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Herschel married, May 8th, 1788, Mary, the only child of Mr. James Baldwin, a merchant in the City of London, and widow of Mr. John Pitt. She was thirty-eight and he fifty. Her jointure relieved him from pecuniary care, and her sweetness of disposition secured his domestic happiness. They set up a curious double establishment, taking a house at Upton, while retaining that at Slough. Two maidservants were kept in each, and a footman maintained the communications. So at least runs Mrs. Papendick’s gossip. Miss Burney records in her Diary a tea at Mr. De Luc’s, where Dr. Herschel accompanied a pair of vocalists “very sweetly on the violin. His newly-married wife was with him, and his sister. His wife seems good-natured; she was rich, too! And astronomers are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as stars.”

He was now at the height of prosperity and renown. Diplomas innumerable were showered upon him by Academies and learned societies. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin, he returned thanks for his election as a member of the American Philosophical Society, and acquainted him with his recent detection of a pair of attendants on the “Georgian planet.” A similar acknowledgment was addressed to the Princess Daschkoff, Directress of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The King of Poland sent him his portrait; the Empress Catherine II. opened negotiations for the purchase of some of his specula, Lucien Bonaparte repaired to Slough incognito; Joseph Haydn snatched a day from the turmoil of his London engagements to visit the musician-astronomer, and gaze at his monster telescopes. By universal agreement, Dr. Burney declared, Herschel was “one of the most pleasing and well-bred natural characters of the day, as well as the greatest astronomer.” They had much in common, according to Dr. Burney’s daughter. Both possessed an uncommon “suavity of disposition”; both loved music; and Dr. Burney had a “passionate inclination for astronomy.” They became friends through the medium of Dr. Burney’s versified history of that science. In September, 1797, he called at Slough with the manuscript in his valise. “The good soul was at dinner,” he relates; and, to his surprise, since he was ignorant of Herschel’s marriage, the company included several ladies, besides “a little boy.” He was, nothing loth, compelled to stay over-night; discussed with his host the plan of his work, and read to him its eighth chapter. Herschel listened with interest, and modestly owned to having learnt much from what he had heard; but presently dismayed the author by confessing his “aversion to poetry,” which he had generally regarded as “an arrangement of fine words without any adherence to the truth.” He added, however, that “when truth and science were united to those fine words,” they no longer displeased him. The readings continued at intervals, alternately at Slough and Chelsea, to the immense gratification of the copious versifier, who occasionally allowed his pleasure to overflow in his correspondence.