Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/43

Rh L O V L O W 21) artificial imitation. His career as a dramatist was checked by the suppression of the stage ; if he had been born thirty years earlier or thirty years later, Fletcher or Congreve would have had in him a powerful rival. The most recent edition of his poems is that by V. C. Hazlitt, in 1864. LOVER, SAMUEL (1797-1868), novelist, artist, song writer, and musician, was born in Dublin in 1797. His father was a member of the stock exchange. Lover began life as an artist, and was elected an academician of the Royal Hibernian Society of Arts a body of which he afterwards became secretary. He acquired repute as a miniature painter ; and a number of the local aristocracy sat to him for their portraits. His love for music showed itself at a very early age. At a dinner given to the poet Moore in 1818 Lover sang one of his own songs, which elicited special praise from Moore. One of his best known portraits was that of Paganini, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy. He attracted attention as an author by his Legends and Stories of Ireland (1832), and was one of the first writers for the Dublin University Magazine. He went to London about 1835, where, among others, he painted Lord Brougham in his robes as lord chancellor. His varied gifts rendered him very popular in society ; and he appeared often at Lady Blessington s evening receptions. There he sang several of his songs, which were so well received that he published them (Songs and Ballads, 1839). Some of them illustrated Irish superstitions, among these being &quot;Rory O More,&quot; &quot;The Angel s Whisper,&quot; &quot;The May Dew,&quot; and &quot;The Four- leaved Shamrock.&quot; In 1837 appeared Rory O More, a National Romance, which at once made him a great reputation as a novelist ; he afterwards dramatized it for the Adelphi Theatre, London. In 1842 was published his best known work, Handy Andy, an Irish Tale. Mean while his multifarious pursuits had seriously affected his health; and in 1844 he gave up writing for some time, substituting instead public entertainments, called by him &quot;Irish Evenings,&quot; illustrative of his own works and his powers as a musician and composer. These were very successful both in Great Britain and in America. In addition to publishing numerous songs of his own, Lover edited a collection entitled The Lyrics of Ireland, which appeared in 1858. He died on July 6, 1868. Lover was remarkable for his versatility ; but his fame rests mainly on his songs and novels ; the latter are full of sunny Irish humour, and teem with felicitous pictures of national life. Besides those already mentioned he wrote Treasure Trove (1844), and Metrical Tales and Other Poems (1860). LOWELL, the twenty-seventh city in population of the United States, in Middlesex county, Massachusetts, at the junction of the Concord and Merrimack rivers, 26 miles north-west from Boston. It is often called the &quot; Spindle City,&quot; and the &quot; Manchester of America,&quot; because of the extent of its cotton manufacture. The principal source of its water-power is Pawtucket Falls in the Merrimack, and steam is employed as an auxiliary to the amount of 19,793 horse-power. The first cotton-mill was started in 1823, when the place was the village of East Chelmsford. In 1826 it was made a town, and named Lowell in memory, of Francis Cabot Lowell, from whose plans it had been developed, but who died in 1817. It was incorporated as a city in 1836. It originally comprised 2885 acres, but by annexation from neighbouring towns its area has been increased to 7615 acres, or 11 8 square miles. The popu lation, which in 1836 was 17,633, was 40,928 in 1870, and 59,485 in 1880 (males, 26,855 ; females, 32,630), and in 1882 was estimated at 64,000. The following table shows the extent of the principal manufacturing companies in 1882 : Company. Estab lished. Looms. Spindles. Opera tives. Yards per Week. Merrimack 1823 4 267 153 552 3 300 947 000 Hamilton 1825 1 597 59 816 1 387 364 000 Appleton 1828 1 228 45 ooo 820 285 000 Lowell 1828 392 24 750 1 700 48 000 Middlesex ... 1830 250 18 640 836 25 000 Tremont and Suffolk.. Lawrence 1832 1833 2,700 2 360 94^000 100 000 1,500 2 130 550,000 425 000 Booth 1836 3 600 127*000 1 875 650 000 Massachusetts 1840 3 658 119 5 9 8 1 717 907 000 The capital invested is $17,300,000 ; number of mills, 153; spindles, 806,000; looms, 20,521; females employed, 12,809 ; males, 9750 ; yards per year, cotton 209,056,000, woollen 8,335,000, carpetings 2,700,000; shawls, 350,000 ; hosiery per year, 13,695,520 pairs; cotton consumed annually, 34,087 tons; clean wool, 11,750,000 Ib ; yards cotton dyed and printed, 97.240,000 ; coal consumed, 80,000 tons. There are many secondary industries con nected with the cotton manufacture, including the making of machinery, elastic and leather goods, tools, boilers, &c., and also a number of small factories for the production of cartridges, chemicals, wire cloth, paper, doors, sashes, blinds, and carriages. The Lowell machine-shop employs 1400 men in the manufacture of machinery, and consumes 9800 tons of iron and steel annually. Lowell has 90 public day schools, 6 evening and 4 technical schools, a reform school, and 2 parochial schools. The principal public buildings are the city-hall, court-house, Middlesex county jail, Green school-house, and St John s Hospital. There are 7 national banks with a total capital of $2,500,000, and 6 savings banks with deposits of $11,000,000. The religious congregations number 35, all but three of which own their places of worship. The two largest Roman Catholic churches, St Patrick s and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, are among the finest in the State. Seven railroads connect Lowell with the railroad system of the country. The benevolent institutions include a home for young women and children, and one for aged women, 2 orphanages, and 3 hospitals. There are 2 reading-rooms, 5 daily newspapers (one French), 6 weeklies, and 4 public libraries. Lowell was early famed for the high character of its operatives, who for some years published a periodical of considerable literary merit called The Loivdl Offering, which was, ib is believed, the only publication of the kind ever sustained by workpeople. Many of the young women rose to positions of prominence in American society, and at least one, Miss Lucy Larcom, is known to readers on both sides of the Atlantic by her contributions to leading magazines. In 1843 Charles Dickens visited the place, and devoted a chapter of his American Notes to its praise. The manufacturers have from the first provided for the moral and social as well as the physical wellbeing of their operatives, so that labour troubles have been exceedingly rare in Lowell. The corporation boarding-houses are model dwellings for the workpeople. The first blood shed in the American civil war was that of two Lowell young men, Luther C. Ladd and A. O. Whitney, who were killed by a rnob while their regiment was passing through the streets of Baltimore, on the way to the defence oi Washington, April 19, 1861. In their honour a granite monument has been erected in Merrimack Street, and in the same enclosure is a bronze statue of Victory by the German sculptor Rauch to commemorate the triumph of the Northern cause. The assessed valuation in May 1881 was $42,785,434 an increase of $3,108,035 since 1879); the net debt December 31, 1881, was $1,992,868, of which $1,565,539 was on account of the introduction of water in 1873.