ay his name be? He must have been
born a _German_."[16]

This obscurity did not long continue. The news spread quickly from
fashionable Bath to London. On the 6th of December, 1781, HERSCHEL was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to which he was formally
"admitted" May 30, 1782. He was forty-three years old.

He also received the Copley medal in 1781 for his "discovery of a new
and singular star."[17]

. . . "He was now frequently interrupted by visitors who were
introduced by some of his resident scholars, among whom I remember
Sir HARRY ENGELFIELD, Dr. BLAGDEN, and Dr. MASKELYNE. With the
latter he was engaged in a long conversation, which to me sounded
like quarrelling, and the first words my brother said after he was
gone were: 'That is a devil of a fellow.'. . .

"I suppose their names were often not known, or were forgotten; for
it was not till the year 1782 or 1783 that a memorandum of the names
of visitors was thought of.". . . "My brother now applied himself to
perfect his mirrors, erecting in his garden a stand for his
twenty-foot telescope; many trials were necessary before the
required motions for such an unwieldy machine could be contrived.
Many attempts were made by way of experiment before an intended
thirty-foot telescope could be completed, for which, between whiles
(not interrupting the observations with seven, ten, and twenty-foot,
and writing papers for both the Royal and Bath Philosophical
Societies), gauges, shapes, weight, etc., of the mirror were
calculated, and trials of the composition of the metal were made. In
short, I saw nothing else and heard nothing else talked of but these
things when my brothers were together. ALEX. was always very alert,
assisting when anything new was going forward, but he wanted
perseverance, and never liked to confine himself at home for many
hours together. And so it happened that my brother WILLIAM was
obliged to make trial of my abilities in copying for him catalogues,
tables, etc., and sometimes whole papers which were lent him for his
perusal. Among them was one by Mr. MICHELL and a catalogue of
CHRISTIAN MAYER, in Latin, which kept me employed when my brother
was at the telescope at night. When I found that a hand was
sometimes wanted when any particular measures were to be made with
the lamp micrometer, etc., or a fire to be kept