the duke of Bedford and Lord Trentham, to make the grand tour under the tutorship of Robert Wood, the Irish scholar and archæologist, who had just returned from the East with the materials for his well-known works on Palmyra and Balbeck. The pair were ill-suited as companions, and it was with difficulty that Wood was persuaded to continue the connection. The marbles and tables of Egyptian granite which, under this archæological control, were purchased at Rome by the young duke, remained in the original packing-cases till after their owner's death! But it is just possible that this continental tour exerted a most important, and at the time, little suspected, influence on the mind and career of the duke of Bridgewater. He may have inspected the Milan canal, or the much grander works of the same kind executed in the south of France, under the auspices of Louis XIV.; and, during this tour, the idea of his future enterprises may have occurred to him. Of direct evidence to this effect, however, there is not a tittle. On his return to England, he bought race-horses, and sometimes rode them himself, for the bulky man of after years was "a feather weight" when young. On attaining his majority, he took his seat in the house of peers, but neither then nor afterwards did he play any conspicuous part in politics. Had it not been for an accident, he might very possibly have passed through life as undistinguished as the majority of his contemporary fellow-peers whom oblivion has overtaken. Several versions are extant of the circumstances which drove the duke of Bridgewater from the dissipation of London and the sports of Newmarket, to the comparative solitude of his old manor-house at Worsley. The most authentic version is the following:—When the duke attained his majority, of the two celebrated English belles of the middle of the eighteenth century, the beautiful sisters Gunning, one was married to Lord Coventry, the other was the widow of the duke of Hamilton. To the lovely widow the enamoured duke offered another ducal coronet, and the offer was accepted. The preliminaries of the marriage were being adjusted, when the duke himself interposed an obstacle. Rumour had been busy with the fair fame of Lady Coventry, and the duke of Bridgewater insisted on a discontinuance of the natural intimacy between his intended bride and her sister. The duchess of Hamilton refused; the duke of Bridgewater broke off the match; and soon afterwards the rejected fair one married the heir to the dukedom of Argyle, and became, in due time, its duchess. The uneducated, horse-racing duke, felt like the poetic and sensitive hero of a modern novel. The result of his disappointment, however, was peculiar. He not only abandoned society, forswore the company of the fair sex, and betook himself to his Lancashire estates, but he devoted himself for life to the most useful, but most unsentimental occupation of canal-making. Just when the duchess of Hamilton was married to Colonel Campbell, the duke of Bridgewater's first canal act received the royal assent, March, 1759. It is an epoch in the history of the great expansion of British industrialism in the eighteenth century. It preceded by ten years the grant of Arkwright's first patent, and by more than a year Watt's earliest experiments on the force of steam. The canal system of Great Britain, the precursor of its railway system, owes its prime development to the pride or sisterly affection of a beautiful duchess.
The engineering peculiarities and difficulties connected with the duke of Bridgewater's parent canal, will fall more properly to be considered in the biography of his great assistant.—(See Brindley.) But no estimate, however high, of the genius, energy, and perseverance of Brindley, can detract from the merits of the duke of Bridgewater, as the planner of the first English canal, and upholder of the novel enterprise amid the most trying difficulties. An attempt has been made to deprive the duke of the credit of originating the first English canal, on the strength of an act of parliament, obtained by his father and others in 1737, for rendering Worsley brook navigable, and on the ground that the Sankey navigation act was obtained in 1755, and carried out by 1760. The conversion of an unnavigable into a navigable stream is not the construction of a canal, and the claim put forth on behalf of the first duke of Bridgewater is clearly untenable. In the case of the Sankey navigation, the so-called canal ran parallel with the bed of the stream which fed it, and as closely as possible to which it was constructed. Very different was the duke of Bridgewater's first canal from Worsley to Manchester, cut not only through the dry land, and not parallel to the course of any stream, but actually carried over the navigable Irwell by the famous Barton aqueduct. The duke's sole coadjutors were his steward, John Gilbert (brother to the founder of the Gilbert unions), and Brindley, who, in all probability, was introduced by Gilbert to the duke. The act was obtained in 1759; the Barton aqueduct was opened in 1761—a seemingly short interval of two years, but one of trying difficulty to the projector. Lancashire looked with incredulity on the whole enterprise, and at one time the duke's credit was so low that he could not get his bill for £500 cashed in Liverpool;—Gilbert had to ride about in the neighbouring districts and borrow from the farmers such small sums as they would lend. The duke's estates were extensive but encumbered, and his Worsley establishment was reduced to the very lowest scale. He lived to reap his reward even in a pecuniary sense. He constructed thirty-six miles of successful and lucrative canals. The despised projector of the Liverpool financiers could afterwards subscribe £100,000 to the loyalty loan, and return his income to the property-tax commissioners at £110,000 per annum. Nor must it be supposed that his share in the great enterprise was confined to the supply of capital and to the encouragement of others. In some curious pieces printed by Francis, last earl of Bridgewater (the testator of the Bridgewater Treatises), there are related several authentic anecdotes, which prove that the duke, even in matters of detail, occasionally over-ruled Brindley, and that his suggested alterations were successful. More than twenty years after Brindley's death, between 1796 and 1799, and in his own latest years, the duke is represented as indefatigable in improving, or trying to improve, a system with the actual results of which he might well have been content. During the period referred to, and before Bell and Fulton had applied the steam paddle-wheel to navigation, the duke of Bridgewater, at considerable expense of time, trouble, and money, tried (but unsuccessfully) the experiment of the steam-tug on the Worsley canal. He died of a cold, which had deepened into influenza, on the 8th of March, 1803, in his sixty-eighth year, at his mansion in London, on the site of which now stands the magnificent Bridgewater house, built by the late earl of Ellesmere, the duke's principal heir. In person the duke of Bridgewater was, latterly, large and unwieldy, indifferent to his dress, which was uniformly a suit of brown, somewhat similar to that of Dr. Johnson. In his habits he was simple and economical, smoking much but drinking little. His talk was chiefly of canals, and he had a marked aversion to the use of the pen. By his dependents, in spite of his rough exterior and abrupt manners, he was much liked for his familiarity of intercourse and generosity of conduct. It is somewhat singular, that though he displayed a marked aversion to the ornamental when divorced from the useful, and once reproved a labourer who, during his absence from Worsley, had planted some flowers, which he rooted up with his stick, yet he amassed the splendid collection of pictures now preserved in Bridgewater house, and valued, when he died, at £150,000.—(Quarterly Review for March, 1844: Art., "Aqueducts and Canals," reprinted in "Essays by the late Earl of Ellesmere," London, 1858; Letters of the Hon. Francis Egerton, afterwards Earl of Bridgewater, Paris, 1819; Gentleman's Magazine and Annual Register for 1803, &c.)—F. E.
BRIDGEWATER, John. See Aquapontanus.
BRIE, Jehan de, a shepherd of Brie in France, who composed, by order of Charles V., a work entitled "Le vray regime et gouvernement des bergers et bergères," &c., 1542.
BRIENNE, the name of an ancient and illustrious French family, the following members of which deserve mention:—Jean, count of Brienne, married in 1209, Marie, daughter of Conrad of Montferrat, and was crowned king of Jerusalem. For awhile he made war successfully against the Saracens, but was at length obliged to place himself for protection in the hands of the Emperor Frederic II., to whom he gave his daughter in marriage. In the quarrels of the emperor with the pope, he took part with the latter. In 1229 the French barons conferred on him the crown of Constantinople, which, in spite of repeated invasions of Greeks and Bulgarians, he wore till his death in 1237.—Raoul de Brienne, count of Eu, constable of France, and a distinguished warrior under Phillip of Valois, killed at a tournament at Paris in 1344. In 1340 he successfully defended Tournay against an army of 20,000 English.—Raoul II. de Brienne, count of Eu, succeeded to the post of constable on the death of his father. He served in the English wars, especially in Normandy, where, having allowed himself to be drawn into an
