the liberality with which he conferred civil honours and pecuniary rewards on Joseph Fraunhofer, he has immortalised his own name and added a new lustre to the Bavarian crown." The German and other astronomers, who refused to accept Georgium Sidus as a name for the planet discovered by Herschel, were right, as things then stood: the King, who then did so shabbily by the astronomer, deserved neither part nor lot in the astronomer's heavens; and the common sense of mankind gave him none. But the King was unfairly judged, notwithstanding.
This encouragement of science stood on a different footing from the degradation of private patronage and fulsome dedications, to which literature had been subjected, and from which it had shaken itself free. But both literature and science were exposed to another danger than neglect—disparagement and envy from within their own borders. In the case of Herschel we have a curious example of what seems this meanness, written in 1830, eight years after his death: "Herschel's fame rests on discoveries, for which he was indebted solely to the great power of his telescope. That of the planet, sometimes called by his name, was an accidental discovery, in which genius had no part, and which could not have been much longer deferred. He did not, like his illustrious contemporaries Delambre and Piazzi, distinguish himselfby the amelioration of the tables, or the reduction of catalogues of the stars, or by improving methods of computation, or indeed by any labour of practical utility. He devoted himself to the observation of astronomical phenomena, and in this department his unrivalled telescopes gave him a sort of supremacy.
