improvement, I applied, by repeated letters, to the Board,[1] praying that the Watch might be lent to
- ↑ If it be alleged that the Plates, when published, would have been expected to give him sufficient advantages, and that he ought himself to have evinced their utility in the first instance, especially as Mr. Mudge had said he could make the Timekeepers from them; it will yet be conceded that to him they could not be equivalent to his own Drawings, with which he had not been allowed to compare the engravings; and as he had no reliance on the abilities of Dr. Maskelyne for such a purpose, to whom the superintendence of transferring these outlines to the Plates had been very improperly confided, the benefit accruing was trifling, when compared with that of having the different detached parts of the Timekeeper to show to the
Commission, as it is liable to do in others, which thence get the name of jobs. The job here was not lucrative, but it administered to the self-consequence of two men who had an inordinate appetite for such marmalade; to improve the sacharine of which, the whole conduct of the Manager shows, that had John Harrison been made responsible for the safe removal of this public property, (which he would have been glad to have been) and had any thing happened; not "the act of God, or the King's enemies;" he would have been required to make good the damage, at his own expense, to the uttermost farthing! His oppressor, like Shylock, would have "found it in the bond;" but he did not find in the Act of Parliament he called his own, that he was to grant him any facilities, including the use of these machines—"it was not in the bond."—Such was the unequal proportion of good and evil weighed out to his rival by the northern lubber, whom these gallant Admirals suffered to pipe all hands in chase, and steer them to run down, if he could, the renowned genius whose bark with some splicing and caulking from George 3rd, rides on the ocean of time with a light at her mast head, that scatters its rays afar over Europe, reflected to Australia.
