Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/192

NO. 1. power of the Commissioners) and they declared that themselves and the Gentlemen appointed by they would have found that the Act (he called very properly his own) to amend, explain and alter the original enactment, was as far as possible copied from those resolutions he brought with him ready out and dry to the meetings of the separate Commission, without troubling himself about any difference of opinion on the subject (as there could be none in his construction of things.) The 4th of them, which his Lordship, who, like the talkative Barber of Bagdad (we remember from our horn books) having all the arts and sciences at his finger ends, never consulted a Watchmaker about, ran thus—'That Mr. Harrison do explain the method by which he tempers his metals, particularly his springs, or worms, and show the experiment of tempering a number of them at once in presence of the said Commissioners, or a major part of them.'

This was assuming the Claimant to have been accustomed to temper a number of his springs or worms at once, which it would have much become the P. R. S. first to have ascertained the correctness of, and still more to have pointed out at whose expense a number of them were to be manufactured for the experiments he projected.—On the Claimant's being informed of the test that would probably be required, he immediately recollected the source of this ignorant trifling, as he thought it, the description of the process being clear to the commonest capacity. These experiments by a natural retrospect likewise recalled the irksome memento of that abortive Commission which the everlasting intermeddler who now presided at the Board of Longitude, had been the sole cause of entirely frustrating.—After every arrangement was in danger of being overset: after compromised objections, and that et cætera of—what you will; when the real cause of dispute is different from what appears on the surface; who would imagine that when the Invention came to be closely scrutinised, not a single experiment was called for, nor even contemplated! neither was