For Mr. Morris, the staunch friend of William Edwards, there with due ceremony, breaking a bottle of wine upon the parapet, had named the bridge 'Pont-y-Pridd'—The Bridge of Beauty.
THE BRIDGE OF BEAUTY, 1755.
And when the loud acclaim had subsided, the speaker gave as a reason for the name, not alone the wondrous beauty of the structure, or the new features the self-trained builder had introduced into bridge-building, but that out of his failures he had built up an undoubted success, and out of seeming calamities built up another, if an unseen bridge, to span the turbulent River of Life and bear him securely across from this world to a better, the beautiful bridge of humble reliance on the Almighty Creator and Ruler of the universe.
FOOTNOTE:
[16] The largest is nine feet in diameter.
POSTSCRIPT.
From that day William Edwards' fame as a builder of bridges and smelting works was assured. But he could see defects in his Bridge of Beauty; the ascent to the centre was steep and toilsome, and although he was afterwards called upon to erect bridges, not only in Glamorganshire, but in Carmarthenshire and Brecknockshire, he built no more on the same model.