turned 4-inch globe, upon which the equator and ecliptic were engraved." But it was from a passionate devotion to music that the father looked for fame and money for his two sons. He seems just to have missed that aim with the flighty Jacob;[1] it is pardonable to doubt that he could ever have attained it with the staid and persevering William. Neither of them had in him the making of a Handel, who was then, and had long been, the ornament of the English and Hanoverian court, and of whom the aspiring father could not fail to be always thinking.
A greater check to progress than war or poverty was the mothers dislike of learning. She was resolved that, in spite of her husband's wish to educate Caroline, nothing should be taught the girl but what might prove useful to her as a household drudge. She would not allow her to learn French; she relaxed so far as to send her for two or three months to a sewing school to be taught to make household linen, to which the girl added, out of her own ingenuity, the making of bags and sword-knots for her brothers' splendour at concerts, before she knew how to make caps and furbelows. The mother made no concealment of her reason for this unjust and narrow-minded treatment of her daughter. Referring to later troubles in which her own folly involved the family, she laid the blame where it had no right to lie: "It was her certain belief that William would have returned to his country, and Jacob would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." "There is a great simplicity in the character of this nation," the physician of George IV. wrote of the
- ↑ Barney, History of Music iv. 603. See infra, p. 32.
