At the present day the construction of a canal is a very commonplace affair, but it is impossible to doubt the high qualities of the mind of the Duke of Bridgwater, when we consider the education and prejudices of a man of his rank at that period, and observe the boldness with which he accepted, the tenacity with which he adhered to, the energy and self-sacrifice with which he prosecuted the plans of an obscure man like Brindley.

A disappointment in love is said to have first driven the Duke into retirement, and rendered him shy and eccentric, with an especial objection to the society of ladies, although he had once been a gay, if not dissipated, young gentleman, fond of the turf.  He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat of his brother-in-law, the Marquis of Stafford.

When he retired from the pleasures of the fashionable world, his attention was directed to a rich bed of coal on his estate at Worsley, the value of which was almost nominal in consequence of the expense of carriage.  He determined to have a canal, and, if possible, a perfect canal, and who to carry out this object he selected Brindley, who had been born in the station of an agricultural labourer, and was entirely self-educated.  To the last he conducted those engineering calculations, which are usually worked out on paper and by rule, by a sort of mental arithmetic.  Brindley must have been about forty years of age when he joined the Duke.  He died at fifty-six, having laid the foundation of that admirable system of internal commerce which is better described in Baron Charles Dupin’s Force Commerciale de la Grande Bretagne than in any English work.

One often-told anecdote well illustrates the characters of the nobleman and his engineer, if we remember that no such works had ever been erected in England at that time.  “When Brindley proposed to carry the canal over the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, by an aqueduct 39 feet above the surface of the water, he desired, for the satisfaction of his employer, to have another engineer consulted.  That individual, on being taken to the place where the intended aqueduct was to be constructed, said, that ’he had often heard of castles in the air, but never was shown before where any of them were to be erected.’” But the Duke had faith in Brindley, persevered and triumphed, although, before the completion of all his undertakings, he was more than once reduced to great pecuniary difficulties.

The canal property of the Duke of Bridgwater, with the Lancashire estates, are now vested in the Earl of Ellesmere, a nobleman who well knows, and conscientiously works out, the axiom, “that property has its duties as well as its rights.”  A visit to Worsley will prove what an enlightened and benevolent landowner can do for a population of colliers and bargemen.

The educational and other arrangements of a far-sighted character show that there are advantages in even such large accumulations of property as have fallen to the share of the present representative of the Duke of Bridgwater.