"There he stood, surrounded by the little band I have mentioned of northern literati, men not less tenacious, generally speaking, of their own fame and their own opinions, than the national regiments are supposed to be jealous of the high character which they have won upon service. Methinks I yet see and hear what I shall never see or hear again. In his eighty-second year, the alert, kind, benevolent old man, had his attention alive to every one's question, his information at every one's command. "His talents and fancy overflowed on every subject. One gentleman was a deep philologist—he talked with him on the origin of the alphabet, as if he had been coeval with Cadmus; another a celebrated critic—you would have said the old man had studied political economy and belles lettres all his life. Of science it is unnecessary to speak—it was his own distinguished walk. And yet, Captain Clutterbuck, when he spoke with your countryman, Jedediah Cleishbotham, you would have sworn he had been coeval with Claverse and Burley, with the persecutors and persecuted, and could number every shot the dragoons had fired at the fugitive Covenanters. In fact, we discovered that no novel of the least celebrity escaped his perusal, and that the gifted man of science was as much addicted to the productions of your native country, in other words, as shameless and obstinate a peruser of novels, as if he had been a very milliner's apprentice of eighteen." In the Edinburgh newspaper, called the _Scotsman_, of the 4th September, 1819, immediately after the decease of Watt, the following sketch was published from the pen of Lord Jeffrey:—