Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/34

12 in the Court Orchestra, and to give his sons to private pupils. There is no one of the family, except the eldest daughter, whom we do not know to have possessed marked ability in music, and this taste descended truly for four generations. In the letters of Chevalier, he describes meeting, in 1847, the eldest granddaughter of , who, he says, "is a musical genius."

Three members of the family,, and , formed a group which was inseparable for many years, and while the progress of the lives of and  was determined by the energy and efforts of , these two lent him an aid without which his career would have been strangely different. It is necessary to understand a little better the early life of all three.

The sons of the family all attended the garrison school in Hanover until they were about fourteen years old. They were taught the ordinary rudiments of knowledge—to read, to write, to cipher—and a