of Peterhead into the chief station of the flourishing whaling trade.  It was he who secured prosperity for Fraserburgh, and Banff, and many other less important centres; while even Dundee and Aberdeen, the chief commercial cities of the east coast, owe to him a large part of their present extraordinary wealth and industry.  When one thinks how large a number of human beings have been benefited by Telford’s Scotch harbour works alone, it is impossible not to envy a great engineer his almost unlimited power of permanent usefulness to unborn thousands of his fellow-creatures.

As a canal-maker, Telford was hardly less successful than as a constructor of roads and harbours.  It is true, his greatest work in this direction was in one sense a failure.  He was employed by Government for many years as the engineer of the Caledonian Canal, which runs up the Great Glen of Caledonia, connecting the line of lakes whose basins occupy that deep hollow in the Highland ranges, and so avoiding the difficult and dangerous sea voyage round the stormy northern capes of Caithness.  Unfortunately, though the canal as an engineering work proved to be of the most successful character, it has never succeeded as a commercial undertaking.  It was built just at the exact moment when steamboats were on the point of revolutionizing ocean traffic; and so, though in itself a magnificent and lordly undertaking, it failed to satisfy the sanguine hopes of its projectors.  But though Telford felt most bitterly the unavoidable ill success of this great scheme, he might well have comforted himself by the good results of his canal-building elsewhere.  He went to Sweden to lay out the Gotha Canal, which still forms the main high-road of commerce between Stockholm and the sea; while in England itself some of his works in this direction—­such as the improvements on the Birmingham Canal, with its immense tunnel—­may fairly be considered as the direct precursors of the great railway efforts of the succeeding generation.

The most remarkable of all Telford’s designs, however, and the one which most immediately paved the way for the railway system, was his magnificent Holyhead Road.  This wonderful highway he carried through the very midst of the Welsh mountains, at a comparatively level height for its whole distance, in order to form a main road from London to Ireland.  On this road occurs Telford’s masterpiece of engineering, the Menai suspension bridge, long regarded as one of the wonders of the world, and still one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in all Europe.  Hardly less admirable, however, in its own way is the other suspension bridge which he erected at Conway, to carry his road across the mouth of the estuary, beside the grey old castle, with which its charming design harmonizes so well.  Even now it is impossible to drive or walk along this famous and picturesque highway without being struck at every turn by the splendid engineering triumphs which it displays throughout its entire length.  The contrast, indeed, between the noble grandeur of Telford’s bridges, and the works on the neighbouring railways, is by no means flattering in every respect to our too exclusively practical modern civilization.