While Dr. Darwin and Mr. Edgeworth were amongst the oldest members of the Society, Dr. Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and other gases, was one of the most recent. We find Boulton corresponding with him in 1775,[294] principally on chemical subjects, and supplying him with parcels of fluor spar for purposes of experiment. Five years later, in 1780, he was appointed minister of the Presbyterian Congregation assembling in the New Meeting-house, Birmingham; and from that time forward he was one of the most active members of the Lunar Society, by whom he was regarded as a great acquisition.

Dr. Priestley was a man of extraordinary gifts and accomplishments. He had mastered many languages before he was twenty years old. He was well versed in mechanical philosophy and metaphysics, a skilled dialectician, and the most expert chemist of his time. Possessed by an irrepressible activity and untiring perseverance, he became an enthusiast on whatever subject he undertook, whether it was an inquiry into history, theology, or science. He himself likened experimental philosophy to hunting, and in his case it was the pursuit of facts that mainly concerned him. He was cheerful, hopeful, and buoyant; possessed of a most juvenile temperament; happiest when fullest of work; ranging from subject to subject with extraordinary versatility; laying aside metaphysics to pursue experiments in electricity, next taking up history and politics, and resting from these to experiment on gases,—all the while carrying on some public controversy on a disputed point in religion or politics. For it is a curious fact; that gentle, affectionate, and amiable though Priestley was,—devout in temperament, and single-minded in the pursuit of truth,[295]—he was almost constantly involved in paper wars. He described himself, and truly, as “one of the happiest of men;” yet wherever he went, in England or America, he stirred up controversy and exasperated opponents, seeming to be the very Ishmael of polemics.

At the time when he settled at Birmingham, Priestley was actively engaged in prosecuting inquiries into the constitution of bodies. He had been occupied for several years before in making investigations as to the gases. The discovery of carbonic acid gas by Dr. Black of Edinburgh, had attracted his attention; and, living conveniently near to a brewery at Leeds, where he then was, he proceeded to make experiments on the fixed air or carbonic acid gas evolved during fermentation. From these he went on to other experiments, making use of the rudest apparatus,—phials, tobacco-pipes, kitchen utensils, a few glass tubes, and an old gun-barrel. The pursuit was a source of constant pleasure to him. He had entered upon an almost unexplored field of science. Then was the childhood of chemistry, and he gazed with large-eyed wonder at the marvels which his investigations brought to light. He had no teacher to guide him—nothing but experiment; and he experimented constantly, carefully noting the results. Observation of facts was his great object; the interpretation of the facts he left to others. Such was Priestley, and such were his pursuits, when he settled at Birmingham in 1780.

There can be little doubt that his enthusiasm as an experimenter in chemistry exercised a powerful influence on the minds of both Boulton and Watt, who, though both full of work, anxiety, and financial troubles, were nevertheless found taking an active interest from this time forward in the progress of chemical science. Chemistry became the chief subject of discussion at the meetings of the Lunar Society, and chemical experiments the principal recreation of their leisure hours.

To Henderson, in Cornwall, Boulton wrote, two months later,—

The “Priestleyan water-tub” and “mercurial tub,” here alluded to, were invented by Priestley in the course of his investigations, for the purpose of collecting and handling gases; and the pneumatic trough, with glass retorts and receivers, shortly became part of the furniture of every chemical laboratory.

Josiah Wedgwood was another member of the Lunar Society who was infected by Dr. Priestley’s enthusiasm for chemistry; and, knowing that the Doctor’s income from his congregation was small, he and Boulton took private counsel together as to the best means of providing him with funds so as to place him in a position of comparative ease, and enable him freely to pursue his investigations. The correspondence which took place on the subject is creditable to all parties concerned; and the more so to Boulton, as he was embarrassed at the time by financial difficulties of the most distressing kind, as has been already explained in a preceding chapter. Wedgwood had undertaken to sound Dr. Priestley, and he thus communicated the result to Boulton:—

Boulton wrote Wedgwood in reply, requesting that the money subscribed should be collected and paid to Dr. Priestley in such a way as not to wound his sensitive feelings. He suggested that in order to avoid this, it might be better if, instead of an annual subscription, a dozen gentlemen were found willing to give a hundred pounds each for the purpose of buying an annuity, or investing the amount in stock for the Doctor’s benefit.

In a subsequent part of the same letter he indicated the subject of Priestley’s experiments at the time:—

The discussions at the Lunar Society were not, however, exclusively chemical, but were varied according to the visitors who from time to time honoured the members with their presence. Thus, in the autumn of 1782, the venerable Smeaton, having occasion to be in Birmingham upon canal business, was invited to attend a meeting of the Society held in Watt’s house at Harper’s Hill. Watt thus described the evening’s proceedings in a letter to Boulton, then in London:—

A few days later, we find De Luc paying his first visit to Watt at Birmingham, accompanied by Baron Reden, who desired to inspect the Soho works. “M. De Luc,” wrote Watt, “is a modest ingenious man. On Wednesday, Wilkinson, Reden, and he sent for me to ‘The Castle’ after dinner, and kept me to supper. On the following day De Luc came to breakfast, and spent the whole forenoon, insensing[301] himself with steam and steam-engines. He is making a book, and will mention us in it. Dr. Priestley came also to dinner, and we were all good company till six o’clock, when Wilkinson set off for Broseley, and they for London.”

Meanwhile Priestley continued to pursue his investigations with indefatigable zeal, discovering one gas after another,[302] and immediately proclaiming the facts which he brought to light, so that other minds might be employed on them besides his own. He kept nothing secret. Perhaps, indeed, he was too hasty in publishing the results of experiments still unfinished, as it occasionally led him into contradictions which a more cautious method of procedure would have enabled him to avoid. But he was thoroughly honest, ingenuous, and single-minded in all his proceedings, entertaining the conviction that in the end truth would vindicate itself, and that all that was necessary was to inquire ardently, to experiment incessantly, and to publish freely.

One of the most interesting speculations to which Priestley’s experiments gave rise was the composition of water. The merit of discovering the true theory has been variously attributed to Watt, to Cavendish, and to Lavoisier; and perhaps no scientific question has been the subject of more protracted controversy. It had been known for some years that a certain mixture of inflammable and dephlogisticated air (hydrogen and oxygen), or common air and hydrogen, could be fired by the electric spark. The experiment had been made by Volta and Macquer in 1776–7; and in the spring of 1781 Priestley made what he called a “random experiment” of the same kind, to entertain some philosophical friends. He exploded a mixture of common air and hydrogen in a glass globe by sending an electric spark through it, and when the explosion had taken place it was observed that the sides of the glass were bedewed with moisture. Mr. Warltire, a lecturer on Natural Philosophy at Birmingham,[303] was present at the experiment, and afterwards repeated it in a copper flask for the purpose of trying “whether heat is heavy or not.” In the mean time, Mr. Cavendish, who had for some years been occupied in the special study of pneumatic chemistry, and satisfactorily solved the question of the true composition of atmospheric air, having had his attention directed to Mr. Warltire’s experiment, repeated it in London, in the summer of 1781, employing a glass vessel instead of a copper one; and again the deposit of dew was observed on the sides of the glass. This phenomenon, which Priestley had disregarded, appeared to him to be of considerable importance, and “likely to throw great light” upon the subject of the disappearance of oxygen during combustion, which he had been pursuing experimentally by means of his well-known eudiometer. “The liquid which resulted from the detonations was very carefully analysed, and proved in all the experiments with hydrogen and air, and in some of those with hydrogen and oxygen, to be pure water; but in certain of the latter it contained a sensible quantity of nitric acid. Till the source of this was ascertained, it would have been premature to conclude that hydrogen and oxygen could be turned into pure water.”[304] These experiments, however, were not published, being still regarded as inconclusive. But with the communicativeness which distinguishes the true man of science, Cavendish made them known to Priestley, and, through his friend Dr. Blagden, to Lavoisier. It was not until January, 1784, that he communicated the results of his long series of experiments on the subject to the Royal Society.

In the mean time Watt’s attention had been directed to the same subject by the experiments of Priestley, and he was led to the same conclusions as Cavendish, though altogether independent of him, and by means of a different class of experiments. We find him writing to Boulton, then at Cosgarne, as follows, in 1782:—

The results of this experiment were by no means conclusive. That water was composed, at least in part, of air or gas of some kind was obvious; but what the gas was, and whether it existed in combination with other gases, was still a matter of conjecture. But Priestley, having proceeded to repeat Cavendish’s experiment[306] of exploding a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen in a glass vessel, which was followed by the usual deposit of water, communicated the fact to Watt, and this at once put him on the track of the true theory. In a letter to Dr. Black, he communicated the result of Dr. Priestley’s experiments, stating that “when quite dry pure inflammable air (hydrogen) and quite dry pure dephlogisticated air (oxygen) are fired by the electric spark in a close vessel, he finds, after the vessel is cold, a quantity of water adhering to the vessel equal, or very nearly equal, to the weight of the whole air.... Are we not then authorised to conclude, that water is composed of dephlogisticated and inflammable air or phlogiston deprived of part of their latent heat; and that dephlogisticated or pure air is composed of water deprived of its phlogiston and united to heat and light; and if light be only a modification of heat, or a component part of phlogiston, then pure air consists of water deprived of its phlogiston or latent heat?”[307] At the same time Watt wrote to Priestley,—who did not himself see the force of the experiments as establishing the true composition of water,—demonstrating the conclusions which they warranted, and which were identical with those already drawn by Cavendish.

Whether Priestley had communicated to Watt the theory of Cavendish does not appear; but it is probable that both arrived at the same conclusions independently of each other; Cavendish from the result of his own experiments, and Watt from those of Priestley. Each was quite competent to have made the discovery; nor is it necessary for the fame of either to strip a leaf of laurel from the brow of the other. Moreover, we are as unwilling to believe that Cavendish would have knowingly appropriated to himself the idea of Watt, as that Watt would have knowingly appropriated the idea of Cavendish. As it was, however, Cavendish and Watt both claimed priority in the discovery; the advocates of Watt’s claim resting their case mainly on the fact of his having first stated his views on the subject in writing, in a letter which he wrote to Dr. Priestley for the purpose of being read to the Royal Society in April, 1783. Before that letter was read, Watt asked that it should be withheld until the results of some new experiments of Dr. Priestley could be ascertained. These proving delusive, Watt sent a revised edition of the letter to his friend De Luc, in November, but the reading of it was delayed until the 29th April, 1784, before which time, on the 15th January, Cavendish’s paper on the same subject had been communicated to the Society. Watt was much annoyed at the circumstance, and alleged that Cavendish had been guilty of “plagiarism.”[308] At a late period of his life, when all bitter feelings on the subject had subsided, Watt declared himself indifferent to the subject of controversy: “After all,” said he, “it matters little whether Cavendish or I discovered the composition of water; the great thing is, that it is discovered.”

Pneumatic chemistry continued to form the principal subject of discussion at the Lunar Society, as we find from numerous references in Boulton and Watt’s letters. “The Lunar Society,” wrote Watt to his partner, “was held yesterday at Mr. Galton’s at Barr. It was rather dull, there having been no philosophical news lately except Mr. Kirwan’s discovery of an air from phosphorus, which takes fire of itself on being mixed with common or dephlogisticated air.”[309] Among Watt’s numerous scientific correspondents was M. Berthollet, the eminent French chemist, who communicated to him the process he had discovered of bleaching by chlorine. Watt proceeded to test the value of the discovery by experiment, after which he recommended his father-in-law, Mr. Macgregor, of Glasgow, to make trial of it on a larger scale. This, however, was postponed until Watt himself could find time to superintend it in person. At the end of 1787, we find him on a visit to Glasgow for the purpose, and writing Boulton that he is making ready for the trial. “I mean,” he writes, “to try it to-morrow, though I am somewhat afraid to attack so fierce and strong a beast. There is almost no bearing the fumes of it. After all, it does not appear that it will prove a cheap way of bleaching, and it weakens the goods more than could be wished, whatever good it may do in the way of expedition.”[310] The experiment succeeded, and we find Mr. Macgregor, in the following February, “engaged in whitening 1500 yards of linen by the process.” The discovery, not being protected by a patent, was immediately made use of by other firms; but the offensive odour of the chlorine was found exceedingly objectionable, until it was discovered that chlorine could be absorbed by slaked lime, the solution of which possessed great bleaching power, and this process in course of time superseded all the old methods of bleaching by chlorine.

It has been recently surmised that the action of light upon nitrate of silver formed the subject of discussion at the Lunar Society, and of experiments by Boulton and Watt; but we find no indications of this in their correspondence. They were so unreserved with each other on all matters of business as well as science that, had any phenomena of so remarkable a character as those which have issued in the art of photography become known to either Boulton or Watt, we feel confident that they must have formed the subject of much personal discussion, and of many written communications. But both correspondents are alike entirely silent on the subject; and we infer that no such experiments were made by them, or, if made, that they led to no results![311]

Among the many foreigners who were attracted by this distinguished circle of scientific men, we find M. Faujas-Saint-Fond, who visited Birmingham in the course of his tour in England in 1785, while the circle was as yet unbroken, and Watt, Boulton, Priestley, and the rest, were in the full tide of business, invention, and inquiry. Saint-Fond had the pleasure of dining one day with Watt when Dr. Priestley was present, and describes in glowing terms the interest of their conversation. “Watt,” he says, “joins to the frankness of a Scotchman the amiability and kindness of a man of the world. Surrounded by charming children, well educated and full of talent, he enjoys in their midst the happiness of regarding them as his friends, while he is almost worshipped by them as the best of fathers.” A subsequent visit which he paid to Dr. Priestley in company with Dr. Withering, leads him to describe the philosopher’s house at Fairhill, then about a mile and a half from Birmingham. “It is,” he says, “a charming residence, with a fine meadow on one side, and a beautiful garden on the other. There was an air of perfect neatness about the place within and without.” He describes the Doctor’s laboratory, in which he conducted his experiments, as “situated at the extremity of a court, and detached from the house to avoid the danger of fire.”

Only a few years after the date of this visit, while Priestley was still busied with his chemical investigations, his house at Fairhill, thus described by Saint-Fond, was invaded by a brutal mob, who ruthlessly destroyed his library, his apparatus, and his furniture, and forced him to fly from Birmingham, glad to escape with his life.

The Lunar Society continued to exist for some years longer. But one by one the members dropped off. Dr. Priestley emigrated to America; Dr. Withering, Josiah Wedgwood, and Dr. Darwin, died before the close of the century; and, without them, a meeting of the Lunar Society was no longer what it used to be. Instead of an assembly of active, inquiring men, it was more like a meeting of spectres with a Death’s head in the chair. The associations connected with the meeting—reminding the few lingering survivors of the losses of friends—became of too painful a character to be kept alive; and the Lunar Society, like the members of which it was composed, gradually expired. Its spirit, however, did not die. The Society had stimulated inquiry, and quickened the zeal for knowledge of all who had come within the reach of its influence; and this spirit diffused and propagated itself in all directions. Leonard Horner, who visited Soho in 1809, thus referred to the continued moral influence of the association:—“The remnant of the Lunar Society,” he says, “and the fresh remembrance in others of the remarkable men who composed it, are very interesting. The impression which they made is not yet worn out, but shows itself, to the second and third generation, in a spirit of scientific curiosity and free inquiry, which even yet makes some stand against the combined forces of Methodism, Toryism, and the love of gain.”[313]

CHAPTER XIX.
Boulton’s Application of the Steam-engine to Coining.

The manufacture of counterfeit money was very common at Birmingham about the middle of last century,—so common, indeed, that it had become an almost recognised branch of trade. The machinery which was capable of making a button with a device and letters stamped upon one side of a piece of metal, was capable, with a few modifications, of making a coin with a device and letters stamped upon both sides. It was as easy to counterfeit one kind of coin as another—gold and silver, as well as copper; the former only requiring a little extra skill in manipulation, to which the button-makers were found fully equal.

The profits of this illegal trade were of course very large; and so long as the coiners could find a vend for their productions, they went on producing. But at length the public, smarting from many losses, acquired sufficient experience to detect the spurious issues of the Birmingham mints; and when an unusually bright shilling or guinea was offered, they had little difficulty in pronouncing upon its “Brummagem”[314] origin. But though profitable, the prosecution of this branch of business was by no means unattended with risks. While some who pursued it on a large scale contrived to elevate themselves among the moneyed class, others, less fortunate, secured an elevation of a very different kind,—one of the grimmest sights of those days being the skeletons of convicted coiners dangling from gibbets on Handsworth Heath.[315]

The production of counterfeit gold and silver coins came to be avoided as too dangerous; but the production of counterfeit copper money continued active at Birmingham down to the middle of last century, when numerous illegal mints were found in active operation. A Royal proclamation was issued on the 12th July, 1751, warning the coiners against the consequences of their illegal proceedings; and shortly after, the Solicitor for the Mint went down to Birmingham, and had many of the more noted offenders tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The principal manufacturers and traders of the town met and passed strong resolutions, condemning the practice of illegal coining; but the evil still continued; and in 1753 it was estimated that not less than half the copper coin in circulation was counterfeit. This disgraceful state of the coinage suggested, and partly justified, companies, firms, and local bodies, in circulating copper coinages of their own. These were followed by provincial pence and halfpence, which were, in their turn, counterfeited by pieces of baser metal. Most of the new copper coins of all sorts, good and bad, were executed at Birmingham; and thus coining shortly became one of the leading branches of business there.

Boulton, as the owner of the largest and best-equipped manufactory in the neighbourhood, might have done any amount of coining that he desired; but the disreputable character of the business deterred him from entering upon it, and he refused all orders for counterfeit money, whether for home or abroad.[316] He took an active part in the measures adopted by the leading manufacturers to prevent illegal coining; and the interest which he felt in commercial questions generally continued to keep his attention directed to the subject. One of the greatest evils of debased coinage, in his opinion, consisted in the serious losses that it occasioned to the labouring people; many of the lower classes of traders and manufacturers buying counterfeit money from the coiners at half its current value, and paying it in wages at full value, thereby wronging and defrauding the workmen of their hire. He came to the conclusion that the public interest imperatively required that the whole of the so-called copper coinage in circulation should be swept away and superseded by the issue of new coins, the intrinsic value and superior workmanship of which should be so palpable as effectually to suppress counterfeiting and its numerous evils. He had many interviews with the ministers of state on the subject; and we find him alleging in one of his letters to a friend that “his principal reason for turning coiner was to gratify Mr. Pitt in his wishes to put an end to the counterfeiting of money.”[317]

Other circumstances, doubtless, concurred in keeping his attention directed to the subject. Thus, he had become largely interested in the copper-trade of Cornwall through the shares he held in the mines as well as in the Copper Mining Company; and he was himself a large holder of copper, which he had purchased from that Company at a time when they could not dispose of it elsewhere. It was also one of his favourite ideas to apply the power of the steam-engine to the stamping of money,—an idea of which he has the exclusive merit. As early as 1774, Watt says Boulton had many conversations with him on the subject; but it was not until the year 1786 that he successfully applied the engine for the first time in executing his contract with the East India Company for above a hundred tons of copper coin. James Watt, in his MS. memoir of his friend Boulton, gives the following account of the origin of his connexion with the coining business:—

Although the machinery of the “Hôtel de Monnaie,” which Boulton erected at Soho, was found sufficient for the execution of his contract with the East India Company, its action was “violent and noisy,” and did not work to his satisfaction. He accordingly, with his usual determination to reach the highest degree of mechanical perfection, proceeded to remodel the whole of his coining machinery, in the course of which he introduced many entirely new contrivances and adaptations. In this he was ably assisted by William Murdock, Peter Ewart, James Lawson, and John Southern; but he himself was throughout the leading spirit, and took the principal part of the work. He originated numerous essential improvements in the rolling, annealing, and cleaning of the metal,—in the forging, multiplying, and tempering of the dies,—and in the construction of the milling and cutting-out machines,—which were worked out in detail by his assistants, after various trials, examined and tested by himself; while the arrangement and methodising of the system of coining—in a word, the organisation of the mint—was entirely his own work. “To his indefatigable energy and perseverance,” wrote Murdock many years later, “in pursuit of this, the favourite and nearly the sole object of the last twenty years of the active part of Mr. Boulton’s life, is, in a great measure, to be attributed the perfection to which the art of coining has ultimately attained.”[319]

While thus labouring at the improvement of his presses, dies, and the application of the steam-engine to the process of coining, Boulton was actively engaged in stirring up public opinion on the subject of an improved copper coinage. Six presses were fitted and ready for work at Soho by the end of 1788;[320] but the only considerable orders which had as yet been executed were the copper coinage of the East India Company, another for the American Colonies, and a silver coinage for the Sierra Leone Company; so that the Soho mint, notwithstanding the capital, skill, and labour bestowed upon it, remained comparatively idle. Boulton continued to stir up the Government through his influential friends;[321] and he was at length called before the Privy Council and examined as to the best means of preventing the issue of counterfeit money. He stated his views to them at great length; and the members were so much impressed by his statements that they authorised him to prepare and submit to them a model penny, halfpenny, and farthing. This he at once proceeded to do, and forwarded them to the Privy Council, accompanied by an elaborate report, setting forth the superiority of the new coins over those then issued from the Mint; demonstrating that their adoption would effectually prevent counterfeiting of base copper money, and offering to guarantee the execution of a contract for a new coinage, at “not exceeding half the expense which the common copper coin hath always cost at his Majesty’s Mint.”[322]

Although the specimens submitted by Boulton to the Privy Council were approved and eventually adopted, the officials of the Mint were enabled, by mere passive resistance, to delay the adoption of the new copper coinage for more than ten years. With their lumbering machinery they could not execute one-third part of the copper coin required for the ordinary purposes of currency; but they could not brook the idea of inviting a private individual to do that which they were found unable to do with all the powers of the State at their back. Rather than thus publicly confess their incompetency, they were satisfied to execute only one-third of the copper coinage, leaving it to the forgers and private coiners to supply the rest.

Boulton began to fear that the coining presses which he had erected with so much labour, contrivance, and expenditure of money, in anticipation of the expected Government contract, would remain comparatively idle after all. But he did not readily give up the idea of executing the new coinage. “Of all the mechanical subjects I ever entered upon,” he wrote Mr. Garbett, “there is none in which I ever engaged with so much ardour as that of bringing to perfection the art of coining in the reign of George III., as well as of checking the injurious and fatal crime of counterfeiting.” It occurred to him that it might be possible to overcome the obstructiveness of officialism by means of public opinion; and he proceeded with his usual vigour to rouse the trading interests throughout the country on the subject. He had a statement printed and extensively circulated among the leading merchants and manufacturers, to whom he also sent specimens of his model penny and halfpenny, the superiority of which to the rubbishy government and counterfeit coin then in circulation, was made apparent at a glance. He also endeavoured to act upon the Ministry through the influence of the King, to whom he presented copies of his model gold, silver, and copper coins; but though his Majesty expressed himself highly pleased with them, the question of their adoption still remained as much in suspense as ever. The appeals to the public were followed by numerous petitions to Parliament and memorials to the Privy Council against counterfeit money, and in favour of the proposed Boulton coinage.[323]

In the mean time, to find employment for the coining presses he had set up, Boulton sought for orders from foreign and colonial governments. In 1790 and 1792 he executed a large quantity of beautiful copper coin[324] for the revolutionary government of France while we remained at peace with that country. The coin was afterwards suppressed when the government was overturned, to the great loss of the French contractors, who, nevertheless, honourably fulfilled their engagement with Mr. Boulton. In 1791 he executed for the colony of Bermuda a penny coinage; about the same time he turned out a large number of provincial halfpenny tokens;[325] and in 1794 he supplied the Madras Presidency with its four-faluce and two-faluce coinage. By way of exhibiting the artistic skill of Soho, and its ability to turn out first-class medal work, Boulton took advantage of the King’s recovery in 1789, to execute a very fine medal commemorative of the event. He sent the first specimen to his friend M. De Luc, the Queen’s Librarian at Windsor, for presentation to her Majesty, who expressed herself much pleased with the medal. In his letter to De Luc, Boulton stated that he had been the more desirous of turning out a creditable piece of workmanship, as the art of medalling was one of the most backward in England, and had made the least progress of any during the reign of his present Majesty. In preparing this medal, he had the co-operation of Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, who rendered him valuable assistance in supplying the best models and portraits of the King from which a satisfactory likeness could be made, and he also inspected and corrected the engraving of the dies.

The success of the medal commemorative of the King’s preservation was such as to induce Boulton to prosecute this department of business,—not that it was attended with profit, for some of his most costly medals were produced for presentation to individuals, and not for sale,—but that it increased the reputation of Soho, and reflected new credit upon the art manufacture of England.

In preparing the dies for his various coins and medals, we find Boulton seeking and obtaining the assistance of Nollekens, Flaxman, Bacon, and Wilton (sculptors); Mayer (King’s miniature painter); Gossett (modeller); but above all, he was mostly indebted for friendly help to Benjamin West, who cordially entered into his views of “establishing elegant records of the medallic arts in the reign of George III.” Boulton also executed a series of medals commemorative of the great events of the French Revolution, for which there must have been a considerable demand, as we find him sending at one time not less than twenty tons of historical medals to Messrs. Monneron his Paris agents. Amongst these, we may mention his medals of the following subjects:—The Emperor of Russia; Assassination of the King of Sweden; Restoration of the King of Naples; Final Interview of the King of France; Execution of the King of France; Execution of the Queen of France; Serment du Roi; Lafayette; J. J. Rousseau; and Respublica Gallica.[326]

The Boulton MS. contains a brief description, in Mr. Boulton’s handwriting, of the Soho Mint in 1792, from which we make the following extract:—