Slough. He did not even get a knighthood from his Royal patron. In 1816 he was made a Hanoverian Knight by the Prince Regent; traders, slave-holders, moneyed men of all classes were raised to the peerage, but brain power was then less esteemed for the bestowal of worldly rank.
Before the tube was fitted with the great mirror, many of the visitors who flocked to see William Herschel had the curiosity to walk through it. Among them was the King. Close behind him was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who found it difficult to proceed, till the King turned to give him his hand, saying, "Come, my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to heaven."
An invitation from Mr. Herschel to walk through the tube, as it lay on the ground, was not uncommon. Miss Burney and the party she was with accepted the invitation. "It held me quite upright," she says, "and without the least inconvenience; so would it have done had I been dressed in feathers and a bell hoop—such is its circumference. Mr. Smelt led the way, walking also upright; and my father followed. After we were gone, the Bishop [of Worcester] and Dr. Douglas were tempted, for its oddity, to make the same promenade."[1] Evidently the Church was not disposed, in those days at least, to look Heaven in the face.
While the greater tube of Lord Rosse's telescope was lying in readiness to receive its greater mirror, visitors were also in the habit of walking through it, sixty years later. The Dean of Ely, a well-known mathematician, and a man of more than the common
- ↑ Letters, iii. 262.
