he road to ruin with his foolish
good-for-nothing star-gazing.

In 1774, when William Herschel was thirty six, he had at last
constructed himself a seven-foot telescope, and began for the first
time in his life to view the heavens in a systematic manner. From this
he advanced to a ten-foot, and then to one of twenty, for he meant to
see stars that no astronomer had ever yet dreamt of beholding. It was
comparatively late in life to begin, but Herschel had laid a solid
foundation already and he was enabled therefore to do an immense deal
in the second half of those threescore 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