HERSCHEL'S PICTURE 249 



even praised her dead hero. "Now we talk of bio- 

 graphies," she wrote twelve years afterwards, " I have 

 no less than nine of my poor brother, and heard of 

 two more, one by Zach, which I shall try to get sight 

 of. There is but one or two which are bordering on 

 truth, the rest being stuff, not worth while to fret 

 about. The best is accompanied with a miniature of 

 Reberg's bad copy." " Bordering on truth ! stuff ! " 

 Her description of her own racy letters is equally 

 amusing: "I was in hopes you would have thrown 

 away such incoherent stuff . . . and not to let it rise 

 in judgment against my, perhaps, bad grammar, bad 

 spelling, etc." 



Even a small matter became great where his name 

 was concerned. " The following hint is only to you as 

 a dear sister," she writes to her brother's widow, " for 

 as such I now know you: All I am possessed of is 

 looked upon as their own, when I am gone ; the dis- 

 posal of my brother's picture is even denied me it 

 hangs in Mrs. H.'s drawing-room, where a set of old 

 women play cards under it on her club day." Summary 

 also was her judgment of anyone who attempted to 

 rival or surpass her brother : " The fellow is a fool." 

 Great was her excitement on learning that her nephew 

 was preparing to complete in the southern hemisphere 

 the gauging of the heavens, which his father had 

 begun, and for many a year carried on in the northern. 

 That was allowable. It was a war trumpet blown 

 within hearing of a war horse, that had served its last 

 campaign. " Dr. Tias, who travelled through Hanover, 

 called on me to-day," she writes to Lady Herschel. 

 " He talked strangely about my nephew's intention of 

 going to the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Hausmann told 



