1 8 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



turned 4-inch globe, upon which the equator and ecliptic 

 were engraved." But it was from a passionate devotion 

 to music that the father looked for fame and money 

 for his two sons. He seems just to have missed that 

 aim with the flighty Jacob ; 1 it is pardonable to doubt 

 that he could ever have attained it with the staid and 

 persevering William. Neither of them had in him the 

 making of a Handel, who was then, and had long been, 

 the ornament of the English and Hanoverian court, 

 and of whom the aspiring father could not fail to be 

 always thinking. 



A greater check to progress than war or poverty 

 was the mother's dislike of learning. She was 

 resolved that, in spite of her husband's wish to 

 educate Caroline, nothing should be taught the girl 

 but what might prove useful to her as a household 

 drudge. She would not allow her to learn French; 

 she relaxed so far as to send her for two or three 

 months to a sewing school to be taught to make house- 

 hold linen, to which the girl added, out of her own 

 ingenuity, the making of bags and sword-knots for her 

 brothers' splendour at concerts, before she knew how 

 to make caps and furbelows. The mother made no 

 concealment of her reason for this unjust and narrow- 

 minded treatment of her daughter. Referring to later 

 troubles in which her own folly involved the family, 

 she laid the blame where it had no right to lie : " It 

 was her certain belief that William would have re- 

 turned to his country, and Jacob would not have 

 looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." 

 " There is a great simplicity in the character of this 

 nation," the physician of George IV. wrote of the 



1 Burney, History of Music, iv. 603. See infra, p. 32. 



