“Liverpool Steamboat.—On Wednesday last, about noon, the public curiosity was considerably excited by the arrival of the first steamboat ever seen in our river. She came from the Clyde, and in her passage called at Ramsay, in the Isle of Man, which place she left early on the same morning. We believe she is intended to ply between this port and Runcorn, or even occasionally as far as Warrington. Her cabin will contain about one hundred passengers.” This is one of the most tantalising paragraphs ever printed. If “the public curiosity was considerably excited,” the reporter certainly took no pains to gratify it. The name of the vessel is not given, nor any particulars of her dimensions, or of her power and speed. The daring mariners who navigated her are nameless, and the incidents of this pioneer voyage are left unrecorded. “The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.” Fortunately we are able, from other sources, to gather some idea of the size and appearance of the vessel, and of the impression she made on the minds of the spectators. She was presumably one of the three steamers built on the Clyde in 1813, as competitors against the COMET, for passengers between Glasgow and Greenock; the other two were the ARGYLE and the INDUSTRY. There was only a difference of five feet between the smallest and the largest of these three steamers, so that a description of the ARGYLE will answer for the others as well. The ARGYLE was a packet steamer of 70 tons register, measuring in her keel 79 feet, with 16 feet beam, paddle wheels 9 feet in diameter, and engines 14 h.p. Her smoke was carried off by a funnel, which also did duty as a mast, being rigged with a large square sail. A gallery, upon which the cabin windows opened, projected so as to form a continuous deck, interrupted only by the paddle boxes, an arrangement which had the further effect of making the vessel appear larger than she really was. On the outside of the gallery eighteen large port holes were painted, which, with the two she displayed upon her stern, made the ARGYLE look so formidable to those to whom a steamer was a novelty, that it was stated in a Committee of the House of Commons, by several naval officers, that if they had met her at sea they would have endeavoured to reconnoitre before attempting to bring her to. After plying for twelve months between Glasgow and Greenock, the ARGYLE was sold to a London firm, who changed her name to the THAMES. In consequence of this change of ownership, this vessel made one of the most remarkable voyages ever accomplished by any steamer. An interesting narrative of the voyage, from which these particulars are taken, was published in “Chambers’ Journal” on the 25th April, 1857.