Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/39

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TEACHER AND ORGANIST AT BATH
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this tour and concert. Her brother William seems to have at that time fallen entirely out of her life, and to have left her, without education, to become a household drudge and the slave of her brother Jacob. But she cherished a spirit which, amid much that was extremely depressing, scorned to be the one or the other.

In the following year, 1766, William removed to Bath, where he became a teacher of music and organist of the Octagon Chapel. For five or six years after, obscurity again settles on his life and adventures. All that Caroline records is that Jacob joined his brother at Bath, and showed the same flightiness of disposition which the family had previously seen in his character. To speak of William as well known in the society for which Bath was then famous, or among the learned men and physicians by whom the town was frequented, is to people the darkness with visions of what we think should have been, but was not. He was little known there or elsewhere, till he took the world by storm; but at that period events were taking place in Bath which helped materially to lift the curtain of darkness off his life in 1772. He was then thirty-four years of age.

The musical director of Bath in those days was Linley, whose daughter Elizabeth, "at the age of twelve years, was brought forward publicly at the Rooms, where she so charmed the company by her taste and execution" as a singer, that she at once received the name of the Siren. Two years later she got a more attractive name, and was called the Angel. Her début took place in the very year Herschel came to Bath. Before she was seventeen she had turned the heads