191-2] on Sir William Hersc/iel. 457 



this belief. All her notes and memoranda relating to a period of 

 fifteen years from the time of the marriage were destroyed by her 

 when, as we may presume, her calmer judgment showed her that the 

 record of her heart-burning would be painful to the surviving mem- 

 bers of the family. At any rate, she was on affectionate terms with 

 her sister-in-law throughout all the later years of her life, and the 

 brilliant career of her nephew, the celebrated Sir John Herschel, and 

 correspondence with him, afforded the leading interest of her old age. 



Although Herschel Hved until 1822, and accomplished an enormous 

 amount of work up to the end of his life, yet his health seems to have 

 declined from about the time I have noted. On his death Caroline 

 felt that her life, too, was practically ended, and she returned to 

 Hanover. Ever afterwards she used to cry, " Why did I leave happy 

 England ?" and it is incompi-ehensible that she should not have re- 

 turned to the place where all her real interests lay. 



Although she felt the death of her brother as practically the end 

 of her life, she was always full of jokes and fun. In a letter to her 

 nephew, she told him that her father used to punish her, a grown 

 woman, by depriving her of her pudding if she did not guess rightly 

 the angle of the piece she had helped herself to. Dr. Groskopf 

 writes of her when she was eighty-nine years of age, " Well ! what 

 do you say of such a person being able to put her foot behind her 

 back and scratch her ear with it, in imitation of a dog, when she was 

 in one of her merry moods." She only died in 1847, having very 

 nearly completed her ninety-eighth year. 



Herschel himself must have been a man of singular charm, as is 

 testified to by Dr. Burney and his daughter Mdme. d'Arblay. That 

 he possessed an incredible amount of patience is proved by the fact of 

 his submitting to the reading aloud of the whole of a portentous, 

 and fortunately unpublished, poem in many cantos by Dr. Burney, 

 entitled " A Poetical History of Astronomy." It appears that Herschel 

 had had an interview with Napoleon in Paris in 1802, and the poet 

 Campbell asked him whether he had been struck by Napoleon's know- 

 ledge. " No," said Herschel, " the First Consul surprised me by his 

 versatility, but in science he seemed to know little more that any well- 

 educated gentleman, and of astronomy much less, for example, than 

 our king. His general air was something like affecting to know more 

 than he did know." He was struck, too, by Napoleon's hypocrisy in 

 observing " how all these glorious views gave proofs of Almighty 

 Wisdom." 



And now having endeavoured to show what kind of people 

 Caroline and her brother were, I must turn to what they did. 

 Herschel's discoveries were so numerous that I am compelled to make 

 a selection. I shall therefore only attempt to sketch his endeavour 

 to understand the general construction of the stellar universe, and to 

 speak of his work on double stars. 



The only general test of the relative nearness or farness of the 



