+----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | [Illustration: The Horizontal Watch.] | | | | [Illustration: The Skeleton Lever Watch.] | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ Who can forget Dickens's description of the watch of the wonderful Captain Cuttle, which, if you set so far forward at night and so far backward in the morning, was asserted to be 'a watch that would do anybody credit;' or again, how can we omit mention of that earlier Dickensian figure, mentioned by Sam Weller, wearing his enormous watch with so much happy fearlessness, his seals dangling from his fob, the continual temptation and despair of eager pick-pockets, whose ineffectual efforts to abstract the watch from such a tightly-protuberant stomach, were the never ceasing delight of its jolly proprietor? Who shall narrate the characteristics of the various fashions in watches, and the trinkets that were worn along with them, the manners of the fine gentlemen who carried two at a time soon after swords were exchanged for walking-canes, and when pantaloons anticipated the easier but less graceful trowsers? Snuff-boxes, bag-wigs, pig-tails, high cravats, shoe-buckles, have all gone more or less out of fashion, but the watch is a perennial, which may indeed change its outer-casing and its decorations, like man himself, but knows no period of absolute disuse since first it started into being. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | [Illustration: The Full Plate Patent English Lever.] | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | [Illustration: Three-Quarter Plate English Lever.] | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ From the time when the first Nuremberg egg-watch was produced, there has always been noticeable an endeavour to make pocket time-pieces more and more small and portable so far as they could be made so consistently with their durability. Sometimes the love of very minute workmanship has been carried to an extreme, but toy-watches of eccentric shapes and patterns are but the few exceptions to the general rule, which has settled that usefulness and convenience are best provided for within certain moderate sizes, and that of all shapes the round and flat are the most easily carried. The great object of the watch-maker's ambition is to produce a time-keeper minutely accurate, and yet not so delicately constructed that it cannot withstand the rough usage to which even moderately careful wearers subject it.