Cysylltau, which is one thousand feet long, and crosses the vale of Llangollen at a height of one hundred and twenty-one feet above the Dee. The former of those aqueducts is of masonry, and was the first bridge in which was introduced the great improvement afterwards extensively practised by Telford and other engineers, of building the piers and spandrils hollow; the latter was the first aqueduct ever made of cast-iron. He was afterwards employed as engineer of many great works, especially harbours, roads, and canals, amongst which may be mentioned the Highland roads and bridges, the Lanarkshire roads, the Holyhead road, many harbours on the east coast of Scotland; the Caledonian canal, the Gotha canal in Sweden, and the new Harecastle tunnel on the Grand Trunk canal; the St. Katharine's docks; the stone bridges over the Severn at Gloucester, over the Water of Leith at the Dean, near Edinburgh, over the Clyde at Glasgow harbour, over the Glen of the Mouss Water at Cartland Craigs, and many others; the cast-iron bridges over the Severn at Buildwas and Tewkesbury, over the Spey at Craigellachie, and others. His greatest and most truly original work was the renowned suspension bridge over the Menai Straits, the first and still unsurpassed example of its class, and a model not only of strength but of beauty. Its roadway is suspended at a height of one hundred feet above the water, for a span of five hundred and fifty feet, by sixteen chains, which are supported by two hollow piers of one hundred and fifty-three feet high. It was designed in 1818, and finished in 1826. He was one of the founders of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was elected its first president in 1820, and held that office till his death. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society. His life and writings, the latter consisting chiefly of engineering reports, in a collected form, have been published, but are now very scarce. The engineering works of Telford are marked by a very rare combination of qualities; for they show not only the practical skill and scientific knowledge of a consummate engineer, but the taste of an artist, and some traces also of the picturesque imagination of a poet. His character was frank, hearty, and generous; he showed strong affection for his country and his early friends. As long as his mother lived he paid her visits from time to time in Eskdale. He realized a competent but not a large fortune, and, dying a bachelor and childless, left much of it to found libraries for the use of the working people of his native valley.—(Smiles' Lives of the Engineers, vol. ii.)—W. J. M. R.
TELL, William, the national hero of Switzerland, was, according to tradition, born at Bürglen, near Altorf in the canton of Uri, where at the beginning of the fourteenth century he occupied a farm belonging to a convent at Zürich. The following is the legend of Tell, as it figures in modern Swiss histories: When Albert I. of Austria became emperor of Germany in 1298, one of his efforts was to incorporate free Switzerland with his hereditary estates, and among the cantons where he had the least right to claim supremacy were Uri, Schwytz, and Unterwalden. Into these he sent bailiffs (Vogte) who levied taxes, exacted submission, and treated the inhabitants as if they were the subjects of Austria. To resist this tyranny the leading men of these cantons, at a meeting on the Rütli, 7th November, 1307, formed a league, at the head of which were Walter Fürst, whose daughter Tell had married, Werner Stauffacher, and Arnold von Melchthal. Gessler, the bailiff of Albert I. at Küssnacht, and one of the chief oppressors of the Switzers, fixed on a pole in the market-place of Altorf a hat, to which, as a symbol of Austrian supremacy, every passer-by was ordered to make obeisance. Some days after the meeting on the Rütli, Tell refused to pay this hat the homage enjoined, on which he was seized, with his little boy who accompanied him, and brought before Gessler. Tell was a famous marksman, and to punish him Gessler placed an apple on the head of his son, and stationed the lad at a distance from his father, to whom was handed a bow and one arrow, and who was ordered to shoot at the apple on his child's head. If he missed the apple he was threatened with death. Tell procured a second arrow, and hit the apple at the first shot. Being asked by Gessler why he had a second arrow, he replied that it was meant for his oppressor if the first one had struck his child. Gessler, enraged, seized Tell, bound him, and carried him on board a boat in which he himself was sailing over the Walstädt Lake to his castle of Küssnacht, in the dungeon of which he intended to immure his prisoner. On their way across the lake they were overtaken by a violent storm, and as Tell was known to be not only a skilful boatman, but familiar with the lake, his fetters were taken off and the conduct of the boat was committed to him. He guided it safely to the shore, when, seizing his bow, he leapt on to a projecting ledge of rock, still called by his name, pushed back the boat with his foot, and escaped among the mountains towards Küssnacht. Lying in wait for Gessler in a defile through which he knew that the tyrant must pass, when he came up Tell shot him through the heart with the second arrow. The death of Gessler was the signal for an outbreak which deepened into a war that lasted for nearly two centuries, and ended in the liberation of Switzerland. Such is the legend of William Tell, as told in the histories of Tschudi and Johannes Müller, and with embellishments in the noble drama of Schiller. It is added that Tell was present at the battle of Morgarten, and was drowned in the year 1350, in the river Schächen, according to an account which Uhland has versified in a ballad, while endeavouring to save a child from drowning. Doubts of the truth of the legend of Tell began to be expressed early in the seventeenth century, and a controversy on the subject has been continued up to our own day. The sceptics laid great stress on the undoubted fact that a story similar to that of Tell and the apple had been told in Saxo Grammaticus and in the Icelandic sagas. The whole subject has been treated exhaustively, yet lucidly and briefly, in Die Sage vom Tell aufs Neue kritisch untersucht, von Dr. Ludwig Haüsser; eine von der philosophischen Facultät der Universität Heidelberg gekrönte Preisschrift, Heidelberg, 1840. Dr. Haüsser contents himself with admitting that a person of the name of Tell existed, testimony having been borne to that fact in 1388 by one hundred and fourteen persons belonging to the canton of Uri who had known him. But he denies that there is the slightest historic ground for belief in any of the other items of Tell's romantic history. He justifies that denial by referring to the silence on Tell's name and story of such early chroniclers as Konrad Justinger, a native of Berne, who in 1420 was commissioned by the authorities of his canton to write a chronicle; and to that of Johannes von Winterthur, another chronicler, who was at school at the time of the battle of Morgarten. While these early and authentic narrators know nothing of Tell, the first mention of his exploits occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who lived and wrote so late as the second half of the fifteenth century. To Haüsser's work the reader desirous of further information is referred.—F. E.
TELLER, Wilhelm Abraham, one of the German rationalists of last century, was born in Leipsic in 1734, and was educated in the university of that city. Ernesti was one of his professors, and interested himself much in his success in life. He published his first work in 1755, a dissertation, "De studio religionis pace religiosa temperato." Interesting himself chiefly in critical studies, he published in 1756 a Latin translation of Kennicott's Dissertation on the state of the Hebrew Text. In 1761 he was appointed by the help of Ernesti to a theological chair at Helmstadt, coupled with a general superintendentship. Here he continued till 1767 when he was made provost of Cologne on the Spree, and a member of the supreme consistory of the Prussian church, in which post he continued till his death in 1804. His works are only important as marking successive stages in the development of German rationalism. In 1764 appeared his "Manual of the Christian Faith;" in 1767 his "Dictionary of the New Testament," which passed through six editions; and in 1792 his "Religion of the more advanced or perfect," in which his rationalism reached its last stage. In this work he pleads for the resolution of religion into plain every-day morality, and condemns the union of church and state as the chief obstacle in the way of this resolution. The consistory was much influenced in its decisions by his spirit and principles, and even, in 1798, agreed to admit Jews into the church upon their simply consenting to be baptized with the formula, "I baptize thee into the confession of Christ, the founder of a more spiritual and happy religion than that of the community to which thou hast belonged hitherto."—P. L.
TELLEZ, Balthezar, a learned Portuguese jesuit, born in 1595; died in 1675. He taught belles-lettres and philosophy for forty years, and became provincial of his order in Portugal. He wrote a "Compendium of Philosophy;" a "Chronicle of the Society of Jesus," Lisbon, 1645-48; and a "History of Ethiopia," or rather of the jesuit missions in that country.—F. M. W.
TELLEZ, Gabriel, better known by his adopted name of Tirso de Molina, was born at Madrid, and entered the church in 1613. He died in the convent of Soria, of which he was the
