Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/121

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and its Green Border-Land.
107

to the pound, the counterfeit required sometimes more than eighty to make that weight.

Under Boulton, Watt, and Murdoch, Soho became an attracting and eradiating centre of scientific mechanism and artistic taste and skill, which not only supplied the manufacturing industries of Birmingham with their remarkable and diversified faculties, but diffused the overplusage throughout the kingdom and the world. Soho drew to itself and absorbed the best talent of the country. It attracted and employed the genius of Flaxman, Chantrey, and other eminent artists in designs for the almost infinite variety of articles which it produced. It trained up an army of workers under the tuition of all this science, genius, taste, and skill, and they, in their turn, became teachers of thousands of artisans in shops and factories scattered over the United Kingdom and the United States. Soho, also, as we have already noticed, elaborated a night sun for lighting the factories, shops, towns, and villages of the kingdom. It first gave to the world Gas as an illuminating power. Thus, considering all that has emanated from that famous establishment, its memory should be held in grateful estimation wherever the English language is spoken, and even where it is not.

While the Soho establishment was working out such marvels of taste, skill, and science in steel,