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His great telescope took rank, before and after its completion, as the chief scientific wonder of the age. Slough was crowded with sightseers. All the ruck of Grand Dukes and Serene Highnesses from abroad, besides royal, noble, and gentle folk at home, flocked to gaze at it and interrogate its maker with ignorant or intelligent wonder. The Prince of Orange was a particularly lively inquirer. On one of his calls at Slough, about ten years after the erection of the forty-foot, finding the house vacant, he left a memorandum asking if it were true, as the newspapers reported, that “Mr. Herschel had discovered a new star whose light was not as that of the common stars, but with swallow-tails, as stars in embroidery?”!

Pilgrim-astronomers came, too—Cassini, Lalande, Méchain and Legendre from Paris, Oriani from Milan, Piazzi from Palermo. Sniadecki, director of the observatory of Cracow, “took lodgings,” Miss Herschel relates, “in Slough, for the purpose of seeing and hearing my brother whenever he could find him at leisure. He was a very silent man.” One cannot help fearing that he was also a very great bore. Von Magellan, another eminent foreign astronomer, communicated to Bode an interesting account of Herschel’s methods of observation. The multitude of entries in his books astonished him. In sweeping, he reported, “he lets each star pass at least three times through the field of his telescope, so that it is impossible that anything can escape him.” The thermometer in the garden stood that night, January 6th, 1785, at 13 deg. Fahrenheit; but the royal astronomer, his visitor remarked, “has an excellent constitution, and thinks about nothing else in the world but the celestial bodies.”