In the letters which the Prince sent to his father and others, during his stay at Brussels and elsewhere, immediately after his first visit to England, he made frequent reference to the general impressions thence derived, and especially to his young cousin. Of such allusions, this is a fair specimen:--"A few days ago I received a letter from aunt Kent, enclosing one from our cousin. She told me I was to communicate its contents to you, so I send it on with a translation of the English. The day before yesterday I received a second and yet kinder letter from my cousin, in which she thanks me for my good wishes on her birth-day. You may easily imagine that both these letters gave me great pleasure." And when the news of the death of King William and the accession of Victoria arrived, he informed his father, on the authority of his uncle Leopold, that the new reign had commenced most successfully (this, perhaps, in allusion to the anticipated attempt at a _coup d'etat_ by the Duke of Cumberland), that his cousin Victoria had shown astonishing self-possession, although English parties were violently excited, and that the Duchess of Kent had found strenuous support against "violent attacks in the newspapers." This last statement we have, however, good reasons for saying had reached the young Prince in a somewhat exaggerated form; we mean, so far as the "violence" of the attacks was concerned. To the Queen herself the Prince wrote a letter, consolatory in her bereavement, and congratulatory on her accession. This was the first letter which he sent her written in English. He prayed Heaven to assist her now that she was "Queen of the mightiest land in Europe," with the happiness of millions in her hand, and asked her "to think sometimes of her cousins in Bonn [where they were then pursuing their University studies], and to continue that kindness you favoured them with till now." [Sidenote: RUMOURS ABOUT MARRIAGE.] On the accession of the Queen, the rumour of her marriage with Prince Albert became ten times more prevalent. The judicious King Leopold thought it wise, for a time at least, to discourage this expectation, and to withdraw the attention of the English from the Prince. Hence it was that he counselled those journeys into Austria, South Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, in which we have already traced the steps of the Prince. This was chiefly dictated by the distracted state of parties in England, which the King of the Belgians thought it better to permit time to allay ere the matrimonial project was brought specifically forward. "United as all parties are," wrote Prince Albert to his father, from the inspiration of his uncle, "in high praise of the young Queen, the more do they seem to manoeuvre and intrigue with and against each other. On every side there is nothing but a network of cabals and intrigues, and parties are arrayed against each other in a most inexplicable manner."