Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/203

146 the other two were so far abused in the carriage by land to Greenwich, The regular course would have been to have placed them on what, in London, is called a chairman's horse; by which being conveyed to the waterside and embarked for Greenwich, on their arrival there, the former mode of transit would have been resorted to. But these precautions, although no more than what common care pointed out, the consummate self-sufficiency of the Astronomer Royal, disregarded. To judge from the injury these Timekeepers received, for neither of the two smaller ones could be put in motion at Flamstead Hill, exclusive of the large one so grievously marred by a perfect master of mechanics (who possibly had but one method with all subjects, like Sangrado with his patients) they must have been placed on a cart without springs, to be jolted over an execrable London pavement, such as it was in that day, and on to their destination.

Nature having imbued John Harrison with as much sensibility as commonly accompanies genius, it cannot be difficult to form an idea of the effect, not only at parting with these memorials of a life of good works, in a double sense, but of being severed from them for ever under circumstances so ruinous to the persevering labour of many years.—The apathy shown to the feelings of a man of so much private worth, as well as public distinction, partook of those operations in anatomy, in which a passive subject of the brute creation is exposed to the razor, or the actual cautery, of some zealous enquirer into the nervous system, some disputant concerning the seat of the sensorium, and whether the heart, or the brain, is most liable to be affected under experiments of his devising. It would have mitigated the privation, had they been left at Flamstead Hill in apparent order and security; but this consolation the custody to which they were consigned, alas! forbade.—This public property was in the first floor at Red Lion Square, and from the second, where was his study and workroom, the as to be rendered quite