To add to his distresses, Boulton’s health began to fail him. To have seen the two men, no one would have thought that Boulton would have been the first to break down; but so it was. Though Watt’s sufferings from headaches, and afterwards from asthma, seem to have been almost continuous, he struggled on, and even grew in strength and spirits. His fragile frame bent before disease, as the reed bends to the storm, and rose erect again; but it was different with Boulton. He had toiled too unsparingly, and was now feeling the effects. The strain upon him had throughout been greater than upon Watt, whose headache had acted as a sort of safety-valve by disabling him from pursuing further study until it had gone off. Boulton, on the other hand, was kept in a state of constant anxiety by business that could not possibly be postponed. He had to provide the means for carrying on his many businesses, to sustain his partner against despondency, and to keep the whole organisation of the firm in working order. While engaged in bearing his gigantic burden, disease came upon him. In 1784 we find him writing to his wine-merchant, with a cheque in payment of his account,--“We have had a visit from a new acquaintance--the gout.” The visitor returned, and four years later we find him complaining of violent pain from gravel and stone, to which he continued a martyr to the close of his life. “I am very unwell indeed,” he wrote to Matthews in London; “I can get no sleep; and yet I have been obliged to wear a cheerful face, and attend all this week on M. l’Abbé de Callone and his friend Brunelle.”[290] He felt as if life was drawing to an end with him: he asked his friend for a continuance of his sympathy, and promised to exert himself, “otherwise,” said he, “I will lay me down and die.” He was distressed, above all things, at the prospect of leaving his family unprovided for, notwithstanding all the labours, anxieties, and risks he had undergone. “When I reflect,” he said, “that I have given up my extra advantage of one-third on all the engines we are now making and are likely to make,[291]--when I think of my children, now upon the verge of that time of life when they are naturally entitled to expect a portion of their patrimony,--when I feel the consciousness of being unable to restore to them the property which their mother intrusted to me,--when I see all whom I am connected with growing rich, whilst I am groaning under a load of debt and annuities that would sink me into the grave if my anxieties for my children did not sustain me,--I say, when I consider all these things, it behoves me to struggle through the small remaining fragment of my life (being now in my 60th year), and do my children all the justice in my power by wiping away as many of my incumbrances as possible.”