Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/49

Rh at this time, and it is especially valuable as showing how he appeared to his cotemporaries.

"Although Mr. loved music to an excess, and made a considerable progress in it, he yet determined with a sort of enthusiasm to devote every moment he could spare from business to the pursuit of knowledge, which he regarded as the sovereign good, and in which he resolved to place all his views of future happiness in life." ...

"His situation at the Octagon Chapel proved a very profitable one, as he soon fell into all the public business of the concerts, the Rooms, the Theatre, and the oratorios, besides many scholars and private concerts. This great run of business, instead of lessening his propensity to study, increased it, so that many times, after a fatiguing day of fourteen or sixteen hours spent in his vocation, he would retire at night with the greatest avidity to unbend the mind, if it may be so called, with a few propositions in Author:Colin Maclaurin Fluxions, or other books of that sort."

It was in these years that he mastered Italian and made some progress in Greek.

"We may hazard a natural conjecture respecting the course of early studies. Music conducted him to mathematics, or, in other words, impelled him to