Boulton made haste to console his partner, and promised to take immediate steps to relieve his mind of the anxiety that weighed so heavy upon it; and he was as good as his word. At the same time he told Watt that he must not suppose he was the only man in the world who had cares and troubles to endure. Boulton himself had, perhaps, more than his share, but he tried to bear them as lightly as he could. With his heavy business engagements to meet, his large concerns to keep going, he was not a man much to be envied; yet he continued to receive his visitors as usual at Soho, and to put on a cheerful countenance. “I am obliged,” he wrote, “to smile, to laugh, to be good-humoured, sometimes to be merry, and even go to the play! Oh, that I were at the Land’s End!” Such was his playful way of reminding Watt of the necessity of cheerfulness to enable one to get through work pleasantly.[212] But Watt’s temperament was wholly different. His philosophy never rose to the height of taking things easy. He could not cast his cares behind him, nor lose sight of them; but carried them about with him by day, and took them to bed with him at night; thus making life a sort of prolonged vexation--a daily and nightly misery. [212] While Boulton spoke good humouredly to his partner in Cornwall with the object of cheering him up, he privately unbosomed himself to his friend Matthews in London. When requesting him to call at once on the bankers and get the account reduced to an advance of 12,000_l._, and thus obtain Mr. Watt’s release, he complained of the distress which the communications of the latter had caused him. He thought his conduct ungenerous, taking all the circumstances into account, and considering that the firm were within a year of being tolerably easy in money matters. “When I reflect,” he wrote, “on his situation in 1772 and my own at that time, and compare them with his and mine now, I think I owe him little.... I some time ago gave him a security of all my two-thirds, after paying off L. V. and W. [the bankers], from which you may judge how little reason he has to complain. He talks of his duty to his wife and children; by the same rule I ought not to neglect mine. His wife’s fortune joined to his own did not amount to sixpence: my wife brought me in money and land 28,000_l._ I advanced him all he wanted without a security, but in return he is not content with an ample security for advancing nothing at all but what he derived from his connexion with me.”--Boulton to Matthews, 28th June, 1781. Boulton MSS.