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Rh it is not likely that Napoleon, who wrote to Laplace about his great works, and was on intimate terms with the greatest minds of France, would descend to parade knowledge he did not possess, or indulge in a hypocrisy that was altogether out of place. Even his biographer writes, "The impression left upon Campbell's mind by this conversation appears to have been a little too strong."

Far more pleasant is the view given by Campbell of the astronomer himself. "I spent all Sunday with him and his family," he says. "His simplicity, his kindness, his anecdotes, his readiness to explain—and make perfectly perspicuous too—his own sublime conceptions of the universe are indescribably charming. He is seventy-six, but fresh and stout; and there he sat, nearest the door, at his friend's house, alternately smiling at a joke, or contentedly sitting without share or notice in the conversation. Any train of conversation he follows implicitly; anything you ask he labours with a sort of boyish earnestness to explain—a great, simple, good old man." The impression made on Campbell's mind is summed up in these words: "I really and unfeignedly felt as if I had been conversing with a supernatural intelligence. . . . After leaving Herschel I felt elevated and overcome; and have in writing to you made only this memorandum of some of the most interesting moments of my life."

A German writer, who paid a visit to Herschel at Slough a few years afterwards, has left an equally pleasant picture of the astronomer-sage.

"While we were standing by this machine (the great telescope), which we more admired than 14