To be brief, it is evident that the bridge-building of modern times--from the Renaissance to our own day--has been nothing more than a long series of experiments from which a good many important matters have been excluded. High artistic qualities were divorced from military forethought by the earlier pontists of the Renaissance;[139] then came the delicate swagger of a fidgety dilettantism, like that which built the Palladian Bridge in Prior Park, about A.D. 1750; afterwards, by degrees, the industrial spirit began to assert itself; and in 1779 the first metal bridge was built in Europe. How different the history would have been, how much saner and finer, if bridge-builders had taken for their guide the all-sufficient principle that their work must be self-protective, not vulnerable and defenceless. From this principle the most wonderful varied work could have been evolved, generation after generation. By this time there would have been as much difference between an Elizabethan bridge and a modern stone bridge, as between Drake’s “Golden Hind” and a super-Dreadnought. But the sedulous ape has been active everywhere; and Europe to this day is proud when she builds in stone a few bridges that seem to be as good as their classic foreparents, though they break away from the classic principle of self-defence. It is in metal bridges alone that we find a virile growth, a genuine evolution; not often artistic, and as sensitive to bombs as card castles are to a touch from your finger; but yet a great evolution because it represents modern times. If we could summon to earth the spirits of the greatest bridge-builders--Caius Julius Lacer, Apollodorus of Damascus, Isembert, Bénézet, Ammanati, and several others--they would learn nothing much from our stonework, whereas a metal bridge here and there could not fail to strike awe into these spiritual beholders. Even Lacer would be awed by the colossal newness of the Forth Bridge, whose technical inspiration might have come from Vulcan, the god of furnaces, after his annual festival on the 23rd of August. And cannot you imagine what Bénézet and Isembert would say to each other, in swift, excited French, when they gazed up and up at the airy film of road suspended over the wide Menai Straits? This would be enough to convince them that a few recent bridge-builders had forsaken ancient forms in order to give expression to generative ideas. [Illustration: PONT DE TOURS--A FAMOUS BRIDGE OF THE XVIII CENTURY. IT IS IN KEEPING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WATTEAU]