Nowhere should we less expect to find a want of sympathy with the amiable character and astonishing scientific abilities of the Marquis of Worcester than in the pages recording the life of James Watt; for there we might hope to be supplied, as from a fountain-head, with the pure stream of most authentic information; an elaborate, careful, and comprehensive digest of the best materials that learning and influence could accumulate; at once clearing up many doubts, and for ever dissipating the groundless surmises of a multitude of superficial writers. We should never expect a less careful procedure, or in its absence other than the most respectful allusion to the true inventor of the steam-engine--that engine from which Watt’s is lineally descended. Had the Marquis of Worcester and his “Century,” together with his Engine, been unknown, and consequently also his untiring representation and advocacy of its wonderful properties, where would have been the justly-admired models of Savery, Newcomen, and Watt? The inveterate prejudice against the employment of any new engine with which the Marquis had to contend, was not wholly extinct even in the days of Watt’s early career; and it was the all-powerful influence of large capital alone that secured for him what Charles the Second blindly withheld from the great engineer’s noble predecessor. We are far from advocating any undue devotion either to a theory or to a hero. But, certainly, if the rhetorical flourishes of M. Arago can justly be summoned to eulogize the hot-water fountain of De Caus, in preference to producing his own clear, simple description; then, assuredly, in common fairness Mr. Muirhead should have felt bound to a somewhat similar advocacy of the Marquis of Worcester’s invention. If M. Arago’s example is to be quoted, showing how much could be advanced in favour of De Caus’s little metal sphere, then surely Mr. Muirhead should have exerted himself to represent and distinguish the superior properties of the Marquis’s Water-commanding Engine, raising four vessels of water, forty feet high, through a tube a span wide.[H] But Mr. Muirhead hazards no opinion decidedly favourable to either the Marquis or his inventions; while, on the contrary, his observations suggest unfounded difficulties, and raise unnecessary doubts, contributing to increase the existing confusion found in our current literature, in relation to the great inventor and his projects; an instance is even adduced of the pseudonymous writer, Robert Stuart, who, in his “Anecdotes,” and his “History,” flatly contradicts himself; and frequently what one compiler only conjectures, another takes up as a fact. But this vicious system of writing is not to be corrected by following in the same track and proposing new speculative views, offered too in a strain seriously derogating from the Marquis’s character for honour, integrity, consistency, and consummate ingenuity.