that time it chanced that the celebrated actor, John Kemble, was
fulfilling an engagement at Liverpool with his daughter, since known as
Mrs. Frances Kemble Butler. The extraordinary social advantages the
Kemble family enjoyed gave both father and daughter opportunities such as
seldom come in the way of ordinary mortals. For the time being they
were, in fact, the lions of the stage, just as George Stephenson was the
lion of the new railroad. As was most natural the three lions were
brought together. The young actress has since published her impressions,
jotted down at the time, of the old engineer. Her account of a ride side
by side with George Stephenson, on the seat of his locomotive, over the
as yet unopened road, is one of the most interesting and life-like
records we have of the man and the enterprise. Perhaps it is the most
interesting. The introduction is Mrs. Kemble's own, and written
forty-six years after the experience:--

"While we were acting at Liverpool, an experimental trip was proposed
upon the line of railway which was being constructed between Liverpool
and Manchester, the first mesh of that amazing iron net which now covers
the whole surface of England, and all civilized portions of the earth.
The Liverpool merchants, whose far-sighted self-interest prompted to wise
liberality, had accepted the risk of George Stephenson's magnificent
experiment, which the committee of inquiry of the House of Commons had
rejected for the Government. These men, of less intellectual culture
than the Parliament members, had the adventurous imagination proper to
great speculators, which is the poetry of the counting house and wharf,
and were better able to receive the enthusiastic infection of the great
projector's sanguine hope than the Westminster committee. They were
exultant and triumphant at the near completion of the work, though, of
course, not without some misgivings as to the eventual success of the
stupendous enterprise. My father knew several of the gentlemen most
deeply interested in the undertaking, and Stephenson having proposed a
trial trip as far as the fifteen-mile viaduct, they, with infinite
kindness, invited him and permitted me to accompany them: allowing me,
moreover, the place which I felt to be one of supreme honour, by the side
of Stephenson. All that wonderful history, as much more interesting than
a romance as truth is stranger than fiction, which Mr. Smiles's biography
of the project