After the death of her brother, on the 23d of August 1822, Miss Herschel returned to his and her own native country, Hanover, and there proceeded to employ herself in drawing up a catalogue of twenty-five thousand nebulae discovered by her brother, which she completed in 1828, and for which the Astronomical Society of London that year voted her a gold medal. The newspapers announced that she celebrated the ninety-seventh anniversary of her birth-day on the 16th of March 1847. "On that occasion, the king, it is stated on the authority of a letter from Hanover, sent to compliment her; the prince and princess-royal paid her a visit, and the latter presented her with a magnificent arm-chair, the back of which had been embroidered by her royal highness; and the minister of Prussia, in the name of his sovereign, remitted to her the gold medal awarded for the extension of the sciences." Notwithstanding her advanced age and bodily infirmities, Miss Herschel, it has since been stated by her distinguished nephew, Sir John F. W. Herschel, in a letter to the _Athenaeum_, is still [1847] in possession of her faculties. MADAME D'ARBLAY. [BORN 1752. DIED 1840.] MACAULAY. The daughter of Dr Burney deserves to have the progress of her mind recorded from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year. When her education had proceeded no further than her hornbook she lost her mother, and thenceforward educated herself. Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be. He loved his daughter dearly; but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them. No governess, no teacher of any art or of any language, was provided for her. But one of her sisters showed her how to write, and before she was fourteen she began to find pleasure in reading. It was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed. Indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very small. When at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the most celebrated writings of Voltaire and Moliere, and, what seems still more extraordinary, had never heard or seen a line of Churchill, who, when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets. It is particularly deserving of observation, that she appears to have been by no means a novel-reader. Her father's library was large, and he had admitted into it so many books which rigid moralists generally exclude, that he felt uneasy, as he afterwards owned, when Johnson began to examine the shelves. But in the whole collection there was only a single novel--Fielding's "Amelia."