The descendants of the numerous family of George III. and Queen Charlotte, in the third generation, only numbered five princes and princesses. Apart from her German kindred, the Queen had only four cousins--her nearest English relations after her uncles and aunts. Of these the Crown Prince of Hanover, German born but English bred as Prince George of Cumberland, and long regarded as, in default of Princess Victoria, the heir to the crown, married at Hanover, on the 18th of February, Princess Mary of Saxe-Altenburg. The Crown Prince was then twenty-four years of age. Though he had no longer any prospect of succeeding to the throne of England, he was the heir to a considerable German kingdom. But the terrible misfortune which had cost him his eyesight did not terminate his hard struggle with fate. His father, whose ambition had been built upon his son from his birth, appeared to have more difficulty in submitting to the sore conditions of the Prince's loss than the Prince himself showed. By a curious self-deception, the King of Hanover never acknowledged his son's blindness, but persisted in treating him, and causing others to treat him, as if he saw. The Queen of Hanover, once a bone of contention at the English Court, and Queen Charlotte's _bete noire_, as the divorced wife of one of her two husbands prior to her third marriage with the Duke of Cumberland, had died two years before. It was desirable in every light that she should find a successor--a princess--to preside over the widowed Court, and be the mother to the future kings of Hanover, supposing Hanover had remained on the roll of the nations. A fitting choice was made, and the old King took care that the marriage should be celebrated with a splendour worthy of the grandson of a King of England. Twenty-four sovereigns and princes, among them the King of Prussia, graced the ceremony. The bride wore cloth of silver and a profusion of jewels, and whatever further troubles were in store for the blind bridegroom, whose manly fortitude and uprightness of character--albeit these qualities were not without their alloy of pride and obstinacy--won him the respect of his contemporaries, Providence blessed him on that February day with a good, bright, devoted wife. On the 25th of March, the Thames Tunnel, which at the time was fondly regarded as the very triumph of modern engineering, and a source of the greatest convenience to London, was opened for foot-passengers by a procession of dignitaries and eminent men, including in their ranks the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Inglis, Lord Lincoln, Joseph Hume, Messrs. Babbage and Faraday, &c. &c. The party descended by one staircase, shaft, and archway which carried them to Wapping, and, ascending again, returned by the other archway to Rotherhithe. Some of the Thames watermen hoisted black flags as a sign that they considered their craft doomed.