in his cottage. Though his means were slender, he was such a master of domestic economy, as to be always in easy circumstances. In 1812, he made a survey of all the cotton districts in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and obtained an estimate of the number of spindles at work upon his mule principle-then amounting to between four and five millions, and in 1829 to about seven. On his return, he laid the result of his inquiries before his generous friends, Messrs. Kennedy and Lee, with a suggestion, that parliament might possibly grant him some recompense for the national advantages derived from his invention. A memorial was accord

ingly drawn up, in furtherance of which, some of the most prominent manufacturers in the kingdom, to whom his merits were made known, took a lively interest. He went himself to London with the memorial, and had the satisfaction to see a bill through parliament, for a grant to him of five thousand pounds.

Mr. Crompton was now anxious to place his sons in business, and fixed upon that of bleaching; but the unfavorable state of the times, the inexperience and mismanagement of his sons,-a bad situation, and a misunderstanding with his landlord, which occasioned a tedious lawsuit, conspired in a short time to put an end to this establishment. His sons then dispersed, and he and his daughter were reduced to poverty. His friends had recourse to a second subscription, to purchase a life annuity for him, which produced £63, The amount raised for this purpose was per annum. collected in small sums, from one to ten pounds, some of which were contributed by the Swiss and French spinners, who acknowledged his merits, and pitied his misfortunes. At the same time his portrait was engraved for his benefit, and a few impressions were disposed of;-he enjoyed this small annuity only two years. He died January 26, 1827, leaving his daughter, his affectionate housekeeper, in poverty.

Mr. Crompton was fortunate in one respect, namely, in having met with a friend like Mr. Kennedy, who had the heart to befriend merit and the talent to commemorate it.

WILLIAM EDWARDS.

WILLIAM EDWARDS was born in 1719, in the parish of Eglwy silan, 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, beside 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 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.

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 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 work. shop 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 proposed 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 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 extraordinary weight of the masonry having forced up the key