mained, to the end of her long life, the same loving worshipper of departed greatness that she had been during her brother's lifetime, and the same outspoken critic of men and women whom she happened to meet. Thirteen years after she left England, she wrote: "Within the last two months I have been obliged to exert myself once more to answer two letters, one to Mr. De Morgan, the Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, the other to Mr. Baily (who, I suppose, is President), for they have been pleased to choose me, along with Mrs. Somerville, to be a member (God knows what for) of their Society." Promotion! she says, they call it in Hanover, and laughingly talks of "our Society, of which I am now a fellow!" She was then eighty-five years of age. Apparently she was of the same mind as Hannah More, who, when she found her name proposed as an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature, wrote a strong remonstrance, declining the distinction, chiefly "because I consider the circumstance of sex alone a disqualification."[1]
In November 1838 she was also elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin: and besides she received in 1846, from the King of Prussia, a gold medal for science. Well earned though both of these honours were, she wrote with the modesty of true science, when she heard of the former, "I cannot help crying out aloud to myself, every now and then, 'What is That for ?' . . . I think almost it is mocking me to look upon me as a Member of an Academy: I that have lived these eighteen years (against my will and intention) without finding as much as a single
- ↑ Life, ii. 307, December 23, 1820. She was then seventy-five.
