Tell your dear Margaret that the very day on which the letter arrived, in which she requested some hair, I sent for the hair-dresser and made him cut off all which was useless to me, leaving plenty for a toupee and a little curl in the poll. But I repented not having kept a few out of the plait, which I might have sent in a letter, as I understand it is designed for a talisman against the evils of this hurly-burlying world. But I consoled myself with the thoughts that no harm could possibly assail the dear little creature as long as she is under the care of her affectionate and excellent mother, leaving a loving father out of the account.
Dr. Groskopf has been zum Ritter ernannt by his present Majesty. So was Dr. Mühry last week. If all is betitled in England and Germany, why is not my nephew, J. H., a lord, or a wycount at least (query)? General Komarzewsky used to say to your father, Why does not he (meaning King George III.) make you Duke of Slough?
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1830-1831. Her Nephew’s Book.
MISS HERSCHEL TO J. F. W. HERSCHEL, ESQ.
March, 1831.
My dearest Nephew,—
If it was not high time to congratulate you on your birthday—of which I most heartily wish you may enjoy many returns in uninterrupted and increasing happiness—I might have still deferred to thank you for your kind letter and the valuable present of your book. I intend to follow your mother’s example to read it “from end to end,” which I was hitherto not able to do on account of my dim eyes; but now the days are getting longer I think I see better, and to judge by the few pages I have read, that so far from making me go to sleep, it will be an antidote against a propensity for doing so in the daytime.
I much regret my inability to acknowledge my dear niece’s letter in such a manner as might encourage a correspondence with me, but it is difficult to write in a cheerful strain when one is continually in the dismals. I do all I can to keep up my spirits under a daily increase of my infirmities, and have been best part of the winter confined to my rooms. My complaint is incurable, for it is a decay of nature, and nine days after your birthday I am eighty-one. What a shocking idea it is to be decaying! decaying! But never mind—if I am decaying here, there will be, as Mrs. Maskelyne once was comforting me (on observing my growing lean), “the less corruption in my grave!”
22nd.—Some weeks ago I wrote as above, which I intended as a preface to my dying speech, with intention to give you a few hints concerning ——, and indeed I may say of all my German relations, except the Knipping family. If I did not fear that some of them would, after my decease, introduce themselves as troublesome correspondents to you, I would rather write about something else just now, and indeed I had better drop the subject, for you will know, I suppose, how to rid yourself of a pestering fool by answering coolly, or not at all.