from the necessity of teaching shorthand. He had printed new proposals for publishing his system by subscription (dated 1 Nov. 1739). Difficulties arose, and he obtained an act of parliament, passed on 5 May 1742, giving him the sole right both of publishing and teaching the system for twenty-one years. A list of persons testifying to its merits is appended to the proposals, and includes the Duke of Queensberry, Bishop Hoadly and his son, Hartley, R. Smith, the Cambridge astronomer, and other university authorities. The third Duke of Devonshire, Lord Delawarr, Horace Walpole, Gibbon (the historian's father), and, it is said, Lord Chesterfield, were also among his pupils.
At Manchester, Byrom was known as a warm supporter of the high church and Jacobite party. He acted as agent in a successful opposition to a bill for establishing a workhouse in Manchester in the early months of 1731. The objection was that the proposed board of guardians was so constituted as to give a majority to whigs and dissenters (Baines, Lancashire, ii. 293, and Ware's Collegiate Church of Manchester, ii. 79). Byrom was in Manchester during the Pretender's entry in 1745. His daughter's journal (Remains, ii. 385 seq.) shows that, in spite of his strong Jacobite sympathies, he avoided committing himself, though two sons of his intimate friend Dr. Deacon, physician and nonjuring clergyman, joined the regiment raised by the Pretender. A strong party feeling distracted the town for some years afterwards. Jacobites were insulted at public assemblies (ib. ii. 509), and Byrom, with his friend Dr. Deacon, contributed various essays and epigrams to the ‘Chester Courant,’ which were collected in a small volume, called ‘Manchester Vindicated’ (Chester, 1749), and form a curious illustration of the time.
The correspondence of later years is chiefly theological. Byrom died, after a lingering illness, on 26 Sept. 1763. A fine of 5l. was levied on his estate because he was not buried in woollen.
Byrom's poems were collected for the first time and published at Manchester in 1773. They were republished with a life and notes in 1814. To the last is prefixed a portrait, showing a man of great height and a strongly marked face. The poems are also (with some exceptions) given in Chalmers's ‘English Poets.’ Byrom had an astonishing facility in rhyming. Some of his poems are discussions on points of classical or theological criticism (e.g. against Conyers Middleton's reply to Sherlock), and scarcely better than clever doggerel. One is an argument to prove that St. George was really Gregory the Great. Pegge, who is challenged in the poem, replied to Byrom and Pettingall in the fifth volume of the ‘Archæologia.’ Others are versifications of Behmen, Rusbrochius, and Law (e.g. the ‘Enthusiasm’ is from Law's ‘Appeal,’ p. 30 et seq. and the ‘Pond’ from the same writer's ‘Serious Call,’ chap. xi.), and there are a few hymns. Byrom can be forcible, but frequently adopts a comic metre oddly inappropriate to his purpose. Some occasional poems in which his good-humoured sprightliness finds a natural expression have been deservedly admired, especially ‘Colin to Phœbe’ (see above), the ‘Three Black Crows,’ ‘Figg and Sutton,’ printed in the sixth volume of Dodsley's collection and turned to account in Thackeray's ‘Virginians,’ chap. xxxvii.; the ‘Centaur Fabulous’ upon Warburton's ‘Divine Legation,’ and the epilogue to ‘Hurlothrumbo.’ Samuel Johnson, the author of this play, was a favourite object of Byrom's playful satire. Some epigrams are still familiar, ‘Handel and Bononcini’ (see Remains, i. 136), often erroneously given to Swift; ‘Bone and Skin,’ which refers to the mills belonging to the Manchester grammar school, and the well-known
God bless the king, God bless our faith's defender,
God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender;
But who pretender is, and who is king,
God bless us all! that's quite another thing.
Byrom's system of shorthand was not printed until four years after his death, when it was explained in a volume illustrated with thirteen copper-plates, and entitled ‘The Universal English Shorthand; or the way of writing English in the most easy, concise, regular, and beautiful manner, applicable to any other language, but particularly adjusted to our own,’ Manchester, 1767, second edit. 1796. The method is in appearance one of the most elegant ever devised, but it cannot be written with sufficient rapidity, and consequently it was never much used by professional stenographers. For reporting purposes it is decidedly inferior to the systems of Mason, Gurney, Taylor, Lewis, and Pitman. Still its publication marks an era in the history of shorthand, and there can be no doubt that the more widely diffused system published by Samuel Taylor in 1786 was suggested by and based upon that of Byrom. Thomas Molineux of Macclesfield issued several elegantly printed manuals of instruction in Byrom's system between 1796 and 1824, but the best exposition of the method is to be found in the ‘Practical Introduction to the Science of Shorthand,’ by William Gawtress, Leeds, 1819, third edit. London, 1830.
