they would have been to the point. When Dr. Burney made Herschel aware of his purpose in calling, the latter insisted on the trunk being unpacked, the poem produced, and the reading finished then and there. What the poet knew would be the work of a week or a month, if the book had been finished, the astronomer hoped to get out of the road as speedily as he would an ordinary observation on a starry night. He found himself buttonholed to instalments that spread over many months, and seem to have grown very captivating, though he must have soon seen that, if his was the sword of fame, Burney considered his tongue as the more important trumpet, that would blow that fame abroad to all time. But the situation was full of surprises. "He made a discovery to me," Dr. Burney goes on to say, "which had I known it sooner, would have overset me, and prevented my reading any part of my work. He said that he had almost always had an aversion to poetry, which he regarded as the arrangement of fine words, without any useful meaning or adherence to truth; but that when truth and science were united to these fine words, he liked poetry very well." This is rather an odd confession to come from a man whose sister tells us, "He composed glees, catches, etc., for such voices as he could secure, as it was not easy to find a singer to take the place of Miss Linley."[1] However, Dr. Burney managed to persuade him that in his didactic poem fine words were united to science and truth. The astronomer called on the poet in town, lived in his house, and
- ↑ Was the song referred to on p. 321 of the Memoirs, "In thee I bear so dear a part," his own? It "was going to be published by desire."
