tion was particularly called to them. One day, one of his daughters having chanced to repeat in his presence some lines from a poem entitled the Prince of Peace, which appeared in his volume already mentioned, he exclaimed, to her surprise and amusement, 'Those are beautiful lines, child! where did you meet with them?' On another occasion, being shown the model of a machine, he examined it with great attention, and at last observed that the inventor must have been a man of great ingenuity, and that he himself should feel very proud if he had been the author of the contrivance; nor could he be immediately convinced of what was proved to be the case, namely, that it was a machine of his own. older date, even when his atten- in those cases in which it was in reality nothing more than such an infringement, it was yet so protected, that it could hardly be reached and put down as such. On these and other accounts, and in no small degree owing to Dr. Cartwright's carelessness about his own interests, the power-loom only began, in point of fact, to be extensively introduced about the year 1801, the very year in which his patent expired. So generally, however, was it felt among those best entitled to express an opinion on the subject, that to him really belonged the merit of the invention, that in the year 1808 several merchants and manufacturers of Manchester and its neighbourhood, to none of whom he was personally known, held a meeting to consider the propriety of presenting to the Lords of the Treasury a memorial of his eminent services, and of the losses he had sustained through the piracies and other unfortunate circumstances to which we have alluded. In consequence of this and other applications in his favour, the sum of ten thousand pounds was soon after granted to him by Parliament. This national recognition of his claims may be taken as a sufficient answer to some attempts that have been occasionally made to rob Dr. Cartwright of the credit of having been the author of one of the most valuable presents ever made to the manufacturing industry of his country. Dr. Cartwright was defrauded of the pecuniary profits which he might reasonably have expected from his great invention of the power-loom by various accidents, and especially by the burning of a manufactory, containing five hundred of his machines, almost immediately after it was built. It may also be added, that after he had demonstrated the practicability of weaving by machinery, other inventors applied themselves to the devising of contrivances for that purpose slightly different from his a comparatively easy task, even where the new invention was not merely a disguised infringement of his patent; while As a man of education and literary habits, the inventor of the power-loom, notwithstanding his deviation from his original track of thought and study when he began to give his attention to mechanics, may yet be said to have come even to that new line of pursuit with certain acquired advantages. He brought with him at least a mind awakened to some knowledge of its own powers by the general cultivation it had received, and not undisciplined by its accustomed exercises to habits of speculation and inquiry. The individual we are now to mention, who also rose to eminence in what may be called a department of mechanics, was in these respects very differently circumstanced. WILLIAM EDWARDS, a Welsh engineer, was born in 1719, in the parish of Eglwysilan, in Glamorganshire. He lost his father, who was a farmer, when he was only two years old; but his mother continued to hold the farm, and was in this manner enabled to bring up her family, consisting of two other sons and a daughter besides William, 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 meantime 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 neighbouring 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. Hitherto the only sort of building he had practised, or indeed had seen practised, was merely with stones without mortar. But 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 operations 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 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 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 pro 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 neighbour; 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 further increased his reputation as an able and ingenious workman. Mr. Malkin, to whose work on the Scenery, etc. of South Wales, we are indebted for these particulars of Edwards' 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-posed bridge, though it was the 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 anything 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 proposed to throw a 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 selftaught and an equally untravelled artist, was acknowledged to be superior to anything 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 accumulating behind, which at length burst from their confinement and swept away the whole structure. This was no light misfortune 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 the extraordinary weight of the masonry having forced up the keystones, 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 ele gance. 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 Ponty-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 ninety-eight 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 twentyseven 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 our own country 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 width; the 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. 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 |