Edmund Cartwright was the fourth son of William Cartwright, Esq., of Marnham in Nottinghamshire, a gentleman whose family had been long established in the county, and had suffered considerably in its fortune by adherence to the cause of Charles I. in the civil war. He was born April 24, 1743; and at the school of Wakefield, and at University College, Oxford, received the education usually bestowed upon young men destined for the clerical profession. At an early age he manifested a taste for poetic composition; but though he had printed some short pieces anonymously, his name was not given to the public, until the appearance, in 1770, of ‘Armenia and Elvira,’ a legendary poem, which became so popular that it passed through seven editions in little more than a year. He also published, about the same period, the ‘Prince of Peace,’ and ‘Sonnets to Eminent Men.’ In 1774 he became a contributor to the Monthly Review, in which he continued to write for ten years. We have not ascertained the date of his taking orders, of his election to a fellowship at Magdalen College, or of his vacating that fellowship by marriage. The degree of D.D. he took in 1806. For some years after his marriage he resided, first on his living at Brampton in Derbyshire, and afterwards at Goadby-Marwood in Leicestershire; where the hours which were not devoted to the duties of his calling were chiefly employed in literary pursuits. Hitherto Mr. Cartwright’s private life had been that of a retired country clergyman, varied only by his correspondence with literary friends. From his family connexions, and the esteem in which he was held by some who had power to advance him, his prospects in the church were favourable; and he had good reason to believe, that if he had confined himself to the line of life in which he had been educated, and in which he was then advancing, he would have attained a more ample provision in his profession, than it was his lot to acquire by the exercise of his mechanical talent. The existence of such a talent in his own mind had been wholly unknown even to himself, until he was upwards of forty years of age, when the circumstance which has been above narrated called it into action, and caused a change in the whole tenor of his life. In his first attempts he had to contend with the difficulties which usually beset genius without experience. “As I had never before turned my thoughts to anything mechanical, either in theory or practice, nor had even seen a loom at work, or knew anything of its construction, you will readily believe that my first loom was a most rude piece of machinery. The warp was placed perpendicularly; the reed fell with the weight of at least half a hundred weight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. In short, it required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time.” This, as we have seen, was in 1785: he