Greenwich between the years 1766, 1793."[1] Science was thus the mother of peace and goodwill between two bitterly hostile nations.
An attack of influenza, which wore off in less than a week; a series of dinners, at which the new lion of science was exhibited to the gaze of "the best company," and little was talked "of but what they called his great discoveries"; two nights of star-gazing at Greenwich; state concerts, at which the King "kept him in conversation for half an hour," and even asked George Griesbach for a solo-concerto that his uncle might hear him play; acting the showman by explaining the speculum to the Princesses, and, on a cloudy evening, showing them, "with fine effect" through the telescope, a pasteboard Saturn at the bottom of the garden wall,"—these and other tricks of this "showman of the heavens" were his employment for the next few weeks. "Company is not always pleasing," he wrote, "and I would much rather be polishing a speculum." In the midst of this mental dissipation he was brought down from heaven to earth by his money running short. Several times he wrote to Bath for a supply! Delays so unnecessary, and the thoughtless indifference with which a working musician was kept hanging on at Court, without regard to his loss or his expenses, were not creditable to those concerned. It looks as if there were a hitch somewhere.
His sister relates in a letter written in 1842, twenty years after his death, that the King was surrounded by wiseacres, who knew how to bargain. They proposed to send her brother back to Hanover on a salary of £100 a year. Her idea was that Parliament had
- ↑ Edin. Rev., 1809, pp. 65, 69.
