egg-shell.” Notwithstanding the complete success of the experiment, the British ministry seem to have been but little disposed to have anything further to do with Mr. Fulton and his projects. Indeed, the evidence it afforded of their efficiency may have been a reason for this. However Mr. Pitt and Lord Melville may have thought on the subject, there had been a change in the administration, and the new ministers probably agreed with the Earl St. Vincent, that it was great folly in them to encourage a project which, if it succeeded, would revolutionise all maritime questions. Lord Grenville and his Cabinet were not only indisposed to encourage Mr. Fulton, but they were unwilling to fulfil the engagements which their predecessors had made, and that inventor, after some further experiments, of which we have no particular account, wearied with incessant applications, disappointments, and neglect, at length embarked for his native country. But Fulton’s greatest fame rests on his steam-boats. In his first attempt made in France, where he was aided by Mr. Robert R. Livingston, a fellow-countryman, he was not successful. Their experimental boat was completed early in the spring of 1803; they were on the point of making an experiment with her, when one morning, as Mr. Fulton was rising from a bed in which anxiety had given him but little rest, a messenger from the boat, whose precipitation and apparent consternation announced that he was the bearer of bad tidings, presented himself to him, and exclaimed in accents of despair, “Oh, sir, the boat has broken to pieces and gone to the bottom!” Mr. Fulton, who himself related the anecdote, declared that the news created a despondency which he had never felt on any other occasion; but this was only a momentary sensation. Upon examination, he found the boat had been too weakly framed to bear the great weight of the machinery, and that, in consequence of an agitation of the river by wind the preceding night, what the messenger had represented had literally happened. The boat had broken in two, and the weight of her machinery had carried her fragments to the bottom. It appeared to him, as he said, that the fruits of so many months’ labour, and so much expense, were annihilated, and an opportunity of demonstrating the efficiency of his plan was denied him at the moment he had promised it should be displayed. His disappointment and feelings may easily be imagined, but they did not check his perseverance. On the very day that this misfortune happened, he commenced repairing it. He did not sit down idly to repine at misfortunes which his manly exertions might remedy, or waste in fruitless lamentations a moment of that time in which the accident might be repaired. Without returning to his lodgings, he immediately began to labour with his own hands to raise the boat, and worked for four and twenty hours incessantly, without allowing himself rest or refreshment; an imprudence which, as he