“The most marked traits in the character of Arkwright were his wonderful ardour, energy, and perseverance. He commonly laboured in his multifarious concerns from five o’clock in the morning till nine at night; and when considerably more than fifty years of age, feeling that the defects of his education placed him under great difficulty and inconvenience in conducting his correspondence, and in the general management of his business, he encroached upon his sleep, in order to gain an hour each day to learn English grammar, and another hour to improve his writing and orthography! He was impatient of whatever interfered with his favourite pursuits; and the fact is too strikingly characteristic not to be mentioned, that he separated from his wife not many years after his marriage, because she, convinced that he would starve his family by scheming when he should have been shaving, broke some of his experimental models of machinery. Arkwright was a severe economist of time; and, that he might not waste a moment, he generally travelled with four horses, and at a very rapid speed. His concerns in Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Scotland, were so extensive and numerous as to show at once his astonishing power of transacting business, and his all-grasping spirit. In many of these he had partners, but he generally managed in such a way that, whoever lost, he himself was a gainer. So unbounded was his confidence in the success of his machinery, and in the national wealth to be produced by it, that he would make light of discussions on taxation, and say that he would pay the national debt! His speculative schemes were vast and daring; he contemplated entering into the most extensive mercantile transactions, and buying up all the cotton in the world, in order to make an enormous profit by the monopoly; and from the extravagance of some of these designs, his judicious friends were of opinion that, if he had tried to put them in practice, he might have overset the whole fabric of his prosperity.” [Illustration: _Engraved by W. Holl._ COWPER. _From a Picture in the Possession of the Publisher._ Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. _London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street._ ] [Illustration] COWPER.