Of Beethoven’s mother M. de Wyzewa says, “Poor Marie-Madeleine, with her pale complexion and her blonde hair, was not in vain a woman ‘_souffrante et sensible_,’ since from her came her son’s faculty of living in the emotions, of seeing all the world colored with sentiment and passion.” This emotional tendency, the writer thinks, the Flemish blood could not have given; and “it was to the unusual union of this profound German sensibility with the Flemish accuracy and keenness of mind that Beethoven owed his power to delineate with extraordinary precision the most intimate and tender sentiments.” With a final suggestion, tentatively advanced, that the weaknesses of Beethoven’s character, his changeable humor, his sudden fits of temper, his unaccountable alternations of gaiety and discouragement, may have been due to a nervous malady traceable to the grandmother, Maria-Josepha Poll, this masterly study of Beethoven’s antecedents, from which, whether we entirely accept its conclusions or not, we cannot fail to gain illumination, comes to a close.[37] Ludwig van Beethoven, the second of seven children of Johann and Maria-Magdalena Beethoven, was born at Bonn on the Rhine, on December 16 or 17, 1770. Inheriting the musical talent of his father and grandfather, he early showed so much ability that his father, stimulated by the stories of the wondrous precocity of Mozart, decided to make him into a boy prodigy. Ludwig was put hard at work, at the age of four, learning to play the piano, the violin, and the organ, and to compose; and though he had by no means the facility of Mozart, he progressed so well that at thirteen he was made “cembalist” [accompanist] in the court band of the Elector of Cologne, whose seat was at that time in Bonn. The first public mention of Beethoven occurs in an article entitled “An Account of the Elector of Cologne’s Chapel at Bonn,” written in 1783, and runs as follows: “Ludwig van Beethoven is a promising boy of eleven. [Johann van Beethoven had evidently trimmed his son’s age to suit his own idea of what a self-respecting prodigy’s should be.] He plays the piano with fluency and force, reads well at sight, and has mastered the greater part of Sebastian Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord.’ Any one acquainted with this collection of Preludes and Fugues in every key will understand what this means. His teacher has given him instruction in Thorough Bass, and is now practicing him in composition. This youthful genius deserves assistance, that he may be enabled to travel; if he continues as he has begun, he will certainly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”