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12 language did not then rank high in the estimation of kings and princelings who made a pretence to literature. It was the tongue of rude and ignorant boors. Among them French was the language of learning, literature, and politeness. William Herschel was too quick-witted to neglect the language of the country he was destined to look forward to for preferment. He became a proficient in English, though at the best it was sometimes dictionary English, with its long Latin words, that cropped up in his written pages. Towards the end of his life, his mother tongue, the rude language of Germany, as it was then deemed, became somewhat unfamiliar to him. His sister Caroline, after fifty years' residence in this country, had to consult an English dictionary to find or recover words sufficiently strong to describe the objects of her dislike. Her brother, after a longer residence in England, found difficulty in carrying on a conversation in German with the Chancellor of the University of Halle, who paid him a visit at Slough shortly before the close of his life: "All accounts from his native country seemed to please him, although the German language had become somewhat less familiar to his ear." So the visitor wrote. Both brother and sister appear to have felt as Caroline felt when she wrote in her eighty-sixth year that she was a countrywoman of the Duke of Cambridge and would not be a Hanoverian.

The schooldays of William Herschel ended at the age of fourteen; his real education then began. Under the careful instruction of his father, he had become an excellent performer on the oboe and violin. But the father had higher views for a young man of his