This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically placed the Queen's husband in the van of the new movement for the encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince's opportunities of good were increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate, as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day with the Sovereign or the Sovereign's social and ceremonial vicegerents.
Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman, for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the statesman's country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen's eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force, which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.