The Sun.
London, England, 1860-11-27 00:00:00

PROFESSOR .4NDEI SON IN AMERICA.

The following letter from " The Wizard of the North,"
we extract from the Aberdeen Herald 1—
" Philadelphia, Oct. 30, 1860.
" Sint,—Moot materially has the visit of the Prince of
Wales to this country strengthened the entente cordiale
between Great Britain and the United States. His pre-
sence on this soil has done more to obliterate from Ameri-
can minds the rancour which had its birth at Lexington
and Concord than could have been effected by any diplo-
macy, any amount of oratory, or by books innumerable.
Coming to these shores as heir to the throne of England and
son of Queen 'Victoria—a name which all Americans re-
spect—Prince Albert Edward has done the work of years
in a tour of three months. The boom of the cannon fired
on Bunker Hill the 19th of April, 1775, has kept up its
echoes to the present time. Those echoes have never rolled
away into silence until the last few days. In the history
of America few subjects will be more the theme of elo-
quently imaginative pens, and scarcely will another picture
stand out in bolder relief on the panoramic canvas of her
country's story than the meeting of the Prince and the Pre-
sident at the grave of Washington. The Americans inter-
pret that act of the Prince as the very highest compliment
he could have paid their country. To stand with head un-
covered in view of the tomb of him who defied Lord Howe
and his 30,000 troops, and to whom Lord Cornwallis capi-
tulated at Yorktown, virtually yielding up the sceptre of
America to her own people, was doing something which the
sensitive excitable American can accept as an act of homage
to his country, surpassing any political professions and
better far than any alliance negotiated by diplomatic artists.
Every newspaper that I saw seemed to accept the event as a
happy augury of the good fellowship for all time to come of
John Bull and Brother Jonathan ; and of such importance
has the Government deemed it to be, that one of the best
historical painters in this country has been commissioned
to represent it upon canvas, that it may be preserved in the
memory of Americans for all time to come.
While the visit of the Prince of Wales has had its grandly
historical importance, it has, of course, presented some very
ludicrous features. The manner in which the doings of his
Royal Highness has been chronicled daily in the newspapers,
has proved amusing in the extreme. Everything has been
warranted and deemed of sufficient importance to be printed
in the columns of the morning journals. Not merely what
the Prince said and did, but even when he had his hair cut,
how he was shampooed, and which way he lighted his cigar,
I have frequently seen paragraphs in the papers of the
United States, with reference to the news in the Court
Circular, of the London Times, and Morning Post, ridicu-
ling the absurdity of chronicling when her Majesty walked
on the slopes at Windsor, and when the Royal Family took
an airing, but the Court Circular is newwhere, and Jenkins
of the Morning Post is a most meagre writer in compa-
rison with the reporters of the American papers. To them
every incident, however trivial, connected with royalty
has been of the utmost importance, and every movement of
the Prince as much a matter for careful record as Caesar
thoughtthe events of his Gallic invasion to be, or as Napier
valued the incidents of the Peninsular war. The New York
Herald scorns the reports published in the Tithes as not
being sufficiently minute, and eulogises in its own eulo •
gistic way the accuracy of its own reporting corps,
who were observant enough to notice when the Prince
placed his hat on his head at an angle of 80 deg., and
when he deflected it to an angle of 81 deg.
The ball given to his Royal Highness in Boston seems to
have passed off with very great eclat. The Academy of
Music there is one of the theatres in which I have recently
peformed, and I can vouch for its being one of the most
magnificent and most commodious. The attendance was
large and the receipts very great. There is scarcely in all
Boston a gentleman more liked and respected than Colonel
Chickering, the pianoforte maker, and his lady was one of the
happy few on whom the Prince conferred the honour of se-
lection as a partner. Won't Col. Chickering's pianos sell
now! His "Prince of Wales' Grand" will be in every
drawing-room throughout New England.
In Boston, more so than in New York and cities south of
that, the presence of tho Prince was made the occasion of
general festivity. It was made so to such an extent, indeed,
that the tradesmen closed all their shops to join in the gene-
ral frolic ; not but what they could well afford to do so, for
the amount of money put in circulation by the Prince's visit
must have been enormous. Tailors, milliners, and dress-
makers must have reaped a harvest, the like of which does
not live in their remembrance. One of ray friends—a
Scotchinan, too—Mr. William Bogle, the inventor of the
hyperian fluid, took four thousand dollars for headdresses
alone, irrespective of all the cosmetics and pomatums he
sold for the occasion. Boston had good right to delight in
the Prince, and from that which I have heard, I believe
that the Prince delighted in Boston. Amongst other places
which he was taken to visit was Bunker-hill, where stands
the tall monument of Quincy granite in the centre of the
grounds included within the breastworks of the old redoubt
on Breed's-hill, so famous in the commencement of the
great war of independence. It was certainly somewhat deli-
cate matter to invite his Royal Highness to visit a spot, the
recollections associated with which are certainly none of
those 'likely to be pleasant to a descendant of the Third
George. But time has buried the hatchet, and good-fel-
lowship has made flowers to grow over the embedded can-
non-balls. I de not know whether the Prince ascended
the monument and smoked his cigar as a calumet of peace
on the summit, but he should hays done so, that he might
have enjoyed the glorious view from each of the four look-
out places; a view which has been said is " worth a thou-
sand miles of travel to see." Boston and its magnificent
harbour, Cambridge with its fine old university, and Long-
fellow's delightful residence ; Dorchester Heights, charm-
ing Jamaica Plains, the far-distant peaks of the White
Mountains of New Hampshire, the romantic peninsula of
Nahant, and the pleasantly situated towns of Salem and
Lynn. Beneath and more adjacent, the ground on which
Gage, aid Howe, and Clinton fought, the colonists who
were led by the American generals Pomeroy and Warren
—the latter an apothecary turned soldier, who displayed
the most exalted patriotism and gallantry, and whose mo-
nument is one of the fairest preserved at Bunker Hill.
The Bostonians escorted the Prince to Bunker Hill, but the
Philadelphians did not take him to see Independence Hall.
Whether his Royal Highness knew of there being such a
place within five hundred yards of where he was lodging,
whether ho felt a disinclination to visit, or whether from
motives of delicacy the civic authorities refrained from in-
♦iting hint, I canuot tell. It has been the subject of much
debate and conjecture in the city. Certainly it would have
been a sight worth seeing. to have beheld the room in
which the "Declaration of Independence" was passed by
Congress, on the 4th of July, 1776; and in which John
Hancock, after signing, throw down his pen, exclaiming—
" There I John Bull can read my name without spectacles,
and may now double his reward for my head; that is my
defiance." A find bold signature it is, the boldest of all on
the framed paperwhich hangs up to public gaze on the wall
of the room. There is a chair, too, in that room which I
think the Prince would have liked to have seen, for the
mahogany of it is from the walls of the house in which Co •
lumbus lived, and the first house built by Europeans on
American soil, while other portions of the same chair are
formed out of the wood of the tree under which Penn signed
his treaty with the Indians, and the wood also of that tree
which overshadowed the home, of Washington.
Whatever his Royal Highness did see must, however,
have impressed him strongly, and, to judge by his admis-
sions, most favourably. I sincerely hope that he has formed
as good an opinion of this country as America has farmed
of him, and that the bond of brotherhood between Britain
and the United States, which his visit has done so much to
strengthen, may never be broken. Americans were proud
of receiving the representative of the race from which they
have nearly all sprung. In honouring England through
the son of her Queen they have felt, to use the poet's words,
that—

We speak the tongue that Shakspere spoke,
The faith and morale hold that Milton held ; •
In everything we are sprung from Earth's best blood—
Have virtues manifold.

The Prince has sailed from Portland. The excitement oc-
casioled by his visit is over. Sensational as the people of
America aro, no excitement lasts very long, and they re-
quire that one should rapidly follow another. The grea
one now, the excitement of all excitements to the United
States citizens, is the Presidental election. Tuesday next,
November 6, will be an eventful day, and every day which
precedes it will be a day of unrest to all who dabble in

politics; and, in America, who does not? On the Gth of
Noveraber will be settled the important question whe-
ther the next Government is to be Republican or
Democratic whether Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, is
to reign at 'Washington for the next four years, •r
whether the ruler there shall be John Bull, Judge Douglas,
or the present Vice-President, Mr. Breckenridge. Recent
events point strongly in the direction of Mr. Lincoln, and
indications of his being elected are so numerous that the
Neu, York Herald accepts his election as a conceded fact ;
at the same time, it prophecies that much disaster will be
the result. The Republicans, of whom Mr. Lincoln is the

representative, are opposed to the extension, if not to the ex-
istence of Slavery, and the Southern States are alarmed leas*

their slaveholding rights should be interfered with. From
some of them—Georgia and Virginia, for instance—threats

of secession from the Union, in the event of Mr. Lincoln's

election, have been promulgated in very strong phraseology.
But I do not anticipate that anything so serious will result.

That which is said before the election and that which is done

afterwards are usually two very different things ; and next
Tuesday will act like oil on the troubled waters, no matter
who may be uplifted to the Presidential chair. Meanwhile,
the streets are alive at night with torchlight processions,
bands of music, and every form of political demonstration.
In front of the hotels, some distinguished Democrats or
aapublicans nightly harangue the listening crowds, and