r month, discarding scores of specula which they had worked
upon many weary hours in order to get the glass that would serve their
purpose--we must remove our hats in reverence.

* * * * *

God sends great men in groups. From Seventeen Hundred Forty for the next
thirty-five years the intellectual sky seemed full of shooting-stars.
Watt had watched to a purpose his mother's teakettle; Boston Harbor was
transformed into another kind of Hyson dish; Franklin had been busy with
kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was
pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a
Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and
Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole
was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill;
Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was
mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the
apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West, the American,
were forming an English School of Art; George Washington and George the
Third were linking their names preparatory to sending them down the
ages; Boswell was penning undying gossip; Blackstone was writing his
"Commentaries" for legal lights unborn; Thomas Paine was getting his
name on the blacklist of orthodoxy; Burke, the Irishman, was polishing
his brogue so that he might be known as England's greatest orator; the
little Corsican was dreaming dreams of conquest; Wellesley was having
presentiments of coming difficulties; Goldsmith was giving dinners with
bailiffs for servants; Hastings was defending a suit where the chief
participants were to die before a verdict was rendered; Captain Cook was
giving to this world new lands; while William Herschel and his sister
were showing the world still other worlds, till then unknown.

* * * * *

When the brother and sister had followed the subject of astronomy as far
as Ferguson had followed it, and knew all that he knew, they thought
they surely would be content.

Progress depends upon continually being dissatisfied. Now Ferguson
aggravated them by his limitations.

In their music they amused, animated and inspired the fashionable
idlers.

William gave lessons to his private pupils, led his orchestra, played
the organ and harpsichord, and managed to make ends meet, and would have
gotten reasonably rich had he