this great inventor than by the following extract from the character that has been drawn of him by the eloquent writer (Lord Jeffrey) whom we have already quoted.

Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information,had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticizing the measures or the matter of the German poetry,

"His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty-by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place

the information he received, and of casting aside and ecting, as it were instinctively, whatever was worthor immaterial. Every conception that was suggested his mind seemed instantly to take its place among its er rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smalland most convenient form. He never appeared, refore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the biage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to ich he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a d of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attion, and to have reduced it for his own use to its e value and to its simplest form. And thus it often ppened, that a great deal more was learned from his ief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments tedious writers than an ordinary student could have rived from the most faithful study of the originals, and at errors and absurdities became manifest from the ere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, hich might have deluded and perplexed most of his earers without that invaluable assistance."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Sir Richard Arkwright.-The Cotton Manufacture.

WE propose now to give 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 our manufacture, and whose name is intimately connected with the recent his

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of the commercial greatness of this country. We an the celebrated Sir RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Arkight was born on the 23rd of December, 1732, at eston, in Lancashire. His parents were very poor, d he was the youngest of a family of thirteen children; that we may suppose the school education he received, he ever was at school at all, was extremely limited. deed, but little learning would probably be deemed cessary for the profession to which he was bred, that a barber. This business he continued to follow till he as nearly thirty years of age; and this first period of s history is of course obscure enough. About the year

760, however, or soon after, he gave up shaving, and >mmenced business as an itinerant dealer in hair, colcting the commodity by travelling up and down the ɔuntry, and then, after he had dressed it, selling it again › the wig-makers, with whom he very soon acquired the haracter of keeping a better article than any of his rivals 1 the same trade. He had obtained possession, too, we re told, of a secret method of dyeing the hair, by which e doubtless contrived to augment his profits; and aps, in his accidental acquaintance with this little piece f chemistry, we may find the germ of that sensibility he oon began to manifest to the value of new and unpubished inventions in the arts, and of his passion for patentights and the pleasures of monopoly.

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It would appear that his first effort in mechanics, as has happened in the case of many other ingenious men, was an attempt to discover the perpetual motion. It was in inquiring after a person to make him some wheels for a project of this kind, that in the latter part of the year 1767, he got acquainted with a clock-maker of the name of Kay, then residing at Warrington, with whom it is certain that he remained for a considerable time after closely connected. From this moment we may date his entrance upon a new career.

The manufacture of cotton cloths was introduced into this country only towards the end of the seventeenth century; although stuffs improperly called Manchester cottons had been fabricated nearly three centuries before,

ago, would have been accounted miracles and impossibilities. "The trunk of an elephant," it has been finely and truly said, "that can pick up a pin, or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal like wax before it,-draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer,-and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors; cut steel into ribands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves." But another application of it, which had only begun to be made when the above sketch was originally published, is doubtless destined to be productive of still greater changes on the condition of society than had resulted from any of its previous achievements. It had been employed, several years before, at some of our collieries, in the propelling of heavily-loaded carriages over railways; but the great experiment of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in September, 1830, for