CHAP. X. BRINDLKVS DEATH CHARACTERISTICS. !71 



of his laborious and active career. We must not, how- 

 ever, judge liim merely by tlie literary test. It is true, 

 lie could scarcely read, and lie was thus cut off, to his 

 own great loss, from familiar intercourse with a large 

 class of cultivated minds, living and dead ; for he could 

 not share in the conversation of educated men, nor en- 

 rich his mind by reading the stores of experience found 

 treasured up in. books. Neither could he write, except 

 with difficulty and inaccurately, as we have shown from 

 the extracts above quoted from his note-books still 

 extant. 



Brindley was, nevertheless, a highly-instructed man 

 in many respects. He was full of the results of care- 

 ful observation, ready at devising the best methods 

 of overcoming material difficulties, and possessed of a 

 powerful and correct judgment in matters of business. 

 Where any emergency arose, his quick invention and 

 ingenuity, cultivated by experience, enabled him almost 

 at once unerringly to suggest the best means of pro- 

 viding for it. His ability in this way was so remark- 

 able, that those about him attributed the process by 

 which lie arrived at his conclusions rather to instinct 

 than reflection the true instinct of genius. " Mr. 

 Brindley," says one of his contemporaries, "is one of 

 those great geniuses whom Nature sometimes rears by 

 her own force, and brings to maturity without the ne- 

 ity of cultivation. His whole plan is admirable, and 

 so well concerted that he is never at a loss ; for, if any 

 difficulty arises, he removes it with a facility which 

 appears so much like inspiration, that you would think 

 Minerva was at his fingers' ends." 



His mechanical genius was indeed most highly culti- 

 vated. From the time when he bound himself ap- 

 prentice to the trade of a millwright impelled to do so 

 by the strong bias of his nature he had been under- 

 going a course of daily and hourly instruction. There 

 was noihinir to distract his attention, or turn him from 



