“Ce qui le préservait d’un antagonisme perpétuel c’était l’habitude volontaire et bientôt invétérée de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce qui lui deplaisait: en général sans toucher à ses affections personelles, les êtres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient à ses yeux comme des espèces de fantômes; et comme il était d’une politesse charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui n’était chez lui qu’un froid dédain—une aversion insurmontable.” 108. The father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle. He had a conviction—in his case more truly founded than is usual—that he was the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because he _did_ estimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with respect to his gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart’s moral life, and to have given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow. “The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart’s style, is an interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful.” This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the interfusion of their own great individual genius with every subject they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other. The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di Tito at Prague;—which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the operas. Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he composed the _Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora_. When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said of himself was very striking from its _naïveté_ and truth. “I do not,” he said, “aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or style which makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart’s nose, and different from other people’s.”