Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/115

Rh shabby when the return he had to make was set off against the salary he received. A teacher of elocution, the father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, had enjoyed a pension of the same amount for about twenty years, through the influence of Lord Bute, "to enable him to carry on his literary pursuits." But small though the allowance was, Herschel preferred the post of Royal Astronomer at Windsor to the troubles of a teacher's life at Bath. His friend Dr. Watson, not having yet forgotten, it may be, the discreditable civil war between "the sharps" and "the blunts," in which the King did not figure to advantage, four years before, only echoed what would have been the general sentiment of scientific men, had they known, as he did, the money part of the arrangement, when he exclaimed, "Never bought monarch honour so cheap!" It is far from pleasant to look back on this transaction or on the one-sided record of it given by Miss Herschel. Well would it have been had she laid the burden of blame on advisers, whom apparently she was not ignorant of. Probably it added to the bitterness which dropped from her pen, that in the following year, Pallas, or Mr. Pallas as he was called in this country, a student of George .'s own University of Göttingen, and a man of science far from equal to Herschel, got an addition of £200 to his salary in Russia! For the transaction, as we have seen, had a shabbier look than appears on the surface. At least, as it is represented, so it seems. Herschel was to give lessons in astronomy to the Princesses of the Royal Family, when called upon, and to receive the visitors whom His Majesty might send. This might and did