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, thorough-going, journeyman mason
of the quiet little Eskdale village. Whether we go into the drained
fens of Lincolnshire, or traverse the broad roads of the rugged Snowdon
region; whether we turn to St. Katharine's Docks in London, or to the
wide quays of Dundee and those of Aberdeen; whether we sail