The mediaeval castle moat and drawbridge have, indeed, been transferred
from the actual world to that of fiction, history, and art, except where
preserved as memorials of antiquity; but the civil importance which from
the dawn of civilization attached to the bridge is as patent to-day as
when a Roman emperor, a feudal lord, or a monastic procession went forth
to celebrate or consecrate its advent or completion; in evidence
whereof, we have the appropriate function which made permanently
memorable the late visit of Victoria's son to her American realms, in
his inauguration of the magnificent bridge bearing her name, which is
thrown across the St. Lawrence for a distance of only sixty yards less
than two English miles,--the greatest tubular bridge in the world. When
Prince Albert, amid the cheers of a multitude and the grand cadence of
the national anthem, finished the Victoria Bridge by giving three blows
with a mallet to the last rivet in the central tube, he celebrated one
of the oldest, though vastly advanced, triumphs of the arts of peace,
which ally the rights of the people and the good of human society to the
representatives of law and polity.
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