This Neefe, long since forgotten, was one of the best musicians of the time, and thought worthy to be named in the same breath with Bach and Graun. He was a ready composer, and the favourite pupil of Johann Adam Hiller, Bach's successor as Cantor in the Thomasschule at Leipzig. He appears, moreover, to have been an amiable, conscientious man, and so high did his artistic reputation stand that he, although a Protestant, was tolerated as organist in the archbishop's private chapel. How comes it, then, that with all these qualifications Beethoven would not afterwards allow that he had profited by his instructions? The question is not easily solved. Beethoven himself wrote from Vienna to his old teacher in 1793, "I thank you for the advice which you often gave me whilst striving in my divine art. If I ever become a great man you have a share in it." Notwithstanding this tribute there was a coldness between them. It may be that master and pupil had not that entire sympathy with each other which is essential to any worthy result from the relationship. Beethoven, as we know, was self-willed, and overflowing with an originality which, even at that early age, would not easily brook dictation. Neefe, on the other hand, was a _young_ man, and endowed, as he himself tells us in his Autobiography, with a certain satirical tendency, which he may have allowed somewhat too free play in criticising his young pupil's efforts in composition. If the latter conjecture be correct, it gives the clue to the earnest advice Beethoven was wont to give the critics in after years--never to judge the performances of a beginner harshly, as "many would thus be deterred from following out what they might, perhaps, have ultimately succeeded in." Contempt to a sensitive, shrinking nature is like the blast of the east wind on a tender flower; downright condemnation is easier to bear than the sneer which throws the young aspirant, smarting and humiliated, back into himself--his best energies withered for the moment.