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support this bridge also serve as conduits to the aqueduct which
supplies the city with water.

Amid the mass of prosaic structures in London, what a grand exception to
the architectural monotony are her bridges! how effectually they have
promoted her suburban growth! Canova thought the Waterloo Bridge the
finest in Europe, and, by a strangely tragic coincidence, this noble and
costly structure is the favorite scene of suicidal despair, wherewith
the catastrophes of modern novels and the most pathetic of city lyrics
are indissolably associated. Westminster Bridge is as truly the Swiss
Laboyle's monument of architectural genius, fortitude, and patience, as
St. Paul's is that of Wren; and our own Remington's bridge-enthusiasm
involves a pathetic story. At Cordova, the bridge over the Guadalquivir
is a grand relic of Moorish supremacy. The oldest bridge in England is
that of Croyland in Lincolnshire; the largest crosses the Trent in
Staffordshire. Tom Paine designed a cast-iron bridge, but the
speculation failed, and the materials were subsequently used in the
beautiful bridge over the River Wear in Durham County. There is a
segment of a circle six hundred feet in diameter in Palmer's bridge
which spans our own Piscataqua. It is said that the first edifice of the
kind which the Romans built of stone was the Ponte Rotto, begun by the
Censor Fulvius and finished by Scipio Africanus and Lucius Mummius.
Popes Julius III. and Gregory XIV. repaired it; so that the fragment now
so valued as a picturesque ruin symbolizes both Imperial and
Ecclesiastical rule. In striking contrast with the reminiscences of
valor, hinted by ancient Roman bridges, are the ostentatious Papal
inscriptions which everywhere in the States of the Church, in elaborate
Latin, announce that this Pontiff built or that Pontiff repaired these
structures.

The mediaeval castle moat and drawbridge have, indeed, been transferred
from the actual world to that of fiction, history, and art, except where
preserved as memorials of antiquity; but the civil importance which from
the dawn of civilization attached to the bridge is as patent to-day as
when a Roman emperor, a feudal lord, or a monastic procession went forth
to celebrate or consecrate its advent or completion; in evidence
whereof, we have the appropriate function which made permanently
memorable the late visit of Victoria's son to her American realms, in
his inauguration of the magnificent bridge bearing h