year, was appointed lord high chancellor of England, which office he held until 1801, when he was succeeded by the present lord Eldon. In Oct. 1795 his lordship obtained a new patent of a barony, by the title of lord Loughborough, of Loughborough in the county of Surrey, with remainder severally and successively to his nephews, sir James Sin clair Erskine, bart. and John Erskine, esq. and by patent, April 21, 1801, was created earl of Rosslyn, in the county of Mid Lothian, with the same remainders.

His lordship, feeling the infirmities of age coming fast upon him, retired from the post of chancellor at this time, and lived chiefly in the country, sometimes at his seat, near Windsor, and also occasionally at Weymouth, when the royal family, at whose parties both he and his countess were frequent guests, happened to be there. By sobriety, regularity, and temperance, he doubtless prolonged a feeble existence, but at length died suddenly, at Baileys, between Slough and Salt Hill, on Thursday, January 3, 1805, about one o'clock in the morning, in the seventysecond year of his age, of an apoplectic fit. He was interred a few days after in St. Paul's cathedral.

His lordship was first married Dec. 31, 1767, to BettyAnne, daughter and heir of John Dawson, of Morley, in the county of York, esq. but her ladyship dying, Feb. 15th, 1781, without issue, his lordship married, July 1782, Charlotte, daughter of William the first and sister to the late William, viscount Courtenay, but had no issue by her.

Lord Rosslyn never published but one work, to which his name was affixed; this made its appearance in 1793, and was entitled "Observations on the state of the English Prisons, and the means of improving them; communicated to the rev. Henry Zouch, a justice of the peace, by the right hon. lord Loughborough, now lord high chancellor of Great Britain." For some time, Mr. Wraxall informs us, he was almost convinced that his lordship was the author of Junius's letters, notwithstanding the severity with which he is treated in those celebrated invectives; but in this opinion few perhaps will now coincide.

It is difficult, says the most candid of his biographers, to speak of public men, so lately deceased, free from prejudices created by individual feelings. Lord Rosslyn appeared to be a man of subtle and plausible, rather than of solid talents. His ambition was great, and his desire of office unlimited. He could argue with great ingenuity on

either side, so that it was difficult to anticipate his future by his past opinions. These qualities made him a valuable partizan; and a useful and efficient member of any administration. Early in his public career he incurred the powerful satire of Churchill in a couplet which adhered to him for the remainder of his life. He had been destined for the Scotch bar; a fortunate resolve brought him to the wealthier harvest of English jurisprudence. His success was regular and constant; and in the character of solicitorgeneral he was long a powerful support to the parliamentary conduct of lord North's ministry. When the alarm of the French revolution, which separated the heterogeneous opposition formed by the whigs under Fox, and the tories under lord North, obtained him a seat on the woolsack, he filled that important station during the eight years he occupied it, not, perhaps, in a manner perfectly satisfactory to the suitors of his court, nor always with the highest degree of dignity as speaker of the upper house; but always with that pliancy, readiness, ingenuity, and knowledge, of which political leaders must have felt the convenience, and the public duly appreciated the talent. Yet his slender and flexible eloquence, his minuter person, and the comparative feebleness of his bodily organs, were by no means a match for the direct, sonorous, and energetic oratory, the powerful voice, dignified figure, and bold mans ner of Thurlow; of whom he always seemed to stand in awe, and to whose superior judgment he often bowed against his will.1

WEDGWOOD (JOSIAH), an ingenious improver of the English pottery manufacture, was born in July 1730, and was the younger son of a potter, whose property consisting chiefly of a small entailed estate, that descended to the eldest son, Josiah was left, at an early period of life, to lay the foundation of his own fortune. This he did most substantially by applying his attention to the pottery business, which, it is not too much to say, he brought to the highest perfection, and established a manufacture that has opened a new scene of extensive commerce, before unknown to this or any other country. His many discoveries of new species of earthen wares and porcelains, his studied forms and chaste style of decorations, and the correctness

1 Collins's Peerage, by sir E. Brydges,-Park's edition of the Royal and No ble Authors.-Gent. Mag. vol. LXXV.-Wraxall's Memoirs.

and judgment with which all his works were executed under his own eye, and by artists for the most part of his own forming, have turned the current in this branch of commerce; for, before his time, England imported the finer earthen wares; but for more than twenty years past, she has exported them to a very great annual amount, the whole of which is drawn from the earth, and from the industry of the inhabitants; while the national taste has been improved, and its reputation raised in foreign countries.

It was about 1760 that he began his improvements in the Staffordshire potteries, and not only improved the compo sition, forms, and colours of the old wares, but likewise invented, in 1763, a new species of ware, for which he obtained a patent, and which being honoured by her majesty's approbation and patronage, received the name of queen's ware. Continuing his experimental researches, Mr. Wedgwood afterwards invented several other species of earthen-ware and porcelain, of which the principal are: 1. A terra cotta; resembling porphyry, granite, Egyptian pebble, and other beautiful stones of the siliceous or crystalline order. 2. Basaltes, or black ware; a black porcelain biscuit of nearly the same properties with the natural stone, receiving a high polish, resisting all the acids, and bearing without injury a very strong fire. 3. White porcelain biscuit; of a smooth wax-like appearance, of similar properties with the preceding. 4. Jasper; a white porcelain of exquisite beauty, possessing the general properties of basaltes; together with the singular one of receiving through its whole substance, from the admixture of metallic calces, the same colours which those calces give to glass or enamels in fusion; a property possessed by no porcelain of ancient or modern composition. 5. Bamboo, or cane-coloured biscuit porcelain, of the same nature as the white porcelain biscuit. And 6. A porcelain biscuit remarkable for great hardness, little inferior to that of agate; a property which, together with its resistance to the strongest acids, and its impenetrability to every known liquid, renders it well adapted for the formation of mortars, and many different kinds of chemical vessels. The above six distinct species of ware, together with the queen's ware first noticed, have increased by the industry and ingenuity of different manufacturers, and particularly by Mr. Wedgwood and his son, into an almost endless variety of forms for ornament and use. These, variously painted and em

bellished, constitute nearly the whole of the present fine earthen-wares and porcelains of English manufacture.

Such inventions have prodigiously increased the number of persons employed in the potteries, and in the traffic and transport of their materials from distant parts of the kingdom and this class of manufacturers is also indebted to him for much mechanical contrivance and arrangement in their operations; his private manufactory having had, for thirty years and upward, all the efficacy of a public work of experiment. Neither was he unknown in the walks of philosophy. His communications to the royal society shew a mind enlightened by science, and contributed to procure him the esteem of scientific men at home and throughout Europe. His invention of a thermometer for measuring the higher degrees of heat employed in the various arts, is of the greatest importance to their promotion, and will add celebrity to his name.

The

At an early period of his life, seeing the impossibility of extending considerably the manufactory he was engaged in on the spot which gave him birth, without the advantages of inland navigation, he was the proposer of the Grand Trunk canal, and the chief agent in obtaining the act of parliament for making it, against the prejudices of the landed interest, which at that time were very strong. Grand Trunk canal is ninety miles in length, uniting the rivers Trent and Mersey; and branches have been since made from it to the Severn, to Oxford, and to many other parts; with also a communication with the grand junction canal from Braunston to Brentford. In the execution of this vast scheme, he was assisted by the late ingenious Mr. Brindley, whom he never mentioned but with respect. By it he enabled the manufacturers of the inland part of Staffordshire and its neighbourhood, to obtain from the distant shores of Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and Kent, those materials of which the Staffordshire ware is composed; affording, at the same time, a ready conveyance of the manufacture to distant countries, and thus not only to rival, but undersell, at foreign markets, a commodity which has proved, and must continue to prove of infinite advantage to these kingdoms; as the ware, when formed, owes its value almost wholly to the labour of the honest and industrious poor. Still farther to promote the interest and be nefit of his neighbourhood, Mr. Wedgwood planned and carried into execution, a turnpike-road, ten miles in length,

through that part of Staffordshire, called the pottery; thus opening another source of traffic, if, by frost or other impediment, the carriage by water should be interrupted. His pottery was near Newcastle-under-Lyne, in Staffordshire, where he built a village called Etruria, from the resemblance which the clay there dug up bears to the ancient Etruscan earth.

On one occasion he stept forward in favour of general trade, when, in his opinion, Mr. Pitt's propositions for adjusting the commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Ireland, threatened to be of very pernicious consequence to the British manufacturers. He was, therefore, in 1786, the founder and chief promoter of an association in London, called "The General Chamber of the Manufacturers of Great Britain." Mr. Wedgwood was very assiduous in writing and printing upon this great national subject, and in consequence of so firm an opposition the propositions were abandoned.

Mr. Wedgwood closed a life of useful labour, on January 3, 1795, in his sixty-fourth year. Having acquired a large fortune, his purse was always open to the calls of charity, and to the support of every institution for the public good. To the poor he was a benefactor in the most enlarged sense of the word, and by the learned, he was highly respected for his original genius and persevering industry in plans of the greatest national importance. He had been for many years a fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies.1

WEEVER, or WEAVER, (JOHN), an industrious antiquary, is supposed to have been born in Lancashire in 1576; but the exact place of his birth does not appear to have been ascertained by his biographers. He was educated at Queen's college, Cambridge, where he was admitted April 30, 1594, under doctor Robert Pearson, archdeacon of Suffolk, and shortly after went abroad in search of antiquities, a study to which he was peculiarly attached. He appears to have been at Liege and at Rome. At his return to England he travelled over most parts of that country, and of Scotland, under the protection and encouragement of sir Robert Cotton and the learned Selden. In 1631 he published his "Funeral Monuments," and the next year died at his house in Clerkenwell-close, aged

1 Gent. Mag. vol. LXV.