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On the 4th of October, 1767, the new Octagon Chapel was opened for service, with Herschel as organist. How it was that he obtained this “agreeable and lucrative situation” we are ignorant; but he had that singular capacity for distinction which explains everything. The Octagon Chapel became a centre of fashionable attraction, and he soon found himself lifted on the wave of public favour. Pupils of high rank thronged to him, and his lessons often mounted to thirty-five a week. He composed anthems, psalm-tunes, even full services for his assiduously-trained choir. His family were made sharers in his success. He secured a post in Linley’s orchestra for his younger brother Alexander, in 1771; and he himself fetched his sister Caroline to Bath in 1772. Both were of very considerable help to him in his musical and other enterprises, the latter of which gradually gained ground over the former.

Music was never everything to William Herschel. He cultivated it with ardour; composed with facility in the prevalent graceful Italian style; possessed a keen appreciation and perfect taste. But a musical career, however brilliant, did not satisfy him. The inner promptings of genius told him to look beyond. The first thirty-five years of his life were thus spent in diligently preparing to respond to an undeclared vocation. Nothing diverted him from his purpose of self-improvement. At first, he aimed chiefly at mastering the knowledge connected with his profession. With a view to the theory of music, “I applied myself early,” he said, in a slight autobiographical sketch sent to Lichtenberg at Göttingen, “to all the branches of the mathematics, algebra, conic sections, fluxions, etc. Contracting thereby an insatiable desire for knowledge in general, I extended my application to languages—French, Italian, Latin, English—and determined to devote myself entirely to the pursuit of knowledge, in which I resolved to place all my future enjoyment and felicity. This resolution I have never had occasion to change.” At Bath, in the midst of engrossing musical occupations, his zeal for study grew only the more intense. After fourteen or sixteen hours of teaching, he would “unbend his mind” by plunging into Maclaurin’s “Fluxions,” or retire to rest with a basin of milk, Smith’s “Opticks,” and Ferguson’s “Astronomy.” He had no sooner fallen under the spell of this last science than he “resolved to take nothing upon trust, but to see with my own eyes all that other men had seen before.”