The Victorian Court had begun to encourage science before Darwin's great book was published. In 1847 the Prince Consort became Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and in this capacity he was naturally brought into official and friendly relations with Dr Whewell, then Master of Trinity, as well as with other English leaders of scientific thought. The growing success of the British Association after its inaugural congress had been held, is not unjustly connected with the Prince's name. The idea of an annual parliament of learning was, like that of the Great Exhibition itself, not of English origin. Even in Germany, where the first trial of it had been made, prosperity had been gradual. At Halle, Frankfort, Dresden, and Munich, notwithstanding the personal distinction of its chief promoter Professor Oken, and its encouragement by many of the enlightened Kinglets who then divided the rule of the Fatherland, during the second decade of the century when the enterprise began, its most noticeable meeting does not seem to have numbered more than from 200 to 400. At Leipsic in 1822, the attendance was barely two score; six years later in Berlin, it amounted to 464. Before that assemblage probably had much impressed the young Prince Albert, it had stimulated the most distinguished representatives of scientific thought in England. Sir David Brewster, Sir John Herschel, Sir Humphry Davy based, upon the German example, an appeal to the English Government. The decline of arts and science in this country was attributed to their total neglect by the State, to the exclusion of men eminent in either of these departments from the titular decorations of the country, and to the heavy exactions from scientific inventors imposed by the fees payable under the patent law. More than two or three decades of the Victorian age had passed before art, science, and letters began to receive the State recognition now firmly acknowledged as their due. Both Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay had served in Parliament or in office fifteen years before they were ennobled.[77] Tennyson was the first English poet raised to the peerage who knew no politics save those of patriotism; to the same epoch, too, belongs a like honour bestowed upon three men of science at successive intervals:--now a physician, Playfair, now the physicist, Lord Kelvin, and again the latest, and to not a few the most welcome and significant of all, the inventor of the antiseptic treatment which has saved so many lives and limbs, who will henceforth be known as Lord Lister.