“Had I esteemed him,” he wrote to Boulton, “a man of ingenuity and the real inventor of the thing in question, I should not have made any objection; but, when I know that the contrivance is my own, and has been stolen from me by the most infamous means, and, to add to the provocation, a patent been surreptitiously obtained for it, I think it would be descending below the character of _a man_ to be found in any way aiding or assisting him in his pretended invention.... I think, therefore, that you should propose to the Honourable Board to undertake the direction of the whole; and, provided you can agree with them about the customary premium for the savings by our engine, you should do the whirligig part [the rotative motion] for love. If this proposal should not be accepted, I beg of you to decline having any concern with it, and leave the field clear to Washborough. We may perhaps gain more by so doing than we can lose, as I assure you I have a very mean opinion of the mechanical abilities of our opponents. They have committed many gross errors in such of their works as I have had occasion to know about, and we may get honour by rectifying their mistakes. Perhaps this may seem to you to savour of vanity. If it does, excuse it on account of the very provoking circumstances which have extorted the confession. If these engineers had let us alone, I should not have meddled with them; but, as it is, I think we should be wanting in common prudence if we suffered a marriage between our machine and theirs, and if we did not do all we could to strip them of their borrowed feathers, which I hope there is justice enough left in England to enable us to do.”[208]