Biographies of Working Men | Page 8

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.
Telford was now growing an old man. The Menai bridge was begun in
1819 and finished in 1826, when he was sixty-eight years of age; and
though he still continued to practise his profession, and to design many
valuable bridges, drainage cuts, and other small jobs, that great
undertaking was the last masterpiece of his long and useful life. His
later days were passed in deserved honour and comparative opulence;
for though never an avaricious man, and always anxious to rate his
services at their lowest worth, he had gathered together a considerable
fortune by the way, almost without seeking it. To the last, his happy
cheerful disposition enabled him to go on labouring at the numerous
schemes by which he hoped to benefit the world of workers; and so
much cheerfulness was surely well earned by a man who could himself
look back upon so good a record of work done for the welfare of
humanity. At last, on the 2nd of September, 1834, his quiet and
valuable life came gently to a close, in the seventy-eighth year of his
age. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and few of the men who
sleep within that great national temple more richly deserve the honour
than the Westerkirk shepherd-boy. For Thomas Telford's life was not
merely one of worldly success; it was still more pre-eminently one of
noble ends and public usefulness. Many working men have raised
themselves by their own exertions to a position of wealth and dignity
far surpassing his; few indeed have conferred so many benefits upon
untold thousands of their fellow-men. It is impossible, even now, to
travel in any part of England, Wales, or Scotland, without coming
across innumerable memorials of Telford's great and useful life;
impossible to read the full record of his labours without finding that
numberless structures we have long admired for their beauty or utility,
owe their origin to the honourable, upright, hardworking,
thoroughgoing, journeyman mason of the quiet little Eskdale village.

Whether we go into the