which he eagerly perused; and it has been proved that he began to write verses at twelve. Amongst his school-exercises he paraphrased one chapter of Job, and several of Isaiah; he also wrote a satire on his upper-master; but in none of these compositions do we discover any striking indication of that vigour and fertility of thought which were so soon to distinguish him.

In his 15th year he was removed from school, and articled to an attorney in Bristol; and now commenced that series of literary frauds by which "the wondrous boy" created so strong a sensation in the republic of letters, and in the contrivance and conduct of which he exhibited such an astonishing combination of knavery and genius. In 1768, when the new bridge of his native city was opened, a paper appeared in Farley's Bristol Journal,' entitled A Description of the Fryars passing over the old bridge, taken from an ancient manuscript.' This paper, from its appropriate character, and the air of vraisemblance which its author had contrived to infuse into it, excited a good deal of attention, and was ultimately traced to Chatterton, who, after some hesitation, declared that he had got the original among some papers taken from the muniment room of the church of St Mary Redcliffe, in Bristol. These, he said, had been deposited in a very old chest, which had immemorially been called the coffer of Mr Canynge, an eminent merchant, who, during the reign of Edward IV., had either founded or rebuilt the church. The keys belonging to this chest having been lost, and some deeds which it was supposed to contain being wanted, the locks were forced by an order of the vestry in 1727, and the deeds removed, but the other papers which it contained being determined to be of no legal utility, were allowed to be gradually carried off by the then sexton, the father of our Chatterton, who covered the books of his scholars with them, and converted them to a number of equally trifling purposes. On one of his occasional visits to his home, Chatterton said his attention was casually drawn to some writing on a thread-paper of his mother's which with difficulty he decyphered, and found to be a portion of a curious and original MS. His first care, he added, on this discovery, was to secure all the remaining MSS. or portions of MS. still existing with his mother or in the chest; and it was from this source, he affirmed, that he drew the various pieces of ancient poetry which from time to time he now submitted to the public as the compositions of Thomas Canynge, and Thomas Rowley, a priest.

The MSS. of Rowley soon introduced Chatterton to some of the most eminent citizens of Bristol, to whom he presented various specimens of the pretended MSS. and by whose attentions he felt much flattered. In 1769 he sent a specimen of his newly discovered treasure to the Hon. Horace Walpole: these were shown to Gray the poet, and his friend Mason, who immediately pronounced them to be forgeries. In the meantime Chatterton forwarded various communications to the Town and Country Magazine,' which were inserted in that publication, and chiefly consisted of pretended extracts from Rowley. In 1770 he composed a poem of 1300 lines, entitled, 'Kew Gardens,' and designed as a satire on the Princess-dowager of Wales and Lord Bute. He now began to display great laxity of speculative principle, and, having quarrelled with some of his earliest and best friends, threatened to put an end to his own existence, and was in consequence turned out of doors

by his master. In this emergency he resolved to seek an asylum in the metropolis, whither he instantly repaired, and where he soon got engaged with various publications. Besides contributing a variety of essays to the daily papers, he projected a history of London, and a history of England, and plunged deeply into the party-politics of the day. But the result disappointed his expectations, and in a few months he was reduced to a state of utter indigence. After an ineffectual attempt to obtain the situation of surgeon in a slave-ship, the unfortunate youth terminated his own existence, on the 25th of August, 1770, by swallowing a dose of arsenic or opium, having previously destroyed all his manuscripts, and left nothing behind him but a few small parchments. His remains were interred in the burying-ground of St Andrew's workhouse. Thus died Chatterton,

"The wonder and reproach of an enlightened age."

That he "passed his life in the fabrication of a lie" is, in spite of the efforts of a Whiter and a Symmons to establish the authenticity of the Rowleian poems, too true.1 But posterity, while it deprecates the fraud. will ever award the due meed of praise to

"The wondrous youth of Bristowe's plain,

That pour'd in Rowley's garb his solemn strain."

The poems to which Chatterton appended the name of Rowley were first collected into an 8vo volume by Mr Tyrwhitt, and subsequently in a splendid 4to by Dean Milles. The best edition is that of Southey and Gregory, in 3 volumes 8vo.

The St James' Chronicle, during the rage of the Chattertonian controversy, punlished the following list of the partizans on each side :

William Falconer.

BORN A. D. 1730.-DIED A. D. 1770.

THIS ingenious but hapless poet was a native of Edinburgh. His father was in very humble circumstances, and apprenticed him, while yet very young, on board a Leith merchant-vessel. Campbell, the author of Lexiphanes,' was among the first to discover symptoms of genius about the youth; he warmly befriended him, and procured him the appointment of mate on board a vessel engaged in the Levant trade. This vessel was afterwards shipwrecked during her passage from Alexandria to Venice, and only Falconer and two of the crew escaped. When about twenty years of age he appears to have contributed several little effusions to the Gentleman's Magazine.' They are chiefly of a whimsical cast, and touch on naval life and adventures. In 1762, he published The Shipwreck,' the poem which introduced him to public notice, and on which alone his fame rests. Soon after its appearance he was rated a midshipman on board Sir Edward Hawke's ship, the Royal George; and in 1763 was appointed purser of the Glory frigate. He was afterwards transferred to the Aurora frigate, which sailed from England for the East Indies on the 30th of September, 1769, but was never heard of after leaving the Cape, and is supposed to have foundered in the Mozambique channel. The Shipwreck is a poem of great promise. Its versification is exquisite, and its whole construction as nearly perfect as any descriptive piece in the language. It is, perhaps, to a landsman's ear, overloaded with technical terms; but this was probably inseparable from his subject, and invests his verse with the highest claims to those for whose gratification he chiefly wooed the muse.

James Brindley.

BORN A. D. 1716.-DIED A. D. 1772.

THIS celebrated and self-instructed engineer was born at Tunsted in Derbyshire. He received little or no education in his childhood. At seventeen years of age he apprenticed himself to a millwright, near Macclesfield, in Cheshire. In this situation his mechanical genius soon displayed itself in a manner which astonished his master and fellow-workmen, who could not believe that such a ready command of all the resources of their art, as he always evinced when left to himself, could have been acquired by any thing short of a previous and long ap prenticeship. It is related of him that his master having undertaken to construct a paper-mill, soon found himself at fault with regard to some part of the machinery; whereupon his apprentice set off one evening a distance of fifty miles to obtain a personal inspection of a paper-mill in operation, and returned the succeeding day with such a thorough comprehension of the parts and working of the machinery, that he not only enabled his master to finish a good paper-mill, but even to introduce various improvements into it.

In 1752, Brindley erected a very powerful water-wheel at Clifton in Lancashire, for the purpose of draining some coal-mines; the complete success of this undertaking introduced him to extensive employment both as a machinist and an engineer. In 1758, the duke of Bridgewater obtained an act of parliament for cutting a canal from Worsley to Salford near Manchester. This undertaking required the execution of several tunnels and aqueducts on the line of the canal, for it was resolved to avoid the construction of locks, so as to render the transit of vessels perfectly free and uninterrupted; and his grace, having full confidence in Brindley's skill and fertile genius, intrusted the whole work to his superintendence. In the execution of it, Brindley evinced consummate skill and the most complete command of all the resources of mechanical art, triumphing over obstacles which thoroughly trained engineers had pronounced insurmountable, and at the same time effecting extensive savings on the original estimates for different parts of the undertaking. In 1766 he began a canal from the Trent to the Mersey, commonly known by the name of the Grand Trunk navigation; he did not live to finish this undertaking, but it owes its success to the skill and ingenuity of his plans. He was also the engineer of the canals from Haywood, in Staffordshire, to Bewdley, and from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, of the Oxfordshire canal, the Calder navigation, and various other works of a similar kind throughout the kingdom.

Brindley died at Turnhurst, in Staffordshire, on the 30th of September, 1772. His life appears to have been shortened by the intense and ceaseless demands made upon his faculties by the number and magnitude of the undertakings intrusted to his management. In these he had little or no assistance from books, or the labours of other men; his resources lay almost entirely within himself. His methods of calculation and designing were in a great measure peculiar to himself, and incommunicable to others; while the results he obtained were always found to be exactly verified in practice.

George Edwards.

BORN A. D. 1693.-died a. D. 1773.

He

THIS very eminent naturalist was born at Westham, in Essex. received his education at two private seminaries. He was early apprenticed to a London merchant; but it is said that the arrival of a quantity of books on natural history at his master's house, the bequest of a deceased relative, and to which young Edwards had access, determined his taste, and ultimately led him to abandon commercial pursuits for the sake of gratifying his absorbing passion-the pursuit of natural history. A combination of fortunate circumstances enabled him to perform several tours on the continent in early life; amongst other countries he visited and spent a considerable time in Holland, Norway, and France. Being an acute and diligent observer of nature, these excursions greatly enlarged his acquaintance with objects of natural science. His election in 1733, to the office of librarian to the college of physicians, on the recommendation of Sir Hans Sloane, threw open to him the stores of scientific literature in the possession of that body,

and afforded him eminent facilities for the cultivation of his favourite branches.

In 1743, the first volume of his History of Birds' was published in 4to; a second volume appeared in 1747; a third in 1750; and a fourth in 1751. These volumes were well-received by the public. The figures are natural, and the drawing and colouring very correct. In 1758 he published a volume entitled Gleanings of Natural History,' to which he successively added other two volumes. These seven quarto volumes contain upwards of six hundred subjects in natural history, described and delineated for the first time. Some idea of the extreme accuracy and care of our author and artist may be formed from the account which he himself has given in the third volume of his Gleanings' of his exactness in delineating any object. "It often happens," he says, "that my figures on the copper plates greatly differ from my original drawings; for sometimes the originals have not altogether pleased me as to their attitudes or actions. In such cases I have made three or four, sometimes six, sketches or outlines, and have deliberately considered them all, and then fixed upon that which I judged most free and natural to be engraven on my plate." "It is not reasonable," adds he, "to expect that a work of this nature should be highly laboured and finished in the colouring part, because it would greatly raise the price of it, as colouring work in London, when highly finished, comes very dear. The most material part is, keeping as strictly as can be to the variety of colours found in the natural subjects, which has been my principal care; and now, on revising all that have been coloured, I think them much nearer nature than most works of the kind that have been published."

Edwards communicated various papers to the Royal society. He enjoyed the friendship and correspondence of many eminent men, especially of the great Swedish naturalist Linnæus, who highly esteemed his ornithological publications. He died in 1773.

John Hawkesworth.

BORN A. D. 1719.-DIED A. D. 1773.

THIS elegant essayist was born in London. He appears to have early devoted himself to literature, and from the first to have followed letters as his profession. In 1744 he succeeded Dr Johnson in compiling the parliamentary debates for the 'Gentleman's Magazine;' he also contributed various poetical pieces to that miscellany. His papers in the 'Adventurer' attracted the attention of Archbishop Herring, who conferred on him the degree of doctor of civil law. In 1761 he published several dramatic pieces, and his admired tale of 'Almoran and Hamet.' Short

ly after the secession of Ruffhead, in 1760, from the review department of the Gentleman's Magazine,' Dr Hawkesworth was intrusted with this department. In 1768 he published a good translation of Telemachus.'

In 1772 the lords of the admiralty employed Dr Hawkesworth to draw up an account of the late voyage and discoveries of Captain Cook in the South seas. He received £6000 for this work; but was severely