This page has been validated.
20
Caroline Lucretia Herschel.
[1767.
her desire for better instruction. The parents had never agreed on the subject. " When I had left school," she writes,
"My father wished to give me something like a polished education, but my mother was particularly determined that it should be a rough, but at the same time a useful one; and nothing farther she thought was necessary but to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make household linen. Having added this accomplishment to my former ingenuities, I never afterwards could find leisure for thinking of anything but to contrive and make for the family in all imaginable forms whatever was wanting, and thus I learned to make bags and sword-knots long before I knew how to make caps and furbelows. . . . . .My mother would not consent to my being taught French, and my brother Dietrich was even denied a dancing-master, because she would not permit my learning along with him, though the entrance had been paid for us both; so all my father could do for me was to indulge me (and please himself) sometimes with a short lesson on the violin, when my mother was either in good humour or out of the way. Though I have often felt myself exceedingly at a loss for the want of those few accomplishments of which I was thus, by an erroneous though well-meant opinion of my mother, deprived, I could not help thinking but that she had cause for wishing me not to know more than was necessary for being useful in the family; for it was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning.
******
But sometimes I found it scarcely possible to get through with the work required, and felt very unhappy that