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,