The knitting stockings with wires, called _weaving_, has been thought to bear a resemblance to the wire work in screens of churches. However, the invention of the stocking loom is thought more worthy of attention, because it is alleged to have been the production of a single person, and perfected at one trial; his name, and the exact period is ascertained; and, because it is founded upon a similar incident to that of the beauteous Corinthian maid, elsewhere mentioned, as the introducer of painting in Greece; we bestow a particular attention upon this incident which produced the stocking loom, trusting our fair readers will favour us with their attention, when they are informed it is ascribed to Love. It is a complicated piece of machinery, consisting of no fewer than two thousand pieces; it could not have been discovered accidentally, but must have been the result of deep combination and profound sagacity. Under the usurpation of Cromwell, the stocking-knitters of London presented a petition, requesting permission to establish a guild. In this petition they gave a circumstantial account of their profession, of its rise, progress, and importance. No doubt can exist but that in this document the petitioners rendered the best, and probably a true account of the origin and progress of their trade, that of stocking weaving being then scarcely fifty years old. The circumstances they stated being then within memory, any misrepresentation would have militated against them, and could have been easily contradicted. In Deering’s account of Nottingham, this petition is found. In that town the loom was first employed, where it has given wealth to many. From this account it appears the inventor’s name was William Lee, a native of Woodborough, a village about seven miles distant from Nottingham, in which the following passage occurs: “Which trade is properly styled frame work-knitting, because it is direct and absolute knit-work in the stitches thereof, nothing different therein from the common way of knitting, (not much more anciently for public use practised in this nation than this,) but only in the number of needles, at an instant working in this, more than in the other by a hundred for one, set in an engine or frame composed of above two thousand pieces of smith’s, joiner’s and turner’s work, after so artificial and exact a manner that, by the judgment of all beholders, it far excels in the ingenuity, curiosity, and subtility of the invention and contexture, all other frames or instruments of manufacture in use in any known part of the world.”