Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/39

 regained his former skill on the violin, and was reduced to a sad state of suffering and infirmity; a few months later he was pronounced to be in a confirmed dropsy. Changes of abode, not always for the better; anxieties, on account of Alexander's prospects and Jacob's vagaries; disappointment, at seeing his daughter grow up without the education he had hoped to give her; were the circumstances under which the worn-out sufferer struggled through the last three years of his life, copying music at every spare moment, assisting at a Concert only a few weeks before his death, and giving lessons until he was obliged to keep wholly to his bed. He was released from his sufferings at the comparatively early age of sixty-one on the 22nd March, 1767, leaving to his children little more than the heritage of his good example, unblemished character, and those musical talents which he had so carefully educated, and by which he probably hoped the more gifted of his sons would attain to eminence.

Miss Herschel describes herself as having fallen into "a kind of stupefaction," which lasted for many weeks after the loss of her father, and the awakening to life had little of hope in the present or promise for the future, so far as she could see then. At the age of seventeen she had learned little beyond the first elements of education, and she was now deprived of the one friend who encouraged and sympathised with