indispensable race for bread along one course, which they all saw and had little or no sympathy with, and the unquenchable race for fame along another totally unlike, to which they were altogether indifferent. To run both races at the same time required a spirit of indomitable energy and perseverance.
In the world of literature and science it is not unfrequently the hard fate of genius to be passed by in the crowd, till some onlooker discovers it, as a diamond may be discovered among a heap of common stones on the roadside. The fire of genuine inspiration may have warmed the heart or lighted up the eye; but, until the onlooker, long waited for, it may be, goes past, no difference will be seen between a genius and other men by the ordinary crowd of humanity.
Ministers of state, heads of political parties, busy-bodies filled with national affairs were seen, recognised, or pointed out in carriages or places of public resort by those who enjoyed or were compelled by doctors' orders to endure the weariness of the place.[1] But "there are forty thousand others that I neither know nor intend to know," Walpole wrote: "in short, it is living in a fair, and I am heartily sick of it already." In the very year in which these words were written, Herschel was settled at Bath. He was one of the forty thousand nobodies, but Walpole was compelled in good time to reckon him a power in the world; he was only a poor player in the world's fair at Bath.
Court ladies and people of distinction knew William Herschel at Bath. They patronised him and his sister,
- ↑ See Walpole's Letters from Bath, v. 160, Oct. 2, 1766.
