“Well, but Herschel has been in town, for short spirts and back again, two or three times, and I have had him here two whole days. * * * I read to him the first five books without any one objection, except a little hesitation, at my saying, upon Bayly’s authority, that if the sun were to move round the earth, according to Ptolemy, instead of the earth round the sun, as in [Pg 264] the Copernican system, the nearest fixed star in every second must constantly run at the rate of near 100,000 miles. ‘Stop a little!’ cries he; ‘I fancy you have greatly under-rated the velocity required; but I will calculate it at home.’ And, on his second visit, he brought me a slip of paper, written by his sister, as he, I suppose, had dictated. ‘Here we see that Sirius, if it revolved round the earth, would move at the rate of 1426 millions of miles per second. Hence the required velocity of Sirius in its orbit would be above 7305 times greater than that of light.’ This is all that I had to correct of doctrine in the first five books! And he was so humble as to protest that I knew more of the history of astronomy than he did himself; and that I had surprised him by the mass of information that I had gotten together.
“In arranging another lecture, he flattered me much in a note, by saying that, if I should be disengaged on a day that he mentioned, it would give him pleasure to devote it to the continuation of ‘our’ poetical history. This is adoption!
“He came, and his good wife accompanied him; and I read four books and a half. * * * And on parting, still more humble than before, or still more amiable, he thanked me for the instruction and entertainment I had given him!
“What say you to that? ‘Can anything be grander?’ And all without knowing a word of what I have written of himself; all his discoveries, as you may remember, being kept back for the twelfth and last book. Adod! I begin to be a little conceited! * * * So God bless you, the dear Gardener, and the Alexandretto.
“But hold! on the first evening Herschel spent at Chelsea, when I called for my Argand lamp, Herschel, who had not seen one of those lamps, was surprised at the great effusion of light; and immediately calculated the difference between that and a single candle, and found it as sixteen to one.”
