Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/173

Rh to satisfy their minds. The thing seemed to them entirely incomprehensible.

That the nation possessing the greatest military and commercial marine in the world—the nation which had spent so much in endeavouring to render perfect the means of finding the longitude—which had recently caused to be computed and published at considerable expense an entirely new set of lunar Tables should not have availed itself at any cost of mechanical means of computing and stereotyping such Tables, seemed entirely beyond their comprehension.

At last they asked me whether the Commissioners were bêtes. I assured them that the only one with whom I was personally acquainted certainly was not.

When hard pressed by difficult questions, I thought it my duty as an Englishman to save my country's character, even at the expense of my own. So on one occasion I suggested to my unsatisfied friends that Commissioners were usually selected from the highest class of society, and that possibly four out of five had never heard of my name.

But here again my generous efforts to save the character of my country and its Commissioners entirely failed. Several of my foreign friends had known me in their own homes, and had seen the estimation in which I was held by their own countrymen and by their own sovereign. These were still more astonished.

On another occasion an anecdote was quoted against me to prove that my name was well known even in China. It may, perhaps, amuse the reader. A short time after the arrival of Count Strzelecki in England, I had the pleasure of meeting him at the table of a common friend. Many inquiries were made relative to his residence in China. Much interest was expressed by several of the party to learn on