TEACHER AND ORGANIST AT BATH 27 



this tour and concert. Her brother William seems to 

 have at that time fallen entirely out of her life, and 

 to have left her, without education, to become a house- 

 hold drudge and the slave of her brother Jacob. But 

 she cherished a spirit which, amid much that was 

 extremely depressing, scorned to be the one or the 

 other. 



In the following year, 1766, William removed to 

 Bath, where he became a teacher of music and organist 

 of the Octagon Chapel. For five or six years after, 

 obscurity again settles on his life and adventures. All 

 that Caroline records is that Jacob joined his brother 

 at Bath, and showed the same flightiness of disposi- 

 tion which the family had previously seen in his 

 character. To speak of William as well known in the 

 society for which Bath was then famous, or among 

 the learned men and physicians by whom the town 

 was frequented, is to people the darkness with visions 

 of what we think should have been, but was not. He 

 was little known there or elsewhere, till he took the 

 world by storm ; but at that period events were taking 

 place in Bath which helped materially to lift the cur- 

 tain of darkness off his life in 1772. He was then 

 thirty-four years of age. 



The musical director of Bath in those days was 

 Linley, whose daughter Elizabeth, "at the age of twelve 

 years, was brought forward publicly at the Rooms, 

 where she so charmed the company by her taste and 

 execution " as a singer, that she at once received the 

 name of the Siren. Two years later she got a more 

 attractive name, and was called the Angel. Her debut 

 took place in the very year Herschel came to Bath. 

 Before she was seventeen she had turned the heads 



