248 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



nature. Herschel had done so in a pre-eminent degree. 

 With good reason, then, the world said, Tell us about 

 him; his faults, if he had any, we can forgive and 

 forget ; his virtues we can admire or follow. Caroline 

 Herschel did not take this view of her duty. She 

 left it to others to write what she could have written 

 better, and to record what she knew at first hand, and 

 they did not know at all or only as dull echoes of a 

 resounding past. " The Germans are very busy about 

 the fame of your dear father," she writes ; " there does 

 not pass a month but something appears in print, 

 and Dr. Groskopf saw it stated that Professor Pfaff 

 had translated all your dear father's papers from 

 the Phil. Trans, into German, and which will be 

 published in Dresden. I wish he had left it for some 

 good astronomer to do the same." Evidently the 

 acid of her temper had been called into action by 

 Professor Pfaff. Her nephew describes him in reply 

 as " a respectable mathematician, and I hope it is he 

 who undertakes the work." " Johann Wilhelm Pfaff," 

 she answers, " professor, in Erlangen, is the same who 

 intends to translate your father's papers, but those 

 only which he can get a copy of. The Philosophical 

 Transactions, I am told, are not within his reach." 

 The acid is a little sweetened; not much, and it is 

 clear that Caroline Herschel at eighty-five does not 

 differ in temper at least from the same lady at twenty- 

 two. Alas ! her inventory of books, pictures, etc., showed 

 what she thought of the Professor's two- volume edition 

 of her brother's collected works, "Abominable stuff! 

 What is to be done with them ? They are so prettily 

 bound, I cannot take it in my heart to burn them." 

 But she could lash with her tongue everybody who 



