366

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

III.

Badnessof ihoroads.

quite unacquainted with that principle which has, in our owntime, produced an unprecedented revolution in human affairs,which has enabled navies to advance in the face of wind andtide, and battalions, attended by all their baggage and artil-lery, to traverse kingdoms at a pace equal to that of the fleetestrace horse. The Marquess of Worcester had recently ob-served the expansive power of moisture rarefied by heat.After many experiments he had succeeded in constructing arude steam engine, which he called a fire water work, andwhich he pronounced to be an admirable and most forcibleinstrument of propulsion. * But the Marquess was suspectedto be a madman, and known to be a Papist. His inventions,therefore, found no favourable reception. His fire water workmight, perhaps, furnish matter for conversation at a meetingof the Royal Society, but was not applied to any practical pur-pose. There were no railways, except a few made of timber,from the mouths of the Northumbrian coal pits to the banks ofthe Tyne.** There was very' little internal communication bywater. A few attempts had been made to deepen and embankthe natural streams, but with slender success. Hardly asingle navigable canal had been even projected. The Englishof that day were in, the habit of talking with mingled admi-ration and despair of the immense trench by which Lewis theFourteenth had made a junction between the Atlantic and theMediterranean. They little thought that their country would,in the course of a few generations, be intersected, at the costof private adventurers, by artificial rivers making up morethan four times the length of the Thames, the Severn, and theTrent together.

It was by 'the highways that both travellers and goodsgenerally passed from place to place. And those highway'sappear to have been far worse than might have been expected

* Century of Inventions, 1663. No. GS.

** North’s Life of Guildford, 136.