Before the year was out, the ingenious Mr. Herschel of Bath was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was also presented with the Copley gold medal.  From this moment all the distinguished people in Bath were anxious to be introduced to the philosophical music-master; and, indeed, they intruded so much upon his time that the daily music lessons were now often interrupted.  He was soon, however, to give up lessons for ever, and devote himself to his more congenial and natural work in astronomy.  In May, 1782, he went up to London, to be formally admitted to his Fellowship of the Royal Society.  There he stayed so long that poor Carolina was quite frightened.  It was “double the time which my brother could safely be absent from his scholars.”  The connection would be broken up, and the astronomy would be the ruin of the family. (A little of good old dame Herschel’s housewifely leaven here, perhaps.) But William’s letters from London to “Dear Lina” must soon have quieted her womanly fears.  William had actually been presented to the king, and “met with a very gracious reception.”  He had explained the solar system to the king and queen, and his telescope was to be put up first at Greenwich and then at Richmond.  The Greenwich authorities were delighted with his instrument; they have seen what Herschel calls “My fine double stars” with it.  “All my papers are printing,” he tells Lina with pardonable pride, “and are allowed to be very valuable.”  But he himself is far from satisfied as yet with the results of his work.  Evidently no small successes in the field of knowledge will do for William Herschel.  “Among opticians and astronomers,” he writes to Lina, “nothing now is talked of but what they call my great discoveries.  Alas! this shows how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are called great.  Let me but get at it again!  I will make such telescopes and see such things!” Well, well, William Herschel, in that last sentence we get the very keynote of true greatness and true genius.

But must he go back quietly to Bath and the toils of teaching?  “An intolerable waste of time,” he thought it.  The king happily relieved him from this intolerable waste.  He offered Herschel a salary of 200 pounds a year if he would come and live at Datchet, and devote himself entirely to astronomical observations.  It was by no means a munificent sum for a king to offer for such labour; but Herschel gladly accepted it, as it would enable him to give up the interruption of teaching, and spend all his time on his beloved astronomy.  His Bath friend, Sir William Watson, exclaimed when he heard of it, “Never bought monarch honour so cheap.”  Herschel was forty-three when he removed to Datchet, and from that day forth he lived almost entirely in his observatory, wholly given up to his astronomical pursuits.  Even when he had to go to London to read his papers before the Royal Society, he chose a moonlight night (when the stars would be mostly invisible), so that it might not interfere with his regular labours.