HISTORY OF

whether it was intended for the purposes of inland navigation, it is im-possible that I should determine, different authors having assigned to itdifferent uses ; hut as it is cut from the river Nyne, a little below Peter-borough, into the river Witham, three miles below Lincoln, there isgreat reason to suppose that it was intended to join those two rivers. Itis probably a work of the Romans, and was forty miles in length,though it is now almost silled up, and must have been very deep. Someauthors, however, suppose it to have been cut by the Danes. Moretonwill have it to have been made under the emperor Domitian ; andurns and medals have been dug up near it, which seem to confirm thisopinion.

The canal for supplying London with water, commonly called theNew River , was projected and begun by Mr. (afterwards Sir Hugh)Middletoft in the year 1608, and finished in five years. This canalbegins near Ware in Hertfordshire, and takes a course of sixty milesbefore it reaches the grand cistern at Islington, which supplies theseveral pipes that convey the water to the city and parts adjacent. Insome places it is thirty feet deep ; and near Hornsey it was formerlyconveyed over a valley, between two hills, by means of a woodentrough supported by wooden props, and about twenty-three feet inheight ; but of late years the course has been changed, and the riverembanked. In other places, meandering round hillocks and risinggrounds, it is confined on one side by the solid hill, and on the other bylarge thick banks, piled, or large mounds.

The different rivers which have been made navigable by art above thetide-ways, do not come within my plan ; the first canal, therefore,which claims attention as being the first public work of the kind exe-cuted in England, although completed at the expence of a private indi-vidual, is that cut by his Grace the Duke of Bridgewater, in whosepraise it would be unpardonable to be silent, who, at an age too oftenspent in dissipation by our young nobility, applied his attention to use-ful