Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/155

98 body was uninformed of it, who at all attended to the business of the Longitude. That our passions make us listless to what a common sense of propriety might otherwise have preserved our attention, is exemplified here, when the Astronomer Royal in his eagerness to make the most of a machine that overset his own pretensions to the reward, so entirely overlooked the delicacy of his situation, as to have neglected fortifying the projected inquest with a certificate to the effect, that when he received the Timekeeper, it was declared by the Inventor, or by some competent person with his sanction, to be in a fit state for the examination, and that its rate of going was so and so.—The want of such a document, which, in the usual course of things would have preceded the pages occupied with the daily registering, or the calculations consequent, becomes a hiatus which those Commissioners who authorized the publication of a trial so surreptitiously commenced, should have been aware might thereafter make their mental remains stink in the nostrils of all who honour genius contending with the storms and adverse currents of life; and would deprecate the despotic treatment seen here, even by the tacit admission of the parties; for it never was denied that the Watch gaining near twenty seconds a day was known to several Gentlemen, members of Parliament and others, some of whom were Commissioners: which makes the chance almost as a centum to an unit that Dr. Maskelyne could not be ignorant of what it was not very convenient to him to know. But this discreditable affectation in a collateral descendant of Ignatius Loyola (as he seemed) proved in the sequel an important link in the concatenation of events which made his Majesty, who placed no kind of reliance on the Doctor's demonstrations, very desirous to ascertain the merit of the last made Timekeeper under his own observation;—a propitious circumstance for the Inventor, when application was made for that very purpose, as has been described.