years and ten which are the allotted average life of man, but which he himself really overstepped by fourteen winters.  As he said long afterwards with his modest manner to the poet Campbell, “I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me.  I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two millions of years to reach this earth.”  That would have been a grand thing for any man to be able truthfully to say under any circumstances:  it was a marvellous thing for a man who had laboured under all the original disadvantages of Herschel—­ a man who began life as a penniless German bandsman, and up to the age of thirty-six had never even looked through a telescope.

At this time, Herschel was engaged in playing the harpsichord in the orchestra of the theatre; and it was during the interval between the acts that he made his first general survey of the heavens.  The moment his part was finished, he would rush out to gaze through his telescope; and in these short periods he managed to observe all the visible stars of what are called the first, second, third, and fourth magnitudes.  Henceforth he went on building telescope after telescope, each one better than the last; and now all his glasses were ground and polished either by his own hand or by his brother Alexander’s.  Carolina meanwhile took her part in the workshop; but as she had also to sing at the oratorios, and her awkward German manners might shock the sensitive nerves of the Bath aristocrats, she took two lessons a week for a whole twelvemonth (she tells us in her delightfully straightforward fashion) “from Miss Fleming, the celebrated dancing mistress, to drill me for a gentlewoman.”  Poor Carolina, there she was mistaken:  Miss Fleming could make her into no gentlewoman, for she was born one already, and nothing proves it more than the perfect absence of false shame with which in her memoirs she tells us all these graphic little details of their early humble days.

While they were thus working at Bath an incident occurred which is worth mentioning because it shows the very different directions in which the presence or the want of steady persistence may lead the various members of the very self-same family.  William received a letter from his widowed mother at Hanover to say, in deep distress, that Dietrich, the youngest brother, had run away from home, it was supposed for the purpose of going to India, “with a young idler no older than himself.”  Forthwith, the budding astronomer left the lathe where he was busy turning an eye-piece from a cocoa-nut shell, and, like a good son and brother as he always was, hurried off to Holland and thence to Hanover.  No Dietrich was anywhere to be found.  But while he was away, Carolina at Bath received a letter from Dietrich himself, to tell her ruefully he was “laid up very ill” at a waterside tavern in Wapping—­not the nicest or most savoury East End sailor-suburb of London.  Alexander