hold the farm, and was in this manner enabled to bring up her family, consisting of two other sons and a daughter, beside Wil liam, who was the youngest. Her other sons, indeed, were soon old enough to take the chief part of her charge off her hands. William, in the mean time, was taught, as he grew up, to read and write Welsh; and this was all the education he seems to have received. When about the age of fifteen, he first began to employ himself in repairing the stone fences on the farm; and in this humble species of masonry he soon acquired uncommon expertness. The excellent work he made, and the despatch with which he got through it, at last attracted the notice of the neighboring farmers; and they advised his brothers to keep him at this business, and to let him employ his skill, when wanted, on other farms as well as their own. After this he was for some time constantly engaged; and he regularly added his earnings to the common stock of the family.

But

Hitherto the only sort of building he had practised, or indeed had seen practised, was merely with stones without mortar. at length it happened that some masons came to the parish to erect a shed for shoeing horses near a smith's shop. By William the operation of these architects were contemplated with the liveliest interest, and he used to stand by them for hours while they were at work, taking note of every movement they made. A circumstance that at once struck him was, that they used a different description of hammer from what he had been accustomed to employ; and, perceiving its superiority, he immediately got one of the same kind made for himself. With this he found he could build his walls both a good deal faster and more neatly than he had been wont to do. But it was not long after he had, for the first time in his life, had an opportunity of seeing how houses were erected, that he undertook to build one himself. It was a workshop for a neighbor; and he performed his task in such a manner as obtained him great applause. Very soon after this he was employed to erect a mill, by which he still farther increased his reputation as an able and ingenious workman. Mr. Malkin, to whose work on the Scenery, &c., of South Wales, we are indebted for these particulars of Edwards's early life, as well as for the materials of the sequel of our sketch, says, that it was while building this mill that the self-taught architect became acquainted with the principle of the arch.

After this achievement, Edwards was accounted the best workman in that part of the country; and being highly esteemed for his integrity and fidelity to his engagements, as well as for his skill, he had as much employment in his line of a common builder,

as he could undertake. In his twenty-seventh year, however, he was induced to engage in an enterprise of a much more difficult and important character than any thing he had hitherto attempted. Through his native parish, in which he still continued to reside, flowed the river called the Taff, which, following a southward course, flows at last into the estuary of the Severn. It was pro posed to throw a bridge over this river at a particular spot in the parish of Eglwysilan, where it crossed the line of an intended road; but to this design difficulties of a somewhat formidable nature presented themselves, owing both to the great breadth of the water, and the frequent swellings to which it was subject. Mountains covered with wood rose to a considerable height from both its banks; which first attracted and detained every approaching cloud, and then sent down its collected discharge in torrents into the river. Edwards, however, undertook the task of constructing the proposed bridge, though it was the first work of the kind in which he ever had engaged. Accordingly, in the year 1746, he set to work; and in due time completed a very light and elegant bridge of three arches, which, notwithstanding that it was the work of both an entirely self-taught and an equally untravelled artist, was acknowledged to be superior to any thing of the kind in Wales. So far his success had been as perfect as could have been desired. But his undertaking was far from being yet finished. He had, both through himself and his friends, given security that the work should stand for seven years; and for the first two years and a half of this term all went on well. There then occurred a flood of extraordinary magnitude; not only the torrents came down from the mountains in their accustomed channels, but they brought along with them trees of the largest size, which they had torn up by the roots; and these, detained as they floated along by the middle piers of the new bridge, formed a dam there, the waters accumulated behind which at length burst from their confinement and swept away the whole structure. This was no light misfor. tune in every way to poor Edwards; but he did not suffer himself to be disheartened by it, and immediately proceeded, as his contract bound him to do, to the erection of another bridge, in the room of the one that had been destroyed. He now determined, however, to adopt a very magnificent idea-to span the whole width of the river, namely, by a single arch of the unexampled magnitude of one hundred and forty feet from pier to pier. He finished the erection of this stupendous arch in 1751, and had only to add the parapets, when he was doomed once more to behold his bridge sink into the water over which he had raised it, the extraordinary weight of the masonry having forced up the key.

stones, and, of course, at once deprived the arch of what sustained its equipoise. Heavy as was this second disappointment to the hopes of the young architect, it did not shake his courage any more than the former had done. The reconstruction of his bridge for the third time was immediately begun with unabated spirit and confidence. Still determined to adhere to his last plan of a single arch, he had now thought of an ingenious contrivance for diminishing the enormous weight which had formerly forced the keystone out of its place. In each of the large masses of masonry called the haunches of the bridge, being the parts immediately above the two extremities of the arch, he opened three cylindrical holes, which not only relieved the central part of the structure from all over-pressure, but greatly improved its general appearance in point of lightness and elegance. The bridge, with this improvement, was finished in 1755, having occupied the architect about nine years in all; and it has stood ever since.

This bridge over the Taff-commonly called the New Bridge, and by the Welsh Pont y Pridd,-was, at the time of its erection, the largest stone arch known to exist in the world. Before its erection, the Rialto at Venice, the span of which was only ninetyeight feet, was entitled, as Mr. Malkin remarks, to this distinction among bridges; unless, indeed, we are to include the famous aqueduct-bridge at Alcantara, near Lisbon, consisting in all of thirty-five arches, the eighth of which is rather more than a hundred and eight feet in width, and two hundred and twenty-seven in height. The bridge at Alcantara was finished in 1732. Since the erection of the bridge over the Taff, several other stone arches of extraordinary dimensions have been built both in Great Britain and in France; such, for instance, as the five composing the splendid Pont de Neuilly over the Seine, near Paris, the span of each of which is a hundred and twenty-eight feet-the central arch of the bridge over the same river at Mantes, which is of the same dimensions-the Island Bridge, as it is called, over the Liffey, near Dublin, which is a single arch of a hundred and six feet in widththe bridge over the Tees, at Winston, in Yorkshire, which is also a single arch of a hundred and eight feet nine inches wide, and which was built in 1762 by John Johnson, a common mason, at a cost of only five hundred pounds-and the nine elliptical arches, each of a hundred and twenty feet span, forming the magnificent Waterloo bridge, over the Thames at London. But no one of these great works rivals in respect of dimensions the arch constructed by Edwards. The bridge over the Taff, we may add, rises to the height of thirty-five feet above the water, and is the segment of a circle of a hundred and seventy feet in diameter.

Buttressed as it is at each extremity by lofty mountains, while the water flows in full tide beneath it, its aspect, as it is seen rising into the air, may well be conceived to be particularly striking and grand.

This bridge, which is looked upon as a wonder to this day, spread the fame of Edwards over all the country. He afterwards built many other bridges in South Wales, several of which consisted also of single arches of considerable width, although in no case approaching to that of the arch over the Taff. One which he erected over the Tawy, near Swansea, had a span of eighty feet-another at Llandovery, in Carmarthenshire, was eighty-four feet wide-and a third, Wychbree bridge, over the Tawy, was of the width of ninety-five feet. All the bridges which Edwards built after his first attempt have their arches formed of segments of much larger circles than he ventured to try in that case; and the roads over them are consequently much flatter, a convenience which amply compensates for their inferiority in point of imposing appearance. He found his way to this improvement entirely by his own experience and sagacity; as indeed he may be said to have done to all the knowledge he possessed in his art. Even his principles of common masonry, he used himself to declare, he had learned chiefly from his studies among the ruins of an old Gothic castle in his native parish. In bridge building, the three objects which he always strove to attain in the highest possible degree were, first, durability; secondly, freedom for the passage of the water under the bridge; and lastly, ease of traffic over it.

In commencing architect, Edwards did not abandon the business of his forefathers. He was likewise a farmer to the end of his life. Nay, such was his unwearied activity, that, not satisfied with his week-day labors in these two capacities, he also officiated on Sundays as pastor to an Independent congregation, having been regularly ordained to that office when he was about thirty years of age, and holding it till his death. He accepted the usual salary from his congregation, considering it right that they should support their minister; but, instead of putting the money into his own pocket, he returned it all, and often much more, in charity to the poor. He always preached in Welsh, although early in life he had also made himself acquainted with the English language, having embraced the opportunity of acquiring it under the tuition of a blind old schoolmaster in whose house he once lodged for a short time while doing some work at the county town of Cardiff. He is said to have shown all his characteristic assiduity of application in this effort, and to have made a correspondingly rapid progress. This ingenious and worthy man died in 1789, in the seventieth

year of his age, leaving a family of six children, of whom his eldest son David became also an eminent architect and bridge. builder, although he had had no other instruction in his profession than what his father had given him.

RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.

We now propose to give, in the memoir of the celebrated Richard Arkwright, some account of an individual, whose rise from a very humble origin to affluence and distinction was the result of his persevering attention to the improvement of the machinery employed in one of the most important branches of manufactures, and whose name is intimately connected with the recent history of the commercial greatness of his native country. This illustrious individual, persecuted and calumniated as nearly all the signal benefactors of corrupt humanity have ever been, was raised up by providence from an obscure rank in life to vindicate the natural equality of man.

Arkwright was born on the 23d of December, 1732, at Preston, in Lancashire. His parents were very poor, and he was the youngest of a family of thirteen children; so that we may suppose the school education he received, if he ever was at school at all, was extremely limited. Indeed, but little learning would probably be deemed necessary for the profession to which he was bred,that of a barber. This business he continued to follow till he was nearly thirty years of age; and this first period of his history is of course obscure enough. About the year 1760, however, or soon after, he gave up shaving, and commenced business as an itinerant dealer in hair, collecting the commodity by travelling up and down the country, and then, after he had dressed it, selling it again to the wig-makers, with whom he very soon acquired the character of keeping a better article than any of his rivals in the same trade. He had obtained possession, too, we are told, of a secret method of dyeing the hair, by which he doubtless contrived to augment his profits; and perhaps, in his accidental acquaintance with this little piece of chemistry, we may find the germ of that sensibility he soon began to manifest to the value of new and unpublished inventions in the arts, and of his passion for patent rights and the pleasures of monopoly.

It would appear that his first effort in mechanics, as has hap