vni PBEFACE. 



memorials It is surely worth writing; and 



if the task be not soon accomplished, the materials 

 requisite for its complete execution will have disappeared 

 beyond recall. The real value of such records the 

 place due to their objects in the national annals has 

 hitherto been little regarded. Professed historians of 

 the old school overlook them with dignified contempt ; 

 more philosophical moderns at best admit them here and 

 there to a summary notice made up of dry statistical 

 matter, that reads but tamely among reports of party 

 struggles and foreign disputes of the vanities of courts 

 and the achievements of armies. Our purpose here is 

 to vindicate the claims of the subject and to show what 

 part of it may well be preserved for the instruction of 

 future times." 



The only attempt made to work out the literary design 

 so ably sketched in the Athenceum, was by Mr. Francis, 

 in his ' History of the English Railway,' which, though 

 an exceedingly graphic resume of the early history of 

 railways, failed in the main point of biographic interest 

 in connection with the subject. A series of summary 

 articles on the life and works of George Stephenson was 

 also published by Mr. Hyde Clarke, C.E., in the ' Civil 

 Engineer and Architect's Journal ;' but, though valuable 

 as a collection of facts and dates, it was not a biography, 

 and the Life of George Stephenson, therefore, remained 

 to be written. 



To ascertain Robert Stephenson' s views as to a Life 

 of his father, the author called upon him at his office in 

 Great George Street in March, 1851 ; Mr. Kitsort having 

 previously written him on the subject. Mr. Stephenson 

 then said that a Memoir of his father had been fre- 



