for which he obtained large prices, but he also got a grant of L2000
from the king to aid him in constructing his huge forty-foot instrument.
It was here, too, in 1783, that Herschel married. His wife was a widow
lady of scientific tastes like his own, and she was possessed of
considerable means, which enabled him henceforth to lay aside all
anxiety on the score of money. They had but one child, a son, afterwards
Sir John Herschel, almost as great an astronomer as his father had been
before him. In 1785, the family moved to Clay Hall, in Old Windsor, and
in 1786 to Slough, where Herschel lived for the remainder of his long
life. How completely his whole soul was bound up in his work is shown in
the curious fact recorded for us by Carolina Herschel. The last night at
Clay Hall was spent in sweeping the sky with the great glass till
daylight; and by the next evening the telescope stood ready for
observations once more in the new home at Slough.

To follow Herschel through the remainder of his life would be merely to
give a long catalogue of his endless observations and discoveries among
the stars. Such a catalogue would be interesting only to astronomers;
yet it would truly give the main facts of Herschel's existence in his
happy home at Slough. Honoured by the world, dearly loved in his own
family, and engrossed with a passionate affection for his chosen
science, the great astronomer and philosopher grew grey in peace under
his own roof, in the course of a singularly placid and gentle old age.
In 1802 he laid before the Royal Society a list of five thousand new
stars, star-clusters, or other heavenly bodies which he had discovered,
and which formed the great body of his personal additions to
astronomical knowledge. The University of Oxford made him Doctor of
Laws, and very late in life he was knighted by the king--a too tardy
acknowledgment of his immense services to science. To the very last,
however, he worked on with a will; and, indeed, it is one of the great