240 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



similar to the claims made on Herschel by visitors 

 from Windsor Castle. Macaulay reprobates, and justly 

 reprobates, the thoughtless cruelty, to which it exposed 

 a woman who could have earned by her pen ten times 

 the income she received from dancing attendance on a 

 queen. But the Queen was not altogether in fault 

 in her case ; nor was the King in Herschel's. It was 

 Court etiquette, cruel and thoughtless unquestionably ; 

 " a slavery of five years, of five years taken from the 

 best part of her life, and wasted in menial drudgery or 

 in recreations duller than even menial drudgery, under 

 galling restraints, and amidst unfriendly or uninterest- 

 ing companions." l It was a huge mistake to cramp 

 the genius of the novelist or the astronomer by the 

 formalities and triflings of a Court. It did little or no 

 harm to the latter; it did irreparable wrong to the 

 former. People who have lived in a crowd all their 

 lives, to whom indeed it is the breath of life, cannot 

 understand that it may be poison to genius. 



Sir Joseph Banks also was dead. A year after his 

 death a German visitor to this country gives a pleasing 

 picture of an uncommon triumvirate of rank and 

 science. " In England," he says, " people have long 

 been accustomed to associate with their recollections of 

 their late revered Monarch, the names of these two 

 veterans in science, Herschel and Banks, both not only 

 of nearly the same age with the King, but also dis- 

 tinguished by him with peculiar favour, and frequent 

 personal intercourse. All the three members of this 

 singular triumvirate were still living when I visited 

 England; now the astronomer is the only survivor." 

 " With good reason did Cuvier, in the panegyric he pro- 



1 Macaulay, vii. 25. 



