On the 25th of August, 1822, this truly great and simple man passed away, in his eighty-fifth year.  It has been possible here only to sketch out the chief personal points in his career, without dwelling much upon the scientific importance of his later life-long labours; but it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that Herschel’s work was no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the most profoundly philosophical astronomical work ever performed, except perhaps Newton’s and Laplace’s.  Among astronomers proper there has been none distinguished by such breadth of grasp, such wide conceptions, and such perfect clearness of view as the self-taught oboe-player of Hanover.

V.

Jean Francois Millet, painter.

There is no part of France so singularly like England, both in the aspect of the country itself and in the features and character of the inhabitants, as Normandy.  The wooded hills and dales, the frequent copses and apple orchards, the numerous thriving towns and villages, the towers and steeples half hidden among the trees, recall at every step the very similar scenery of our own beautiful and fruitful Devonshire.  And as the land is, so are the people.  Ages ago, about the same time that the Anglo-Saxon invaders first settled down in England, a band of similar English pirates, from the old common English home by the cranberry marshes of the Baltic, drove their long ships upon the long rocky peninsula of the Cotentin, which juts out, like a French Cornwall, from the mainland of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and beetling crags of busy Cherbourg.  There they built themselves little hamlets and villages of true English type, whose very names to this day remind one of their ancient Saxon origin.  Later on, the Danes or Northmen conquered the country, which they called after their own name, Normandy, that is to say, the Northmen’s land.  Mixing with the early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country.  To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship with the English race.  While other Frenchmen are generally dark and thick-set, the Norman is, as a rule, a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed man, not unlike in build to our Yarmouth fisherman, or our Kentish labourers.  In body and mind, there is something about him even now which makes him seem more nearly akin to us than the true Frenchmen who inhabit almost all the rest of France.