his brother Jeremy took in law. But Brunel reaped the pecuniary benefit, such as it was; and Bentham was shelved by the usual Governmental process, going to France, on the return of peace in 1814, in order to bring up his family economically. Pleasant is the modest face of Sir Samuel, in the background, with almost a winning gentleness, like that of his brother Jeremy, who when returning to his home through Tothill Street, dressed in a suit of grey, of ancient cut, and with long grey hair falling over his shoulders, sat down, tired, on a door-step. A lady passing, struck with his appearance, and taking him for a poor man, gave him a penny. He took it, enjoying the jest, and ever after kept it in his writing-desk.
Near Sir Samuel Bentham stands Maudslay, the original Maudslay, who founded the famous firm. He was a huge man, broad and stout, of whom it could not well be said that his mechanical talent lay in a nutshell. On one occasion, while they were busy on the building of the “London Engineer,” the first steamer that crossed the Channel, some experiments were making, and Maudslay was wanted. “Go for him,” said John Farey to the clerk; “pick out the best coach on the stand,”—there were hackney coaches in those days—“and be sure to load him equally between the four springs, or there will be a break-down.” When Maudslay came, and the consultation was over, John Farey was wickedly slow in taking the draught of water. When asked why, he said, “I am waiting till Maudslay steps ashore, she’ll rise half a streak then.”
Prominently next to Watt stands Rennie, the mechanician, the engineer, the bridge builder, the canal maker, the lighthouse constructor; and earnestly looking up into his face is Telford, his peer, one of the same calibre, a man who could have invented all that Brindley and Smeaton did, had it not been done before. They were men of strength and faculties, who worked with brain and hand, and not by jobbing in shares. Affectionate is the face of Telford; rugged that of Rennie—a strong man, with a large body to match a large head.
In the background stand Count Rumford (such was his Swedish title), and William Murdoch, the economiser of heat for domestic purposes, and the constructor of the first steam locomotive, although only in a model; both have beneficence marked in their faces.
Cartwright and Crompton follow next, the inventors of the power-loom and spinning-mule, which called into so large an existence an exotic trade, removing it from its native India to Lancashire, and furnishing a large portion of the wealth that enabled England to resist the despotism that would otherwise have overwhelmed the Continent, a trade now at the culmination which will again lead it back to India.
Cartwright is an example of the inventor in his highest phase,—the discoverer by forethought, and not the mere contriver by afterthought,—the poet, the minister of religion, and inductive physician, who lived till forty years of age unknowing of mechanism, till the problem was accidentally proposed to him, how to supply weaving hands to answer the demand of the yarn plethora which machinery had induced, in answer to the previous yarn famine, balancing supply and demand.
And so Cartwright—a minister of the church, and not the first or the last with a similar aptitude—set himself to work to produce a machine loom, and gradually completed it in all its parts; and as the customs of society forbade him becoming a manufacturer, some of his friends established a factory at Doncaster, and failed in it, probably from want of business aptitude. Another of his mills was burnt down by the mob at Manchester, who feared loss of employment; and finally Parliament awarded the man who thus marvellously had aided England’s prosperity, with a less sum than it had cost him to bring his invention to use. Ere his death he had practically given to his country machine labour equal to 200,000 men. In that thoughtful, earnest face, set before us by Mr. Walker, there are the aspect and lineaments of the philosophic poet stamped by Nature as a benefactor of mankind, a creator and distributor of wealth, too earnest to reserve his own share of it.
Close by him sits Crompton, the farmer-weaver, who learned to work and play in the quaint old building called the Hall-i-the-Wood, who loved music better than weaving, but was constrained to the latter by the necessities of life. With the eight-spindled jenny of Hargreaves he spun his yarn for his own weaving; and, after five years of thought, he produced his spinning-mule with forty-eight spindles, multiplying the power by six, and the excellence of the quality many fold. And all this he had done when only twenty-seven years of age.
Then came his trouble. The manufacturing men who had not the inventive brains, besieged him, and bargained with him to buy his machine, and then cheated him of the payment, giving him little more than sufficient to construct a new machine. Very similar to this was the process which dispossessed Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, of his reward in the United States. The planters broke into his house by night, and stole and published his invention, thus precluding him from obtaining his patent.
The face of Crompton is that of a thoughtful student unused to worldly ways, and rendered cautious by being practised upon. An honest worker, desirous of using his own invention in peace, he was unfitted to struggle with the competitive world about him. After all his struggles, a miserable pittance was awarded to him, by the charity of pitying neighbours, enough to save him from hunger in his old age.
Lord Stanhope is not omitted: he is a man of the Cavendish stamp, but a mechanist instead of a chemist; yet with a mental warp that could not recognise greatness in other things than mechanism—a workman, with an hereditary fortune provided him, a man ill-fitted to the aristocratic sphere of his birth; one like King Louis of France—a good locksmith spoiled to make a weak king. Had Lord Stanhope been born in the sphere of a Brindley, he would probably have achieved far greater things.
In the face of Richard Trevithick there is an expression of the same kind of energy and ambi-