life in 1765, when he was appointed organist at Halifax. Now,
there is a great social difference between the position of an oboe-
player in a band and a church organist; and it was through his
organ-playing that Herschel was finally enabled to leave his needy
hand-to-mouth life in Yorkshire. A year later, he obtained the
post of organist to the Octagon Chapel at Bath, an engagement which
gave him new opportunities of turning his mind to the studies for
which he possessed a very marked natural inclination. Bath was in
those days not only the most fashionable watering-place in England,
but almost the only fashionable watering-place in the whole
kingdom. It was, to a certain extent, all that Brighton,
Scarborough, Buxton, and Harrogate are to-day, and something more.
In our own time, when railways and steamboats have so altered the
face of the world, the most wealthy and fashionable English society
resorts a great deal to continental pleasure towns like Cannes,
Nice, Florence, Vichy, Baden, Ems, and Homburg; but in the
eighteenth century it resorted almost exclusively to Bath. The
Octagon Chapel was in one sense the centre of life in Bath; and
through his connection with it, Herschel was thrown into a far more
intelligent and learned society than that which he had left behind
him in still rural Yorkshire. New books came early to Bath, and
were read and discussed in the reading-rooms; famous men and women
came there, and contributed largely to the intellectual life of the
place; the theatre was the finest out of London; the Assembly Rooms
were famous as the greatest resort of wit and culture in the whole
kingdom. Herschel here was far more in his element than in the
barracks of Hanover, or in the little two-roomed cottage at rustic
Doncaster.

He worked very hard indeed, and his work soon brought him comfort