similar to the claims made on Herschel by visitors from Windsor Castle. Macaulay reprobates, and justly reprobates, the thoughtless cruelty, to which it exposed a woman who could have earned by her pen ten times the income she received from dancing attendance on a queen. But the Queen was not altogether in fault in her case; nor was the King in Herschel's. It was Court etiquette, cruel and thoughtless unquestionably;—"a slavery of five years, of five years taken from the best part of her life, and wasted in menial drudgery or in recreations duller than even menial drudgery, under galling restraints, and amidst unfriendly or uninteresting companions."[1] It was a huge mistake to cramp the genius of the novelist or the astronomer by the formalities and triflings of a Court. It did little or no harm to the latter; it did irreparable wrong to the former. People who have lived in a crowd all their lives, to whom indeed it is the breath of life, cannot understand that it may be poison to genius.
Sir Joseph Banks also was dead. A year after his death a German visitor to this country gives a pleasing picture of an uncommon triumvirate of rank and science. "In England," he says, "people have long been accustomed to associate with their recollections of their late revered Monarch, the names of these two veterans in science, Herschel and Banks, both not only of nearly the same age with the King, but also distinguished by him with peculiar favour, and frequent personal intercourse. All the three members of this singular triumvirate were still living when I visited England; now the astronomer is the only survivor." "With good reason did Cuvier, in the panegyric he pro-
- ↑ Macaulay, vii. 25.
