Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/20

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with new sensations of interest in the improvement and ornament of our country. … Telford is a most useful cicerone in London. He is so universally acquainted and so popular in his manners that he can introduce one to all kinds of novelty and all descriptions of interesting society.’ Campbell is said to have been staying with Telford at the Salopian when writing ‘Hohenlinden,’ and to have adopted ‘important emendations’ suggested by Telford (Smiles, p. 384). Telford became godfather to his eldest son, and bequeathed Campbell 500l. He left a legacy of the same amount to Southey, to whom it came very seasonably, and who said of Telford, ‘A man more heartily to be liked, more worthy to be esteemed and admired, I have never fallen in with.’ There is an agreeable account by Southey of a tour which he made with Telford in the highlands and far north of Scotland in 1819. He records in it the vivid impressions made on him by Telford's roads, bridges, and harbours, and by what was then completed of the Caledonian canal. Extracts from Southey's narrative were first printed by Dr. Smiles in his ‘Life of Telford.’ Southey's last contribution to the ‘Quarterly Review’ (March 1839) was a very genial and appreciative article on Telford's career and character. Southey's article was a review of an elaborate work which appeared in 1838, as the ‘Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer, written by himself, containing a Descriptive Narrative of his Professional Labours, with a Folio Atlas and Copper Plates, edited by John Rickman, one of his Executors, with a Preface, Supplement, Annotations, and Index.’ In this volume Telford's accounts of his various engineering enterprises, great and small, are ample and luminous. Rickman added biographical traits and anecdotes of Telford. The supplement contains many elucidations of his professional career and a few of his personal character, among the former being his reports to parliament, &c., and those of parliamentary commissioners under whose supervision some of the most important of his enterprises were executed. In one of the appendices his poem on ‘Eskdale’ is reprinted. There is also a copy of his will. ‘Some Account of the Inland Navigation of the County of Salop’ was contributed by Telford to Archdeacon Plymley's ‘General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire’ (London, 1802). He also wrote for Sir David Brewster's ‘Edinburgh Encyclopædia,’ to the production of which work he gave financial assistance, the articles on ‘Bridges,’ ‘Civil Architecture,’ and ‘Inland Navigation;’ in the first of these, presumably from his want of mathematical knowledge, he was assisted by A. Nimmo.

[The personal as distinguished from the professional autobiography of Telford given in the volume edited by Rickman is meagre, and ceases with his settlement at Shrewsbury. The one great authority for Telford's biography is Dr. Smiles's Life, 1st ed. 1861; 2nd ed. 1867 (to which all the references in the preceding article are made). Dr. Smiles threw much new and interesting light on Telford's personal character, as well as on his professional career, by publishing for the first time extracts from Telford's letters to his old schoolfellow in Eskdale, Andrew Little of Langholm. There is a valuable article by Sir David Brewster on Telford as an engineer in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ for October 1839. Telford as a road-maker is dealt with exhaustively in Sir Henry Parnell's Treatise on Roads, wherein the Principles on which Roads should be made are explained and illustrated by the Plans, Specifications, and Contracts made use of by Thomas Telford, Esq., London, 1833.]

F. E.

TELYNOG (1840-1865), Welsh poet. [See Evans, Thomas.]

TEMPEST, PIERCE (1653–1717), printseller, born at Tong, Yorkshire, in July 1653, was the sixth son of Henry Tempest of Tong by his wife, Mary Bushall, and brother of Sir John Tempest, first baronet. It is said that he was a pupil and assistant of Wenceslaus Hollar [q. v.], and some of the prints which bear his name as the publisher have been assumed to be his own work; but there is no actual evidence that he ever practised engraving. Establishing himself in the Strand as a book and print seller about 1680, Tempest issued some sets of plates of birds and beasts etched by Francis Place and John Griffier from drawings by Francis Barlow; a few mezzotint portraits by Place and others, chiefly of royal personages; and a translation of C. Ripa's ‘Iconologia,’ 1709. But he is best known by the celebrated ‘Cryes of the City of London,’ which he published in 1711, a series of seventy-four portraits, from drawings by Marcellus Laroon the elder [q. v.], of itinerant dealers and other remarkable characters who at that time frequented the streets of the metropolis; the plates were probably all engraved by John Savage (fl. 1690–1700) [q. v.], whose name appears upon one of them. Tempest died on 1 April 1717, and was buried at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, London. There is a mezzotint portrait of him by Place, after G. Heemskerk, with the motto ‘Cavete vobis principes,’ and the figure of a nonconformist minister in the ‘Cryes’ is said to represent him.