Byrom, JOHN, poet and stenographer, was born at Broughton, near Manchester, February 29, 1692. From Merchant Taylors' School he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1712, and two years later was elected to a fellowship. He next travelled, studied medicine at Montpellier, and returned to London to make his bread by teaching a new system of shorthand he had invented at Cambridge. In 1740 he succeeded to the family estates, and in 1742 obtained from parliament the sole privilege for twenty-one years of teaching his system. He maintained friendship and a correspondence with many great contemporaries, and his diary gives us interesting glimpses of Bentley, Bishop Butler, Samuel Clarke, Wesley, and William Law. He died 26th September 1763. The Chetham Society published his diary (2 vols.) in 1854–57; his poems (4 vols.) in 1894–95. His system of shorthand was first published in 1767, at Manchester. It is clear, characterised by 'simple strokes and no arbitrary characters,' but cannot be written with sufficient rapidity, and consequently has long since been superseded by swifter systems. His poems were first collected in 1773. They show dexterity in rhyme and a fine vein of genial satire. Byrom was throughout life a sound Jacobite, and one of his epigrams which reveals this, in spite of its sly safety, has survived:
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.