Previous to the accession of George III., the communications throughout England were of the most wretched kind, the great highways being simply the worn-out tracks of the old Roman roads. The manufactures of our country, struggling into notice, were greatly hampered by this lack of communication, few facilities for carriage existing, and distant markets being beyond reach. The little carrying-trade was necessarily of the slowest and most expensive kind, and goods were conveyed to the nearest port or navigable river, generally by long strings of packhorses, less frequently by the slow clumsy stage-wagon. Packhorses conveyed from the Severn the clay used in the Potteries, bringing back in return coarse earthenware for export. The cloth-manufacturer of Yorkshire saddled his horse with his wares and travelled from fair to fair as his own salesman; and the little cotton used in the Manchester looms was transported from Liverpool in the same primitive fashion. This was the state of the communications in England in 1757, when the Duke of Bridgewater, having been crossed in love by one of the beautiful Miss Gunnings, turned his attention to the more prosaic employment of canal construction. His idea was to construct a waterway, or ‘navigation,’ from his coal-pits to Manchester, a distance of ten miles. Short as this distance appears in our time, it offered so great a barrier in those days, that the supply of fuel was always limited and uncertain. The duke, who was desirous of engaging an engineer to put his idea into practical form, was advised to employ the famous millwright Brindley, who had already made himself a name in the district for his clever contrivances in the pottery-works and the silk-factories. Like many others who have risen to fame, Brindley was a self-made man. To his natural-born genius, there were united two characteristics which are necessary to all such pioneers—great perseverance, and a confidence in his own judgment which overbore all the adverse criticism of the multitude. His diary, which is extant, shows his school education to have been of the scantiest; the words, spelt in the broad Staffordshire dialect, and the painfully crabbed writing, excite alternately our amusement and our respect; whilst it shows throughout the dogged determination of the individual to overcome difficulty.