Late in life, musicologist Dr Charles Burney composed Astronomy: An Historical and Didactic Poem, a twelve-canto poem on the history of astronomy, uniting his two amateur pastimes, poetry and astronomy. The poem led to friendship with Court Astronomer William Herschel, and for years Burney shared the work-in-progress, modelled (I argue) on Erasmus Darwin's scientific poems, in scribal coteries. Between 1807 and 1812, however, Burney burned the manuscript; only fragments survive. While biographer Roger Lonsdale attributes this destruction to Burney's ‘realization that for years he had been boring his friends’, I argue it was his fear, as he prepared the poem for publication, that the changing literary marketplace would damage his reputation as man of letters. My re-dating of the major fragment reinforces this argument.

中文翻译：

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“天文学缪斯”：查尔斯伯尼和天文学

晚年，音乐学家查尔斯·伯尼博士创作了《天文学：一首历史和教学诗》，一首关于天文学史的十二章诗，结合了他的两种业余消遣，诗歌和天文学。这首诗与宫廷天文学家威廉·赫歇尔建立了友谊，多年来伯尼在抄写小组中分享了正在进行的工作，模仿（我认为）伊拉斯谟·达尔文的科学诗。然而，在 1807 年至 1812 年之间，伯尼烧毁了手稿。只有碎片存活。虽然传记作者罗杰·朗斯代尔将这种破坏归因于伯尼“意识到他多年来一直让朋友们感到厌烦”，但我认为这是他在准备出版这首诗时担心不断变化的文学市场会损害他作为文人的声誉. 我对主要片段的重新约会加强了这一论点。