66 SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. So now, where Derwent guides his dusky floods, The tangled knots, and smooth the ravell'd fleece, And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below. Darwin's "Loves of the Plants." Canto, 11, 85, 104. Gossypium, the Cotton Plant. On the river Derwent, near Matlock, in Derbyshire, SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT has erected his curious and magnificent machinery for spinning cotton, which has been in vain attempted by many ingenious men before him. The cotton wool is first picked from the pods and seeds by women. It is then carded by cylindrical cards which move against each other with different velocities. It is taken from these by an iron hand or comb, which has a motion similar to that of scratching, and takes the wool off the cards longitudinally in respect to the fibres or staple, producing a continued line loosely cohering, called the Rove or Roving. This Rove, yet very loosely twisted, is then received or drawn into a whirling canister, and is rolled by the centrifugal force in spiral lines within it, being yet too tender for the spindle. It is then passed between two pairs of rollers; the second pair, moving faster than the first, elongate the thread with greater rapidity than can be done by hand, and it is then twisted on spoles or bobbins. "The great fertility of the cotton plant, in these fine flexible threads, whilst those from flax, hemp, or from the bark of the mulberry tree, require a previous putrefaction of the parenchymatous substance, and much mechanical labour, and afterwards bleaching, renders this plant of great importance to the world. And since SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT's ingenious machine has not only greatly abbreviated and simplified the labour and art of carding and spinning the cotton-wool, but performs both these circumstances better than can be performed by hand; it is probable that the cloth of this small reed may become the principal clothing of mankind."Darwin's note on the passage. Now Richard's talents for the world were fit, He'd no small cunning, and he'd some small wit, Long lost to us, at length our man we trace, SHAKSPEARE. Ir may seem somewhat paradoxical if we declare an opinion that Arkwright, the penny-barber, who came to be a Knight-bachelor, and died worth double the revenue of a German principality, belonged to the class of men born great, rather than of those who achieve greatness, and yet, if they be duly considered, there are good substantial reasons for that opinion. For he either did invent the machinery that made his fortune, or he did not,—therefore he was either a great mechanician or a great knave, and no man can be either the one or the other without certain powers, capacities, and ideas, which are not acquirable, but must be intertwined by Nature herself with the thread of his destiny. It is no doubt easy, for any man that chooses, to be a knave; knave enough to ruin himself and his friends, knave enough to lose his character and his soul, but all this a man may do without being a great knave, without realising a fortune of half a million. The common run of small knaves, like small poets, are wretchedly poor, living from hand to mouth upon their shifts or their verses, because they are not the knaves or the poets of Nature, but of vanity or necessity. They play off their tricks and their sonnets on the spur of the moment, and are incapable of forming any scheme befitting "a creature of large discourse, looking before and after." But the great knave despises all the epigrams, and impromptus, and fugitive pieces of knavery. As the great poet speaks plain prose to his neighbours, writes a letter of business like a man of business, and can see a rose or a pretty milk-maid without committing rhyme or blank upon either, reserving and consolidating his powers for some great and permanent object, that will rather ennoble his genius, than be ennobled by it: so the truly great knave never throws knavery away; in all but the main point he is minutely honest, and only to be distinguished from the naturally honest man, by a greater anxiety about appearances. But in one thing the great knave differs from the great poet. The poet conceives great ideas of his own, and in the production and development of those ideas his delight consists; he does not readily adopt the ideas of others, far less does he make any use of them. Now the leading faculty of the knave, and it is a faculty which Not that this We believe it degree by many Still, if they had none can acquire who is not born with it, is a quick apprehension of the use to be made of others' labours, others' thoughts, others' inventions. faculty compels a man to be a knave. to be possessed in a very great persons of the highest integrity. not been persons of more than average integrity, they would have run a hazard of being great knaves. Let us not be accused of Fatalism, as though we had said, that Nature forces men to be knaves. She only gives the capabilities of being a great knave. But on the former, more probable, and more agreeable supposition, that Arkwright was a mechanical inventor, then we fearlessly assert that he gave a proof of congenital endowment as decisive as if he had produced an Iliad. We rest nothing upon Arkwright's want of education, for all the classical and mathematical education in the world, with the most accurate study of mechanical powers, and long and minute observation of their practical operations, would not have enabled him to advance a step in the art. Indeed we doubt if many persons really comprehend the principle of the most ordinary mechanical contrivances, (as a roasting jack, or a squirrel's cage). The great multitude of operatives work by mere imitation and blind rule, bit by bit, each executing his portion, more or less neatly, according to his care, manual dexterity, and length of practice, but without ever thinking or asking to what purpose their handiwork is to serve, and in fact knowing little more of mechanics than an organ pipe does of music. Yet you will find, in the shop or factory, some three or four, without an atom more scholarship, and, it may be, with rather less general intellect than their mates, who know perfectly what they are about, and want nothing but mental industry, or in other words, a will, to be first-rate engineers. So too, in the classes that do not labour, you will perceive in some an invincible propensity to mechanical inventions, while others, not only cannot execute, but cannot be taught, how the simplest processes are executed. This constructiveness is a distinct function, or organ, we had almost said, a peculiar sense, but what it is, or how it operates, we confess our inability to explain, or to imagine. We are utterly destitute of the organ. In this case, as in others, where the pursuits of the subjects of our memoirs lie out of the sphere of our own knowledge, we shall borrow freely from those sources of intelligence which lie open to us. The following notice of SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT is taken, verbatim, from that admirable work, the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, and from one of its most delightful departments-that which illustrates the "Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties." We are glad of this opportunity to express our gratitude to the author of these pleasant and profitable little volumes, and think we do him both honour and justice by giving his facts, in his words, better than if we should attempt to appropriate what is not our own, by a paraphrase. Arkwright was born on the 23rd 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 was ever 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 |