f Great Grimsby, that it evinced its
improved vitality by subscribing a larger sum to the Exhibition of Industry
than many towns of ten times its population and more than ten times its
wealth.

The execution of the railway and dock works, which will render Great Grimsby
even more important than Birkenhead, has been mainly due to the exertions of
the greatest landowner in the county, the Earl of Yarborough, who has wisely
comprehended the value of a close connexion between a purely agricultural and
manufacturing district.

His patriotic views have been ably seconded by Mr. John Fowler, the engineer
of the Manchester and Lincolnshire Railways, and Mr. James J. M. Rendel, the
engineer of these docks as well as of those at Birkenhead.

The Grimsby docks occupy thirty-seven acres, cut off from the sea. The work
was courageously undertaken, in the midst of the depression which followed
the railway panic, by Messrs. Thomas, Hutchins, & Co., contractors, and has
been carried through in an admirable manner, in the face of every kind of
difficulty, without an hour's delay. They will open in March next. The
first stone was laid by Prince Albert in May 1849, when he electrified the
audience at dinner by one of those bursts of eloquence with which the events
of the Great Exhibition have made us familiar. It was on the occasion of his
ride to Brocklesby that Lord Yarborough's tenantry rode out to meet the
Prince, and exhibited the finest farmers' cavalcade for men and horses in
England.

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