Lord Yarborough has done for Lincolnshire what the Duke of Bridgwater did for Lancashire; and, like the Duke, he has been fortunate in having for engineering advisers gentlemen capable of appreciating the national importance of the task they undertook.  It is not a mere dock or railway that Messrs. Fowler and Rendel have laid out—­it is the foundation of a maritime colony, destined not only to attract, but to develop new sources of wealth for Lincolnshire and for England, as any one may see who consults a map, and observes the relative situation of Great Grimsby, the Baltic ports, and the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire.

For the sake of the future it may be well worth while to visit these great works.  It may be a pleasant recollection for the man who, in some ten or twenty years, beholds the docks crowded with steamers and coasters, and the railway busy in conveying seaborne cargoes, to recall the fact that he saw the infancy, if not the birth, of that teeming trade; for it is not to every man that it is given to behold the commencement of such a future as seems promised to gloomy, swampy Great Grimsby.

At Great Grimsby we are in a position to take a large choice of routes.  We may go back to London by Louth, famous for its church, spire, and comical coat of arms; {209} by Boston and Peterborough; or take our way through the ancient city of Lincoln to Nottingham and the Midland Counties, where the famous forest of Robin Hood and the Dukeries invite us to study woodland scenery and light-land farming; but on this occasion we shall make our way to Sheffield, over a line which calls for no especial remark—­the most noticeable station being East Retford, for the franchise of which Birmingham long and vainly strove.  What delay might have taken place in our political changes if the M.P.’s of East Retford had been transferred to Birmingham in 1826, it is curious to consider.

SHEFFIELD.

The approach to Sheffield from Lincolnshire is through a defile, and over a long lofty viaduct, which affords a full view of the beautiful amphitheatre of hills by which it is surrounded.

The town is situated in a valley, on five small streams—­one the “Sheaf,” giving the name of Sheffield, in the southern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, only six miles from Derbyshire.

The town is very ugly and gloomy; it is scarcely possible to say that there is a single good street, or an imposing or interesting public building,—­shops, warehouses and factories, and mean houses run zigzagging up and down the slopes of the tongues of land, or peninsulas, that extend into the rivers, or rather streamlets, of the Porter, the Riveling, the Loxley, the Sheaf, and the Don.  Almost all the merchants and manufacturers reside in the suburbs, in villas built of white stone on terraces commanding a lovely prospect.