mental suffering so
acute, that nothing but that firm reliance on the divine Wisdom and
Goodness, which was at all times one of the most prominent features
in this great man's philosophy, could have enabled him successfully
to surmount their prostrating effects. Many circumstances over which
he had no control conspired to render this } r ear a sad and melancholy
one, in a memory too keenly retentive, for its own comfort, of that
which caused either prolonged chagrin or pain. About the beginning
of the year in which his father's death took place, we find him
" returned from planning and superintending the erection of his
steam-engines, during a long sojourn in Cornwall, where he had been
much harassed by attempts to pirate his improvements. Through the
greater part of the subsequent period, he was laboriously engaged in
making out drawings and descriptions for the long specifications of
his three great patents for mechanical improvements and inventions,
taken out in the years 1781, 1782, and 1784; besides giving the
constant attention necessary to the concerns of a nascent manufactory,
and himself writing volumes of letters on business, which alone would
have furnished full employment even to an industrious intellect." To