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William Herschel was descended from one of three brothers, whose Lutheran opinions made it expedient for them to quit Moravia early in the seventeenth century. Hans Herschel thereupon settled as a brewer at Pirna, in Saxony; his son Abraham rose to some repute as a landscape-gardener in the royal service at Dresden; and Abraham’s youngest son, Isaac, brought into the world with him, in 1707, an irresistible instinct and aptitude for music. Having studied at Berlin, he made his way in 1731 to Hanover, where he was immediately appointed oboist in the band of the Hanoverian Guard. A year later he married Anna Ilse Moritzen, by whom he had ten children. The fourth of these, Frederick William, known to fame as William Herschel, was born November 15th, 1738.

His brilliant faculties quickly displayed themselves. At the garrison-school he easily distanced his brother Jacob, his senior by four years, and learned besides, privately, whatever French and mathematics the master could teach him. He showed also a pronounced talent for music, and was already, at fourteen, a proficient on the hautboy and violin. In this direction lay his manifest destiny. His father was now bandmaster of the Guard; he was poor, and had no other provision to give his sons than to train them in his own art; and thus William, driven by necessity to become self-supporting while still a boy, entered the band as oboist in 1753. They were a family of musicians. Of the six who reached maturity, only Mrs. Griesbach, the elder daughter, gave no sign of personally owning a share in the common gift, which descended, nevertheless, to her five sons, all noted performers on sundry instruments.

William Herschel accompanied his regiment to England in 1755, with his father and elder brother. He returned a year later, bringing with him a copy of Locke “On the Human Understanding,” upon which he had spent the whole of his small savings. Two of the three volumes thus acquired were recovered by his sister after seventy years, and transmitted to his son. The breaking-out of the Seven Years’ War proved decisive as to his future life. Campaigning hardships visibly told upon his health; his parents resolved, at all hazards, to rescue him from them; and accordingly, after the disaster at Hastenbeck, July 26th, 1757, they surreptitiously shipped him off to England. By this adventure, since he was in the military service of the Elector of Hanover, George III. of England, he incurred the penalties of desertion; but they were never exacted, and were remitted by the King himself in 1782.

William Herschel was in his nineteenth year when he landed at Dover with a French crown-piece in his pocket. Necessity or prudence kept him for some time obscure; and we next hear of him as having played a solo on the violin at one of Barbandt’s concerts in London, February 15th, 1760. In the same year he was engaged by the Earl of Darlington to train the band of the Durham Militia, when his shining qualities brought him to the front. The officers of the regiment looked with astonishment on the phenomenal young German who had dropped among them from some cloudy region; who spoke English perfectly, played like a virtuoso, and possessed a curious stock of varied knowledge. Their account of him at a mess-dinner excited the curiosity of Dr. Miller, organist and historian of Doncaster, who, having heard him perform a violin solo by Giardini, fell into a rapture, and invited him on the spot to live with him.

He left nothing undone for the advancement of his protégé; procured for him tuitions and leading concert engagements; and encouraged him, in 1765, to compete for the post of organist at Halifax. Herschel’s special qualifications were small; his chief rival, Dr. Wainwright, was a skilled player, and at the trial performance evoked much applause by his brilliant execution. Only the builder of the organ, an odd old German named Schnetzler, showed dissatisfaction, exclaiming: “He run about the keys like one cat; he gif my pipes no time for to shpeak.” Then Herschel mounted the loft, and the church was filled with a majestic volume of sound, under cover of which a stately melody made itself heard. The “Old Hundredth” followed, with equal effect. Schnetzler was beside himself with delight. “I vil luf dis man,” he cried, “because he git my pipes time for to shpeak.” Herschel had virtually provided himself with four hands. A pair of leaden weights brought in his pocket served to keep down two keys an octave apart, while he improvised a slow air to suit the continuous bass thus mechanically supplied. The artifice secured him the victory.

This anecdote is certainly authentic. It is related by Dr. Miller from personal knowledge. Nor is it inconsistent with a story told by Joah Bates, of King’s College, Cambridge, a passionate lover of music. Repairing to Halifax, his native place, to conduct the “Messiah” at the opening of a new organ, he was accosted in the church by a young man, who asked for an opportunity of practising on it. Although as yet, he said, unacquainted with the instrument, he aspired to the place of organist; and the absolute certitude of his manner so impressed Bates that he not only granted his request, but became his warm patron. The young man’s name was William Herschel. We hear, further, on Dr. Burney’s authority, that he played first violin in Bates’s orchestra.

But the tide of his fortunes was flowing, and he knew how to “take it at the flood.” Early in 1766 he removed to Bath as oboist in Linley’s celebrated orchestra, which played daily in the Pump Room to enliven the parade of blushing damsels and ruffling gallants pictured to our fancy in Miss Austen’s novels. Bath was then what Beau Nash had made it—the very focus of polite society. Turbans nodded over cards; gigs threaded their way along Union Passage; Cheap Street was blocked with vehicles; the Lower Rooms witnessed the nightly evolutions of the country-dance; the Grove, as Doran reminds us, was brilliant with beauty, coquelicot ribbons, smart pelisses, laced coats, and ninepins. The feat of “tipping all nine for a guinea” was frequently performed; and further excitement might be had by merely plucking some lampoons from the trees, which seemed to bear them as their natural fruit. Music, too, was in high vogue. The theatres were thronged; and Miss Linley’s exquisite voice was still heard in the concert-halls.

On the 4th of October, 1767, the new Octagon Chapel was opened for service, with Herschel as organist. How it was that he obtained this “agreeable and lucrative situation” we are ignorant; but he had that singular capacity for distinction which explains everything. The Octagon Chapel became a centre of fashionable attraction, and he soon found himself lifted on the wave of public favour. Pupils of high rank thronged to him, and his lessons often mounted to thirty-five a week. He composed anthems, psalm-tunes, even full services for his assiduously-trained choir. His family were made sharers in his success. He secured a post in Linley’s orchestra for his younger brother Alexander, in 1771; and he himself fetched his sister Caroline to Bath in 1772. Both were of very considerable help to him in his musical and other enterprises, the latter of which gradually gained ground over the former.

Music was never everything to William Herschel. He cultivated it with ardour; composed with facility in the prevalent graceful Italian style; possessed a keen appreciation and perfect taste. But a musical career, however brilliant, did not satisfy him. The inner promptings of genius told him to look beyond. The first thirty-five years of his life were thus spent in diligently preparing to respond to an undeclared vocation. Nothing diverted him from his purpose of self-improvement. At first, he aimed chiefly at mastering the knowledge connected with his profession. With a view to the theory of music, “I applied myself early,” he said, in a slight autobiographical sketch sent to Lichtenberg at Göttingen, “to all the branches of the mathematics, algebra, conic sections, fluxions, etc. Contracting thereby an insatiable desire for knowledge in general, I extended my application to languages—French, Italian, Latin, English—and determined to devote myself entirely to the pursuit of knowledge, in which I resolved to place all my future enjoyment and felicity. This resolution I have never had occasion to change.” At Bath, in the midst of engrossing musical occupations, his zeal for study grew only the more intense. After fourteen or sixteen hours of teaching, he would “unbend his mind” by plunging into Maclaurin’s “Fluxions,” or retire to rest with a basin of milk, Smith’s “Opticks,” and Ferguson’s “Astronomy.” He had no sooner fallen under the spell of this last science than he “resolved to take nothing upon trust, but to see with my own eyes all that other men had seen before.”

He hired, to begin with, a small reflector; but what it showed him merely whetted his curiosity. And the price of a considerably larger instrument proved to be more than he could afford to pay. Whereupon he took the momentous resolution of being, for the future, his own optician. This was in 1772. He at first tried fitting lenses into pasteboard tubes, with the poor results that can be imagined. Then he bought from a Quaker, who had dabbled in that line, the discarded rubbish of his tools, patterns, polishers, and abortive mirrors; and in June, 1773, when fine folk had mostly deserted Bath for summer resorts, work was begun in earnest. The house was turned topsy-turvy; the two brothers attacked the novel enterprise with boyish glee. Alexander, a born mechanician, set up a huge lathe in one of the bedrooms; a cabinet-maker was installed in the drawing-room; Caroline, in spite of secret dismay at such unruly proceedings, lent a hand, and kept meals going; William directed, inspired, toiled, with the ardour of a man who had staked his life on the issue. Meanwhile, music could not be neglected. Practising and choir-training went on; novelties for the ensuing season were prepared; compositions written, and parts copied. Then the winter brought the usual round of tuitions and performances, while all the time mirrors were being ground and polished, tried and rejected, without intermission. At last, after two hundred failures, a tolerable reflecting telescope was produced, about five inches in aperture, and of five and a half feet focal length. The outcome may seem small for so great an expenditure of pains; but those two hundred failures made the Octagon Chapel organist an expert, unapproached and unapproachable, in the construction of specula. With his new instrument, on March 4th, 1774, he observed the Nebula in Orion; and a record of this beginning of his astronomical work is still preserved by the Royal Society.

William Herschel was now, as to age, in mezzo cammin. He had numbered just so many years as had Dante when he began the “Divina Commedia.” But he had not, like Dante, been thrown off the rails of life. The rush of a successful professional career was irresistibly carrying him along. Almost any other man would have had all his faculties absorbed in it. Herschel’s were only stimulated by the occupations which it brought. Yet they were of a peculiarly absorbing nature. Music is the most exclusive of arts. In turning aside, after half a lifetime spent in its cultivation, to seek his ideal elsewhere, Herschel took an unparalleled course. And his choice was final. Music was long his pursuit, astronomy his pastime; a fortunate event enabled him to make astronomy his pursuit, while keeping music for a pastime.

Yet each demands a totally different kind of training, not only of the intellect, but of the senses. From his earliest childhood William Herschel’s nerves and brain had been specially educated to discriminate impressions of sound, and his muscles to the peculiar agility needed for their regulated and delicate production; while, up to the age of thirty-five, he had used his eyes no more purposefully than other people. The eye, nevertheless, requires cultivation as much as the ear. “You must not expect to see at sight,” he told Alexander Aubert, of Loam Pit Hill, in 1782. And he wrote to Sir William Watson: “Seeing is in some respects an art which must be learnt. Many a night have I been practising to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.” A critical observation, he added, could no more be expected from a novice at the telescope than a performance of one of Handel’s organ-fugues from a beginner in music. In this difficult art of vision he rapidly became an adept. Taking into account the full extent of his powers, the opinion has been expressed, and can scarcely be contradicted, that he never had an equal.

At midsummer, 1774, Herschel removed from No. 7, New King Street, to a house situated near Walcot Turnpike, Bath. A grass-plot was attached to the new residence, and it afforded convenient space for workshops. For already he designed to “carry improvements in telescopes to their utmost extent,” and “to leave no spot of the heavens unvisited.” An unprecedented ambition! No son of Adam had ever before entertained the like. To search into the recesses of space, to sound its depths, to dredge up from them their shining contents, to classify these, to investigate their nature, and trace their mutual relations, was what he proposed to do, having first provided the requisite optical means. All this in the intervals of professional toils, with no resources except those supplied by his genius and ardour, with no experience beyond that painfully gained during the progress of his gigantic task.

Since the time of Huygens, no systematic attempt had been made to add to the power of the telescope. For the study of the planetary surfaces, upon which he and his contemporaries were mainly intent, such addition was highly desirable. But Newton’s discovery profoundly modified the aims of astronomers. Their essential business then became that of perfecting the theories of the heavenly bodies. Whether or not they moved in perfect accordance with the law of gravitation was the crucial question of the time. Newton’s generalisation was on its trial. Now and again it almost seemed as if about to fail. But difficulties arose only to be overcome, and before the eighteenth century closed the superb mechanism of the planetary system was elucidated. Working flexibly under the control of a single dominant force, it was shown to possess a self-righting power which secured its indefinite duration. Imperishable as the temple of Poseidon, it might be swayed by disturbances, but could not be overthrown.

The two fundamental conclusions—that the Newtonian law is universally valid, and that the solar system is a stable structure—were reached by immense and sustained labours. Their establishment was due, in the main, to the mathematical genius of Clairaut, D’Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace. But refined analysis demands refined data; hence the need for increased accuracy of observation grew continually more urgent. Attention was accordingly concentrated upon measuring, with the utmost exactitude, the places at determinate epochs of the heavenly bodies. The one thing needful was to learn the “when” and “where” of each of them—that is, to obtain such information as the transit-instrument is adapted to give. In this way the deviations of the moon and planets from their calculated courses became known; and upon the basis of these “errors” improved theories were built, then again compared with corrected observations.

For these ends, large telescopes would have been useless. They were not, however, those that Herschel had in view. The nature of the orbs around us, not their motions, formed the subject of his inquiries, with which modern descriptive astronomy virtually originated. He was, moreover, the founder of sidereal astronomy. The stars had, until his career began, received little primary attention. They were regarded and observed simply as reference-points by which to track the movements of planets, comets, and the moon. Indispensable for fiducial purposes, they almost escaped consideration for themselves. They were, indeed, thought to lie beyond the reach of effective investigation. Only the outbursts of temporary stars, and the fluctuations of two or three periodical ones, had roused special interest, and seemed deserving of particular inquiry.

Of the dim objects called “nebulæ,” Halley had counted up half a dozen in 1714; Lacaille compiled a list of forty-two at the Cape, in 1752–55; and Messier published at Paris, in 1771, a catalogue of forty-five, enlarged to one hundred and three in 1781. He tabulated, only to rid himself of embarrassments from them. For he was by trade a comet-hunter, and, until he hit upon this expedient, had been much harassed in its exercise by mistakes of identity.

But Herschel did not merely “pick up;” he explored. This was what no one before him had thought of doing. A “review of the heavens” was a complete novelty. The magnificence of the idea, which was rooted in his mind from the start, places him apart from, and above, all preceding observers.

To its effective execution telescopic development was essential. The two projects of optical improvement and of sidereal scrutiny went together. The skies could be fathomed, if at all, only by means of light-collecting engines of unexampled power. Rays enfeebled by distance should be rendered effective by concentration. Stratum after stratum of bodies—

“Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms

Of suns and starry streams,”

previously unseen, and even unsuspected, might, by the strong focussing of their feebly-surviving rays, be brought to human cognisance. The contemplated “reviews” would then be complete just in proportion to the grasp of the instrument used in making them.

The first was scarcely more than a reconnaissance. It was made in 1775, with a small reflector of the Newtonian make.A Its upshot was to impress him with the utter disproportion between his daring plans and the means as yet at his disposal. Speculum-casting accordingly recommenced with fresh vigour. Seven- and ten-foot mirrors were succeeded by others of twelve, and even of twenty feet focal length. The finishing of them was very laborious. It was at that time a manual process, during the course of which the hands could not be removed from the metal without injury to its figure. One stretch of such work lasted sixteen hours, Miss Herschel meantime, “by way of keeping him alive,” putting occasional morsels of food into the diligent polisher’s mouth. His mode of procedure was to cast and finish many mirrors of each sort; then to select the best by trial, and repolish the remainder. In this manner he made, before 1781, “not less than 200 seven-foot, 150 ten-foot, and about 80 twenty-foot mirrors, not to mention those of the Gregorian form.” Repolishing operations were, moreover, accompanied by constant improvements, so that each successive speculum tended to surpass its predecessors.

AIn “Newtonian” telescopes the image formed by the large speculum is obliquely reflected from a small plane mirror to the side of the tube, where it is viewed with an ordinary eye-piece. With a “Gregorian,” the observer looks straight forward, the image being thrown back by a little concave mirror through a central perforation in the speculum where the eye-piece is fitted.

These absorbing occupations were interrupted by the unwelcome news that Dietrich, the youngest of the Herschel family, had decamped from Hanover “with a young idler” like himself. William instantly started for Holland, where the fugitive was supposed to be about to take ship for India, but missed his track; and, after having extended his journey to Hanover to comfort his anxious mother—his father had died in 1767—returned sadly to Bath. There, to his immense surprise, he found the scapegrace in strict charge of his sister, “who kept him to a diet of roasted apples and barley-water.” His ineffectual escapade had terminated with an attack of illness at Wapping, whither Alexander Herschel, on learning how matters stood, had posted off to take him in charge and watch his recovery. Musical occupation was easily procured for him at Bath, since he was an accomplished violinist—had, indeed, started on his unprosperous career in the guise of an infant prodigy; but he threw it up in 1779 and drifted back to Hanover, married a Miss Reif, and settled down to live out a fairly long term of shiftless, albeit harmless, existence.

In 1776 William Herschel succeeded Thomas Linley, Sheridan’s father-in-law, as Director of the Public Concerts at Bath. His duties in this capacity, while the season lasted, were most onerous. He had to engage performers, to appease discontents, to supply casual failures, to write glees and catches expressly adapted to the voices of his executants, frequently to come forward himself as a soloist on the hautboy or the harpsichord. The services of his brother Alexander, a renowned violoncellist, and of his sister, by this time an excellent singer, were now invaluable to him. Nor for musical purposes solely. The vision of the skies was never lost sight of, and the struggle to realise it in conjunction with his sympathetic helpers absorbed every remnant of time. At meals the only topics of conversation were mechanical devices for improving success and averting failure. William ate with a pencil in his hand, and a project in his head. Between the acts at the theatre, he might be seen running from the harpsichord to his telescope. After a rehearsal or a morning performance, he would dash off to the workshop in periwig and lace ruffles, and leave it but too often with those delicate adjuncts to his attire torn and pitch-bespattered. Accidents, too, menacing life and limb, were a consequence of that “uncommon precipitancy which accompanied all his actions;” but he escaped intact, save for the loss of a finger-nail.

His introduction to the learned world of Bath was thus described by himself:—

“About the latter end of December, 1779, I happened to be engaged in a series of observations on the lunar mountains; and the moon being in front of my house, late in the evening I brought my seven-feet reflector into the street, and directed it to the object of my observations. Whilst I was looking into the telescope, a gentleman, coming by the place where I was stationed, stopped to look at the instrument. When I took my eye off the telescope, he very politely asked if he might be permitted to look in, and this being immediately conceded, he expressed great satisfaction at the view.”

The inquisitive stranger called next morning, and proved to be Dr. (later Sir William) Watson. He formed on the spot an unalterable friendship for the moon-struck musician, and introduced him to a Philosophical Society which held its meetings at his father’s house. Herschel’s earliest essays were read before it, but they remained unpublished. His first printed composition appeared in the “Ladies’ Diary” for 1780. It was an answer to a prize question on the vibration of strings.

The long series of his communications to the Royal Society of London opened May 11th, 1780, with a discussion of his observations, begun in October, 1777, of Mira, the variable star in the neck of the Whale. As to the theory of its changes, he agreed with Keill that they could best be explained by supposing rotation on an axis to bring a lucid side and a side obscured by spots alternately into view. A second paper by him on the Mountains of the Moon was read on the same day. He measured, in all, about one hundred of these peaks and craters.

In January, 1781, there came an essay stamped with the peculiar impress of his genius, entitled “Astronomical Observations on the Rotation of the Planets round their Axes, made with a view to determine whether the earth’s diurnal motion is perfectly equable.” It embodied an attempt to apply a definite criterion to the time-keeping of our planet. But the prospect is exceedingly remote of rating one planet-clock by the other. Herschel’s methods of inquiry are, however, aptly illustrated in this curiously original paper. His speculations always invited the control of facts. If facts were not at hand, he tried somehow to collect them. The untrammelled play of fancy was no more to his mind than it was to Newton’s. His ardent scientific imagination was thus, by the sobriety of his reason, effectively enlisted in the cause of progress.

Herschel began in 1780 his second review of the heavens, using a seven-foot Newtonian, of 6¼ inches aperture, with a magnifying power of 227. “For distinctness of vision,” he said, “this instrument is, perhaps, equal to any that was ever made.” His praise was amply justified. As he worked his way with it through the constellation Gemini, on the night of March 13th, 1781, an unprecedented event occurred. “A new planet swam into his ken.” He did not recognise it as such. He could only be certain that it was not a fixed star. His keen eye, armed with a perfect telescope, discerned at once that the object had a disc; and the application of higher powers showed the disc to be a substantial reality. The stellar “patines of bright gold” will not stand this test. Being of purely optical production, they gain nothing by magnification.

At that epoch new planets had not yet begun to be found by the dozen. Five, besides the earth, had been known from the remotest antiquity. Five, and no more, seemed to have a prescriptive right to exist. The boundaries of the solar system were of immemorial establishment. It was scarcely conceivable that they should need to be enlarged. The notion did not occur to Herschel. His discovery was modestly imparted to the Royal Society as “An Account of a Comet.” He had, indeed, noticed that the supposed comet moved in planetary fashion from west to east, and very near the ecliptic; and, after a few months, its true nature was virtually proved by Lexell of St. Petersburg. On November 28th, Herschel measured, with his freshly-invented “lamp-micrometer,” the diameter of this “singular star;” and it was not until a year later, November 7th, 1782, that he felt sufficiently sure of its planetary status to exercise his right of giving it a name. Yet this, in the long run, he failed to accomplish. The appellation “Georgium Sidus,” bestowed in honour of his patron, George III., never crossed the Channel, and has long since gone out of fashion amongst ourselves. Lalande tried to get the new planet called “Herschel;” but the title “Uranus,” proposed by Bode, of Berlin, was the “fittest,” and survived.

This discovery made the turning-point of Herschel’s career. It transformed him from a music-master into an astronomer. Without it his vast abilities would probably have been in great measure wasted. No man could long have borne the strain of so arduous a double life as he was then leading. Relief from it came just in time. It is true that fame, being often more of a hindrance than a help, brought embarrassments in its train. In November, 1781, Herschel was compelled to break the complex web of his engagements at Bath by a journey to London for the purpose of receiving in person the Copley Medal awarded to him by the Royal Society, of which body he was, some days later, elected a Fellow. At home, he was persecuted by admirers; and they were invariably received with an easy suavity of manner that gave no hint of preoccupation. Everyone of scientific pretension who visited Bath sought an interview with the extraordinary man who, by way of interlude to pressing duties, had built telescopes of unheard-of power, and performed the startling feat of adding a primary member to the solar system. Among the few of these callers whose names have been preserved were Sir Harry Englefield, Sir Charles Blagden, and Dr. Maskelyne, then, and for thirty years afterwards, Astronomer-Royal. “With the latter,” Miss Herschel relates, “he (William) was engaged in a long conversation which to me sounded like quarrelling, and the first words my brother said after he was gone were, ‘That is a devil of a fellow!’” The phrase was doubtless meant as a sign of regard, for the acquaintance thus begun ripened into cordial intimacy. And William Herschel never lost or forgot a friend.

As regards music alone, the winter of 1781–82 was an exceptionally busy one. He had arranged to conduct, jointly with Rauzzini, a Roman singer and composer, a series of oratorios; undertaking, besides, pecuniary responsibilities which turned out little to his advantage. The labour, vexation, and disappointment involved in carrying out this unlucky plan can readily be imagined. But neither the pressure of business, nor the distractions of celebrity, checked the ardour of his scientific advance. The review which afforded him the discovery of Uranus, and the materials for his first catalogue of 269 double stars, was completed in 1781; and a third, made with the same beautiful instrument, bearing the high magnifying power of 460, was promptly begun. This had for one of its special objects the ascertainment of possible changes in the heavens since Flamsteed’s time; and in the course of it many thousands of stars came under scrutiny, directed to ascertain their magnitude and colour, singleness or duplicity, hazy or defined aspect.

The first of Herschel’s effective twenty-foot telescopes was erected at 19, New King Street, in the summer of 1781. Enclosing a mirror twelve inches in diameter, it far surpassed any seeing-machine that had ever existed in the world. Yet its maker regarded it as only marking a step in his upward progress. A speculum of thirty-feet focus was the next object of his ambition. For its achievement no amount of exertion was counted too great. Its composition was regulated by fresh experiments on various alloys of copper and tin. Its weight and shape were again and again calculated, and the methods appropriate to its production earnestly discussed. “I saw nothing else,” Caroline Herschel tells us, “and heard nothing else talked of but these things when my brothers were together.”B

BIn borrowing Miss Herschel’s lively narratives and comments, some obvious slips in grammar and construction have been corrected. Quotations, too, from the writings of Sir William and Sir John Herschel are often slightly abridged.

“The mirror,” she continues, “was to be cast in a mould of loam prepared from horse-dung, of which an immense quantity was to be pounded in a mortar and sifted through a fine sieve. It was an endless piece of work, and served me for many an hour’s exercise; and Alex frequently took his turn at it, for we were all eager to do something towards the great undertaking. Even Sir William Watson would sometimes take the pestle from me when he found me in the work-room.”

The matter was never out of the master’s thoughts. “If a minute could but be spared in going from one scholar to another, or giving one the slip, he called at home to see how the men went on with the furnace, which was built in a room below, even with the garden.”

At last, the concert season being over, and everything in readiness for the operation of casting, “the metal,” we hear from the same deeply-interested eyewitness, “was in the furnace; but, unfortunately, it began to leak at the moment when ready for pouring, and both my brothers, and the caster with his men, were obliged to run out at opposite doors, for the stone flooring, which ought to have been taken up, flew about in all directions, as high as the ceiling. My poor brother William fell, exhausted with heat and exertion, on a heap of brickbats. Before the second casting was attempted, everything which could ensure success had been attended to, and a very perfect metal was found in the mould, which had cracked in the cooling.”

This second failure terminated the enterprise. Not that it was abandoned as hopeless, but because of a total change in the current of affairs. Herschel’s fame had stirred the royal curiosity, and rumours had now and again reached Bath that he was to be sent for to court. In the spring of 1782 the actual mandate arrived; and on May 8th, leaving his pupils and his projects to shift for themselves, he set out for London. He carried with him his favourite seven-foot reflector, and all the apparatus necessary for viewing double stars and other objects of interest. On May 25th he wrote to his sister:—

“I have had an audience of His Majesty this morning, and met with a very gracious reception. I presented him with the drawing of the solar system, and had the honour of explaining it to him and the Queen. My telescope is in three weeks’ time to go to Richmond, and meanwhile to be put up at Greenwich.... Tell Alexander that everything looks very like as if I were to stay here. The King enquired after him, and after my great speculum. He also gave me leave to come and hear the Griesbachs (Herschel’s nephews) play at the private concert which he has every evening.... All my papers are printing, and are allowed to be very valuable. You see, Lina, I tell you all these things. You know vanity is not my foible, therefore I need not fear your censure. Farewell.”

His next letter is dated June 3rd, 1782. “I pass my time,” he informed “Lina,” “between Greenwich and London agreeably enough, but am rather at a loss for work that I like. Company is not always pleasing, and I would much rather be polishing a speculum. Last Friday I was at the King’s concert to hear George play. The King spoke to me as soon as he saw me, and kept me in conversation for half an hour. He asked George to play a solo-concerto on purpose that I might hear him.... I am introduced to the best company. To-morrow I dine at Lord Palmerston’s, next day with Sir Joseph Banks, etc. Among opticians and astronomers nothing now is talked of but what they call my great discoveries. Alas! this shows how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are called great. Let me but get at it again! I will make such telescopes and see such things—that is, I will endeavour to do so.”

A comparison of his telescope with those at the Royal Observatory showed its striking superiority, although among them was one of Short’s famous Gregorians, of 9½ inches aperture. It had thus a reflecting surface above twice that of Herschel’s seven-foot, the competition with which was nevertheless so disastrous to its reputation that Dr. Maskelyne fell quite out of conceit with it, and doubted whether it deserved the new stand constructed for it on the model of Herschel’s.

In the midst of these scientific particulars, we hear incidentally that influenza was then so rife in London that “hardly one single person” escaped an attack.

On July 2nd he made his first appearance as showman of the heavens to royalty. The scene of the display was Buckingham House (now Buckingham Palace). “It was a very fine evening,” he wrote to his sister. “My instrument gave general satisfaction. The King has very good eyes, and enjoys observations with telescopes exceedingly.”

Next night, the King and Queen being absent at Kew, the Princesses desired an exhibition. But, since they objected to damp grass, the telescope, Herschel says, “was moved into the Queen’s apartments, and we waited some time in hopes of seeing Jupiter or Saturn. Meanwhile I showed the Princesses and several other ladies the speculum, the micrometers, the movements of the telescope, and other things that seemed to excite their curiosity. When the evening appeared to be totally unpromising, I proposed an artificial Saturn as an object, since we could not have the real one. I had beforehand prepared this little piece, as I guessed by the appearance of the weather in the afternoon we should have no stars to look at. This being accepted with great pleasure, I had the lamps lighted up, which illuminated the picture of a Saturn (cut out in pasteboard) at the bottom of the garden wall. The effect was fine, and so natural that the best astronomer might have been deceived. Their royal highnesses seemed to be much pleased with the artifice.” From a somewhat prolonged conversation, he judged them to be “extremely well instructed,” and “most amiable characters.”

Shortly afterwards Herschel received the appointment of royal astronomer, with the modest salary of £200 a year. “Never,” exclaimed Sir William Watson on being made acquainted with its amount, “bought monarch honour so cheap!” The provision was assuredly not munificent; yet it sufficed to rescue a great man from submergence under the hard necessities of existence. The offer was critically timed. It was made precisely when teaching and concert-giving had come to appear an “intolerable waste of time” to one fired with a visionary passion. “Stout Cortes” staring at the Pacific, Ulysses starting from Ithaca to “sail beyond the sunset,” were not more eager for experience of the Unknown.