Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/241

184 From the foregoing premises I infer,

1st. That during six days in every month, no notice that he has completed his observation. At the same instant, or, at the utmost, within a quarter of a minute, and before the observers attempt to read off the degrees and minutes from their quadrants, somebody must note the hour, minute, and quarter of a minute, of the watch regulated as above-mentioned."

This scientific melo-drama would require a rehearsal, like those on other boards: but granting that the Officers of the Navy, from a first to a fourth or fifth rate, might be found at quarters, according to this discipline, and that the mate of some East Indiaman mustered as clever a display as could be wished, yet the security promised is not nearer than twenty leagues from land.—Now, the identical Timekeeper, which the Inventor's antagonist thus depreciates without producing a certificate, that it was in a fit state for the scrutiny intended, had, in the voyage out, foretold the ship's approach to the several Islands in her track, including Barbadoes, with all the precision the seamen could desire. While Dr. Maskelyne by the method opposed to mechanism, with Admiral Tyrrell and his Officers to assist him, foretold nothing to the purpose. So that, under such circumstances, to affect to stand on higher ground, as the Astronomer Royal actually does, and to allow only that Watches may be useful as an auxiliary to the method he practises; a concession which is thus demonstrated to be a contradiction in terms, could only excite the mirth of a Jack-tar; with whatever gravity it might be heard by the learned gownsmen in an Oxford, or a Cambridge, common room. Altogether a condescension so untoward becomes the bitterest irony on the Lunar recreant, the proofs of whose superiority never were forthcoming; it leans too much to "erring reason's spite" and anon recals the Doctor's exposure (through his own indiscretion) to Sir John Lindsay and other respectable Gentlemen at Barbadoes; which he leaves to be inferred, rankled at the core of