Doctor Primrose, those three great characters
in one, "a husbandman, a priest, and the
father of a family."

In Arcadia Ego, said the inventor of the
power-loom nearly half a century afterwards,
when he looked back through a troubled
memory on this first half of his life. Certainly
a dream in Tempe itself, or one of the vales
of Arcady, could hardly have been more quiet.
If one looks a little closely, it is true,
one may see that there peeps forth now and
then a glimpse of the spirit which was to
give such excitement and interest to his latter
years; but it is only when one of his
parishioners has been cured by some simple
remedy he has himself invented, or when, one
of his experiments in farming has had
unexpected success. Never do we observe a
discontented or uneasy looking forth beyond
the limits of his parish or his glebe. He
preaches sermons of the old practical school
of divinity, writes verses in his intervals of
doctoring and farming, and now and then
reviews a book for the Monthly. For, being a
man of good account in the world, a clergyman,
a friend of Langhorne's, and moreover a
Whig (an article now daily becoming much
less plentiful, both in the Church and out of
it, than it had formerly been), he was just
the sort of writer to recommend himself to old
Griffiths, who accordingly laid him under
frequent contribution. As the reader may
possibly remember, this was the editorial
bibliopole, the seller of books at the sign of
the Dunciad, who had no better words for poor
Goldsmith in the depths of his early
distresses than the lowest and worst in the
dictionary; but in his correspondence with
the well-to-do Leicestershire rector we find
him a far more humanised being, who at
least never breaks, as of old, into gross or
unseemly expressions.

This Griffiths connection might yet have
been not worth mentioning but for another
to which it introduced the reviewer.
Goldsmith and Chatterton had not been dead
more than half-a-dozen years when another
youth, also conscious of higher powers than
could find outlet through the meanness
of his fortune, was walking the flinty
streets of London with a feeling bordering
on despair. He was the son of a
poor Norfolk schoolmaster and parish-clerk,
and, like Goldsmith, had been an apothecary's
apprentice. He had come up to London with
three pounds in his pocket, which gradually
dwindled down to fourpence halfpenny; and
no care, no economy, no sacrifice, could delay
any longer the terrible approach of Want.
He had parted with all he could spare of his
scanty wardrobe, had pawned a watch very
dear to him, had let go even that copy of
Dryden in which at the first flush of his little
capital of three pounds he had ventured to
invest no less than three shillings. And yet
no answer was come from Lord North to a
letter he had written that good-humoured prime
minister; Lord Shelburne kept obdurate
silence, notwithstanding a most
complimentary copy of verses addressed to him;
and from Lord Thurlow there was not a hint
of encouragement for the poor confident
youth, who had only asked his lordship to
read and judge whether his poems might not
deserve a patron. Darkness was on all sides
closing around him, when happily he thought
of Edmund Burke, perhaps fancied that
the memory of the friend he loved might
dispose him to a gentle hearing of the petition
elsewhere so scornfully rejected, and finally
resolved to write to him. It was early on a
summer evening, in the year when Cartwright
was so zealously engaged for Jones at Oxford,
that this letter to Burke was delivered at his
door by the writer of it, who afterwards,
such was the agitation of hope and fear that
possessed him, walked backwards and
forwards over Westminster-bridge until long
after daylight broke. Burke's generous
answer sent back solid help as well as
comfortable praise, and one of its many results
was the life-long friendship which afterwards
sprang up between George Crabbe and his
first reviewer.

But while gloomy and anxious days thus
passed for ever from the one, they were slowly
beginning to open on the other. Within
little more than three years after the time
thus glanced at, Crabbe writes, in a laughing
letter to his friend, of some odd invention he
has heard about. The other remonstrates as
if it were no laughing matter. "You shall
not find me smiling at your loom," returns
the good-hearted poet, "when you grow
serious in it. I have the worst mechanical
conception that any man can have, but you
have my best wishes. May you weave your
webs of gold!" Nor, amid the visions that
were crowding then in the fancy of the
sanguine projector, did it seem a mere poet's
wish that golden webs should be woven.

But what had transformed into a sanguine
projector the quiet and contented country
clergyman? Nothing graver than the accident
of a chance conversation. In the summer of
1784 Cartwright happened to be on a visit at
Matlock in Derbyshire, when the talk at
table turned on the extensive and ingenious
manufactures lately established in that
neighbourhood. Arkwright's mode of spinning
cotton by machinery, just introduced, became
the subject of particular controversy; one of
the grumblers among the company having
remarked that, if the method should be
adopted generally, so much more yarn was
sure to be manufactured than our own
weavers could work up that it would have
to be largely exported to the continent, and
might there be woven into cloth so cheaply
as greatly to injure the English trade.
Cartwright reflected a moment, and observed
that the remedy for such an evil did not
seem very difficult;—why not apply the
power of machinery to the art of weaving as