When his sister expected him to cheer her lonely life by lesson or talk, he was so absorbed in work that he withdrew to his bedroom to study some favourite author, and fell asleep in the midst of his books. One of the favourite works she mentions was the Astronomy of James Ferguson, published in 1756, the work of a self-taught Scottish peasant, whose proudest boast, had he lived to see the result, would have been that he did as much as any man, perhaps more, to start William Herschel on the path which led to results undreamed of in the history of science. And the book that Herschel thus fell asleep over was published anew by a famous man of science after Herschel's death, and was enriched with the multitudinous observations of the great astronomer. Master and pupil were embalmed together in that edition of the Astronomy, which can still bear comparison with any books of the kind that have been published, without coming out second best.
But the time of revealing William Herschel to the world as a practical astronomer of the first rank was now at hand. That he was little known in Bath and its neighbourhood we might gather from the silence observed regarding him by Hannah More, whose sisters kept a girls' school in Bristol, where she also resided. She was a lover of astronomy, and in 1762 made the "acquaintance of Ferguson, the popular astronomer, then engaged at Bristol in giving public lectures—an acquaintance which soon ripened into friendship."[1] But the girl who, as a woman of thirty-four, knew and recorded her impressions of Miss Linley, finds no place in either her Bristol or her London gossip for the far greater name of William Herschel, who conducted
- ↑ Life, etc., i. 16.
