Boulton’s efforts to improve the industrial arts did not, however, always meet with such glowing eulogy as this. Two of his most highly finished astronomical clocks could not find purchasers at his London sale; on which he wrote to his wife at Soho, “I find philosophy at a very low ebb in London, and I have therefore brought back my two fine clocks, which I will send to a market where common sense is not out of fashion. If I had made the clocks play jigs upon bells, and a dancing bear keeping time, or if I had made a horse-race upon their faces, I believe they would have had better bidders. I shall therefore bring them back to Soho, and some time this summer will send them to the Empress of Russia, who, I believe, would be glad of them.”[102] During the same visit to London, he was more successful with the king and queen, who warmly patronised his productions. “The king,” he wrote to his wife, “hath bought a pair of cassolets, a Titus, a Venus clock, and some other things, and inquired this morning how yesterday’s sale went. I shall see him again, I believe. I was with them, the queen and all the children, between two and three hours. There were, likewise, many of the nobility present. Never was man so much complimented as I have been; but I find that compliments don’t make fat nor fill the pocket. The queen showed me her last child, which is a beauty, but none of ’em are equal to the General of Soho or the fair Maid of the Mill.[103] God bless them both, and kiss them for me.”
[102] The clocks, with several other articles, were sent out to Russia, and submitted to the Empress through the kindness of Earl Cathcart. His lordship, in communicating the result to Mr. Boulton, said--“I have the pleasure to inform you that her Imperial Majesty not only bought them all, last week, but did me the honour to tell me that she was extremely pleased with them, and thought them superior in every respect to the French, as well as cheaper, which entitled them in all lights to a preference.”
In another letter he described a subsequent visit to the palace. “I am to wait upon their majesties again so soon as our Tripod Tea-kitchen arrives, and again upon some other business. The queen, I think, is much improved in her person, and she now speaks English like an English lady. She draws very finely, is a great musician, and works with her needle better than Mrs. Betty. However, without joke, she is extremely sensible, very affable, and a great patroness of English manufactures. Of this she gave me a particular instance; for, after the king and she had talked to me for nearly three hours, they withdrew, and then the queen sent for me into her boudoir, showed me her chimneypiece, and asked me how many vases it would take to furnish it; ‘for,’ said she, ‘all that china shall be taken away.’ She also desired that I would fetch her the two finest steel chains I could make. All this she did of her own accord, without the presence of the king, which I could not help putting a kind construction upon.”[104]