430 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



Sir Richard "Arkwright, one of the most extraordinary men who ever 

 figured on the theatre of human life, and one who seems to have been 

 born expressly for giving impetus to this vast branch of national industry. 

 Injustice is done to Sir Richard's creative genius a sop we suppose to 

 the living lions, and a gentle kick to the dead one. 



" It has been shown (?) that the splendid inventions, which even to the 

 present day are ascribed to Arkwright by some of the ablest and best- 

 informed persons in the kingdom, belong in great part to other and much 

 less fortunate men. In appropriating those inventions as his own, and 

 claiming them as the fruits of his unaided genius, he acted dishonourably, 

 and left a stain upon his character, which the acknowledged brilliance of 

 his talents cannot efface. Had he been content to claim the merit which 

 really belonged to him, his reputation would still have been high, and his 

 wealth would not have been diminished. That he possessed inventive 

 talent of a very superior order, has been satisfactorily established ; and in 

 improving and perfecting mechanical inventions, in exactly adapting them 

 to the purposes for which they were intended, in arranging a comprehen- 

 sive system of manufacture, and in conducting vast and complicated con- 

 cerns, he displayed a bold and fertile mind, and consummate judgment ; 

 which, when his want of education, and the influence of an employment so 

 extremely unfavourable to mental expansion, as that of his previous 

 life, are considered, have excited the astonishment "of mankind. But 

 marvellous and unbounded invention, which he claimed for himself, and 

 which has been too readily accorded to him, the creative faculty, which 

 devised all that admirable mechanism, so intirely new in its principle, 

 and characteristic of the first order of mechanical genius, which has given 

 a new spring to the industry of the world, and within the last half cen- 

 tury has reared up the most extensive manufacture ever known, this did 

 not belong to Arkwright. It is clear, that some of the improvements 

 which made the carding-engine what it was when he took out his second 

 patent, were devised by others ; and there are two prior claimants to the 

 invention of spinning by rollers, one of whom had undoubtedly made it 

 the subject of a patent thirty-one years before the patent of Arkwright. 

 I will not venture to assert that the latter derived the principle of his 

 machine either from Wyatt or from Highs; but I must declare my 

 strong conviction that this was the case, whilst at the same time it is cer- 

 tain that Arkwright displayed great inventive talent in perfecting the 

 details/' 



This blowing hot and cold, this " damning with faint praise" a man 

 like Arkwright, is as ridiculous as it is unjust. He deserves to be placed 

 on a pedestal of adamant ; for he called into active operation the slum- 

 bering industrial energies of his country ; and we are sure that any efforts 

 Mr. Baines can make will fail most signally in lessening one iota his 

 well and hardly-earned reputation. 



The work sets out with great pretensions ; the author saying in his very 

 first page, " that the subject of this volume may claim attention from the 

 man of science and the political philosopher, as well as from the manu- 

 facturer and merchant. To trace the origin and progress of so great a 

 manufacture, with the causes of that progress, is more worthy the pains of 

 the student, than to make himself acquainted with the annals of wars and 

 dynasties, or with nineteen-twentietbs of the matters which fill the pages 

 of history." Certainly this is playing the trumpeter with a vengeance ; 

 and it equals Mr. Baines with the Mahometan barbarian who destroyed 

 the Alexandrian library, merely remarking, that " so the Koran was left, 

 it signified nothing if every other book in the world was lost." Mr. 

 Baines in like manner would say, that " so the History of the Cotton 

 Manufacture by Edward Baines, Junior, Esq., is left, Hume, Gibbon, 



