Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/34

170 mony to its merits was paid in Mr Kennie's presence, by an untutored son of nature. He was taking the work off the contractor's hands, when a magistrate of the town, who was present, asked a countryman who was passing at the time with his cart, how he liked the new bridge. "Brig," answered the man, "it's nae brig ava; ye neither ken whan ye're on't, nor whan ye're aff't It must be remarked that this bridge superseded an old one in its immediate neighbourhoood, which had a very precipitous road-way, and was in every respect the opposite of the new one.

Mr Rennie was destined, however, to leave more splendid monuments of his talents in this particular department of his profession. The Waterloo bridge across the Thames at London, of which he was the architect, would have been sufficient in itself to stamp him as an engineer of the first order. This magnificent public work Avas commenced in 1811, and finished in 1817, at the expense of rather more than a million of money. It may safely be described as one of the noblest structures of the kind in the world, whether we regard the simple and chaste grandeur of its architecture, the impression of indestructibility which it forces on the mind of the beholder, or its adaptation to the useful purpose for which it was intended. It consists of nine equal arches, of 127 feet span ; the breadth between the parapets is 42 feet ; and the road-way is perfectly flat. Mr Rennie also planned the Southwark bridge, which is of castiron, and has proved very stable, notwithstanding many prophecies to the contrary. The plan of the new London bridge was likewise furnished by him ; but of this public work he did not live to see even the commencement.

Among the public works of different kinds executed by Mr Rennie may be mentioned;—of canals, the Aberdeen, the Great Western, the Kennet and Avon, the Portsmouth, the Birmingham, and the Worcester;—of docks, those at Hull, Leith, Greeriock, Liverpool, and Dublin, besides the West India docks in the city of London;—and of harbours, those at Berwick, Dunleary, Howth, Newhaven, and Queensferry. In addition to these naval works, he planned various important improvements on the national dock-yards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Chatham, and Sheerness; and the new naval arsenal at Pembroke was constructed from his designs. But by far the greatest of all his naval works was the celebrated breakwater at Plymouth. It is calculated that he planned works to the amount of fifty millions in all, of which nearly twenty millions were expended under his own superintendence.

Mr Rennie died, October 16, 1821, of inflammation in the liver, which had afflicted him for some years. By his wife, whom he married in 1789, he left six children, of whom the eldest, Mr George Rennie, followed the same profession as his father. This eminent man was buried with great funeral honours, in St Paul's cathedral, near the grave of Sir Christopher Wren.

The grand merit of Mr Rennie as an engineer is allowed to have been his almost intuitive perception of what was necessary for certain assigned purposes. With little theoretical knowledge, he had so closely studied the actual forms of the works of his predecessors, that he could at length trust in a great measure to a kind of tact which he possessed in his own mind, and which could hardly have been communicated. He had the art of applying to every situation where he was called to act professionally, the precise form of remedy that was wanting to the existing evil, whether it was to stop the violence of the most boisterous sea to make new harbours, or to render those safe which were before dangerous or inaccessible to redeem districts of fruitful land from encroachment by the ocean, or to deliver them from the pestilence of stagnant marsh to level hills or to tie them together by aqueducts or arches, or, by embankment, to raise the valley between them to make bridges that for