"Although Mr. Herschel loved music to an excess, and made a considerable progress in it, he yet determined with a sort of enthusiasm to devote every moment he could spare from business to the pursuit of knowledge, which he regarded as the sovereign good, and in which he resolved to place all his views of future happiness in life.". . .
"His situation at the Octagon Chapel proved a very profitable one, as he soon fell into all the public business of the concerts, the Rooms, the Theatre, and the oratorios, besides many scholars and private concerts. This great run of business, instead of lessening his propensity to study, increased it, so that many times, after a fatiguing day of fourteen or sixteen hours spent in his vocation, he would retire at night with the greatest avidity to unbend the mind, if it may be so called, with a few propositions in Maclaurin's Fluxions, or other books of that sort."
It was in these years that he mastered Italian and made some progress in Greek.
"We may hazard a natural conjecture respecting the course of Herschel's early studies. Music conducted him to mathematics, or, in [Pg 28] other words, impelled him to study Smith's Harmonics. Now this Robert Smith was the author of A Complete System of Optics, a masterly work, which, notwithstanding the rapid growth of that branch of the science, is not yet wholly superseded. It seems to us not unlikely that Herschel, studying the Harmonics, conceived a reverence for the author, who was at that time still living, so that from the Philosophy of Music he passed to the Optics, a work on which Smith's great reputation chiefly rested; and thus undesignedly prepared himself for the career on which he was shortly about to enter with so much glory."[9]
There is no doubt that this conjecture is a true one. The Optics of Dr. Smith is one of the very few books quoted by Herschel throughout his writings, and there is every evidence of his complete familiarity with its conclusions and methods; and this familiarity is of the kind which a student acquires with his early text-books. One other work he quotes in the same way, Lalande's Astronomy, and this too must have been deeply studied.
During the years 1765-1772, while Herschel was following his profession and his studies at Bath, the family life at Hanover went on in much the same way.
In 1765 his father Isaac had a stroke of paralysis, which ended his violin-playing forever, and forced him to depend entirely upon pupils and copying of music for a livelihood. He died on March 22, 1767, leaving behind him a good name, and living in the affectionate remembrance of his children and of all who knew him.
Carolina had now lost her best friend, and transferred to her brother William the affection she had before divided between him and her father.
"My father wished to give me something like a polished education, but my mother was particularly determined that it should be a rough, but at the same time a useful one; and nothing farther she thought was necessary but to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make household linen. . . . My mother would not consent to my being taught French, and my brother Dietrich was even denied a dancing-master, because she would not permit my learning along with him, though the entrance had been paid for us both; so all my father could do for me was to indulge me (and please himself) sometimes [Pg 30] with a short lesson on the violin, when my mother was either in good humor or out of the way. Though I have often felt myself exceedingly at a loss for the want of those few accomplishments of which I was thus, by an erroneous though well-meant opinion of my mother, deprived, I could not help thinking but that she had cause for wishing me not to know more than was necessary for being useful in the family; for it was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning.
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