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Rh Banks remained a sincere, well-meaning friend to the last." Not many days after (May 8, 1827) she writes what it never occurred to her, apparently, might account for this alleged mean-spirited shabbiness: "When in 1758 he again went to England, it was under such unpleasant circumstances that he was obliged to leave it to his mother to send his trunk after him to Hamburg." The nation or mob that shot Admiral Byng for incapacity four months before the Hanoverian bandsman deserted, that cashiered Lord George Sackville for less two years before, and that not only ridiculed the King's own uncle, "the poor Duke," as Cumberland was called, "the lump of fat crowned with laurel on the altar," but "were new grinding their teeth and nails to tear him to pieces the instant he lands," for a similar fault to Byng's, had to be reckoned with in bestowing honours on a deserter. So the King may have thought, and so his dilatoriness and apparent shabbiness may be accounted for, as well as the secrecy in which the affair was shrouded during their lives.

But there are circumstances which involve in still greater obscurity the whole of these so-called bargains between the King and William Herschel. Some years after the death of both, an English writer spoke of the ingratitude of England. But there is no proof that Herschel, though settled in England, was ever naturalized. His sister, so far as words could go, threw off her German nationality; but words are not law. "I was always sure to be noticed by the Duke of Cambridge as his countrywoman," she wrote in 1835, "(and