Without positive facts to guide us we are ever in danger of misjudging a bygone age, and in the present instance it would be imprudent to hazard an opinion on what is no less true than strange, that the Marquis of Worcester entirely failed to arouse public inquiry into the merits of his invention: being treated throughout with an indifference, which, to modern apprehension, appears wholly inexplicable. Yet, so inconsistent is human nature, that the same age which burned and drowned so-called witches, which believed in the transmutation of base metals into gold, put faith in the curative effect of sympathetic powders, and the King’s touch for bodily distempers, saw portents in meteoric phenomena, and considered astrology a sound science, could yet look with stolid indifference on this germ of the steam-engine, unimpressed by what was publicly exhibited, written, printed, and for at least four years made the subject of its inventor’s daily conversation. Books and pamphlets were constantly being published, filled with mysticism, gravely recording the day-dreams of fanatics and impostors, and letters lent their aid to promulgate such fables; yet here was a new agent at work, of such potent power that its like had never been seen, which nevertheless men saw, heard, and listened to in dumb astonishment, with the infantile simplicity of the poor Indian, ignorant of the value of the gold or diamonds strewn in his path. The early associated scientific men may have been perplexed on finding an individual coming forth, in the sixty-second year of his age, to propound a new doctrine. The suspicion was natural; the cause appeared evident; his project might be a chimera, or an absolute delusion. No one ever so remotely suspected his own want of wisdom. Had the Marquis suddenly dropped from the clouds, or sprung from the earth, he could not have been in himself a much greater phenomenon than he appeared to the virtuosi (as the learned were called) of his day. Such a prodigy had never been heard of, and perhaps will never again appear, as that of a secluded scholar, studying all his life, suddenly coming to light with unheard-of knowledge. If true, he was a Leviathan, and compared with him all must have acknowledged a sense of painful inferiority. The Marquis on his part appears to have acted with unsuspecting confidence and modesty, as one quite unconscious of the intellectual disparity between himself and the professors of mechanical science in his day. However, he neither sought nor formed new acquaintances; he seems to have rested satisfied with his early associates, or his own immediate connexions; so that no one was gratified by his condescension, or induced to proffer advice, through any application on his part. Indeed he mainly looked to the Crown for efficient support; but the luxurious and gay monarch sought only youth and beauty, the banquet, the ball-room, or the tennis-court, and was not to be disturbed in his