Bryan Edwards, the son of a gentleman of Westbury in Wiltshire, who tried not very successfully to add to his patrimony by dealing in corn and malt, was born at Westbury in 1743. On his father’s death in 1756, his widowed mother, who had great difficulty in maintaining her six children, was taken under the protection of the elder of her two brothers, Zachary Bayly, a liberal-minded man of considerable wealth, custos of St. Mary and St. George, and a member of the Council, who had come to Jamaica from Westbury. After acquiring some education and a love of letters at two schools in Bristol, and after spending a few months with his younger uncle, Nathaniel Bayly, with whom he disagreed, young Bryan was in 1759 sent out to his uncle, Zachary Bayly. The epitaph on the monument of the uncle in Halfway-Tree church is from the pen of the nephew. In Jamaica Edwards resided under the care of his “great and good uncle,” continuing his studies under the Rev. Isaac Teale, who was specially engaged by his uncle for this purpose—the T—— of Edwards’s “Poems.” They evidently lived on one of Zachary Bayly’s properties in St. Mary, on the banks of the Agua Alta (Wag Water); and the chief outcome of the instruction seems to have been a love for literature, and a propensity for writing poetry. In his “Elegy on the Death of a Friend” Edwards says: Enamour’d echo bade each mountain hear, And pleas’d Agualta smoother flow’d along. Oft round thy banks, sweet stream (now sacred made) Together we explor’d the classic page. Teale, who died in 1794, was at his own request buried on its banks. In 1769, Edwards was left heir in tail male to his uncle’s properties, and four years later he acquired by bequest the great possessions of Benjamin Hume, of Jamaica, a friend of his uncle’s, and became a merchant. Hume, it may be mentioned, had been removed from the post of receiver-general on its being proved that he had embezzled upwards of £20,000 of public money. In 1765 Edwards had been elected a member of the House of Assembly for the parish of St. George, now merged in Portland. In February 1770 he resigned his seat on the plea that his ill-health necessitated a change of climate, but he apparently did not leave the island, and in December 1771 he was again elected for St. George, but in 1772 he was called up to a seat in the Council. As a member of the Assembly he attacked the restrictions placed by the British Government on trade between Jamaica and the United States. In 1782 he returned to England, where he tried, without success, to enter Parliament as member for Chichester against the Duke of Richmond’s nominee, losing by eight votes only. In 1787 he came out again to Jamaica, and in the Assembly which first met in the October of that year he sat as member for Trelawny. In 1788 he received in his place the unanimous thanks of the House for his reports on the slave trade.