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