At an earlier stage we saw that the cross-channel steamship service owed its inauguration almost exclusively to that shrewd Scotsman, Napier, who, after devoting a great amount of patient study to the subject, evolved the _Rob Roy_. But we must not omit to give credit also to others whose work in this connection has been of such historic importance. From about the second decade of the eighteenth century there had been a service between Holyhead and Dublin, carried on by means of sailing packets, as there was, indeed, between Scotland and Ireland, as well as England and the Continent. Then had come the first steam service when the _Talbot_, of 156 tons, built in 1818 at Port Glasgow, for David Napier, began running in the following year between Holyhead and Dublin. In 1819, also, was inaugurated the Liverpool and Dublin service, and in 1823 one of the oldest steamship companies still in existence, the Dublin Steam Packet Company, was formed. It must be recollected that the journey between London and Dublin was a long and tedious one, for there was no railway, and considerable sums of money were expended in order to improve the road between Holyhead and the English capital. The sailing packets took on the average about twenty hours to cross the Irish Channel. The _Royal William_, already alluded to when we discussed the first Atlantic steamers, was one of the early steamships of this City of Dublin fleet. In 1836, when George Stephenson proposed the construction of the Chester and Holyhead Railway, he intended that the company should also provide ships between the latter port and Ireland, but the various steamship companies opposed this until 1848. The London to Liverpool railway was opened in 1838, and so, since the Liverpool to Dublin route was the quickest way to get from London to Ireland, Holyhead was given the cold shoulder for the next ten years. But when the continuous railway was opened between London and Holyhead, the popularity of the Welsh port returned, and the directors and principal shareholders of the Chester and Holyhead Company, who had formed themselves into a small independent company, ordered four new vessels, the _Cambria_, the _Anglia_, the _Hibernia_, and the _Scotia_. Of these the first is illustrated herewith. These ships were 207 feet long, 26 feet wide, and 14 feet deep, with a draught of 8 feet 10 inches. They had a gross tonnage of 589, carried 535 passengers, and possessed the remarkable speed of 14 knots. Instead of the slow passages of the old sailing packets these four ships lowered the average voyage to 3 hours 34 minutes. In 1859 this Chester-Holyhead railway was amalgamated with the London and North Western Railway, and in 1863 the latter introduced a new type of craft, with the same speed as before, but of 700 tons. Both a day and a night service were presently instituted, and this service has continued to be one of the most efficient and the fastest of all the cross-channel ferries from this country.