Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/201

144 were (by order of the Commissioners) soon after demanded of me by Mr. Maskelyne. One of them the most scrupulous attention to the transit of the Timekeeper, after, and not before it had been subjected to experiments that were to counteract the complete satisfaction it had given to the seamen, becomes by this posterior arrangement nauseous to those who are sufficiently conversant with books and with men to be on their guard against such commonplace expedients. The details, "the pomp and circumstance" of the removal of the small box, with the Timekeeper, which the Inventor used to carry on his lap in a coach, can never palliate the gross ignorance of mechanics, or the refined malice, displayed in the transfer of the three machines. Instead of calling in one or more experienced clockmakers, the Astronomer Royal sent for a blacksmith; with whose assistance, and while they were carrying it between them, he stupidly let fall, and extremely injured that machine,—the one which by order of Sir Charles Wager, had been sent (successfully) to Lisbon. This contact between the floor, or the stairs, and our Mechanic's first-made Timekeeper, if it could not be resembled to the crash of St. Paul's, when Sir Christopher plied his battering ram, yet amounted to the wreck of the Doctor's reputation for mechanics: which he understood no better than Sir Robert Walpole did polite gallantry.—And what can be thought of their care of this public property, as the Commissioners (in subserviency to their Manager) always affected to call it? Had they been openly upbraided with not being trust-worthy on the occasion, it does not appear how they could have repelled the accusation; their colleague (who, no doubt, continued to pester them with his knowledge of chronometry) never having been called on to make good the damage out of his own pocket; neither was there any motion, as far as the writer knows, to be aiding to so indispensable an obligation out of their own private funds. The principal in this public injury, who, when he reached Flamstead Hill, might have exclaimed, with Old Chaos,