Page:Hector Macpherson - Herschel (1919).djvu/14

8 of his life already referred to, tells us that his father "taught me to play on the violin as soon as I was able to hold a small one made on purpose for me. . . . Being also desirous of giving all his children as good an education as his very limited circumstances would allow, I was at a proper time sent to a school where, besides religious instructions, all the boys received lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and as I very readily learned every task assigned me, I soon arrived at such a degree of perfection, especially in arithmetic, that the master of the school made use of me to hear younger boys say their lessons and to examine their arithmetical calculations."

At the age of fourteen and a half, young William Herschel entered the band of the Hanoverian Guards, on 1st May, 1753. His school life was at an end, but his education was only beginning. For over two years he received private lessons from a teacher named Hofschläger, who afterwards filled an important post at Hamburg. These lessons included languages, logic, ethics, and metaphysics. In those early years Herschel's thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable. "Although," he wrote in after years, "I loved music to excess and made considerable progress in it, I yet determined with a sort of enthusiasm to devote every moment I could spare to the pursuit of knowledge, which I regarded as the sovereign good, and in which I resolved to place all my future views of happiness in life."

This intellectual keenness was undoubtedly stimulated by the home environment. The mother, it is true, was hostile to intellectual ambition; she was a typical German Hausfrau, with no sympathy for aspirations; but, as before mentioned, Isaac Herschel encouraged his sons to talk and think on scientific and philosophical subjects. Caroline Herschel, then a little girl about five years of age, has given a very interesting glimpse into this period.