References to this deafness, which was to Beethoven such a calamity, have been carefully studied and recorded by his various biographers, and occur nowhere more graphically than in those remarkable letters which give, without the need even of reading between the lines, so clear an exposition of the man as he was, as he aspired, and as he suffered. There has been as yet however no attempt to collate this evidence with a view to making a precise diagnosis of his case or with reference to the possible influence which the infirmity may have had upon his disposition, his habit of thought or possibly even upon the character of his compositions. "It is hard to arrive," says Grove, "at any certain conclusion on the nature and progress of Beethoven's deafness owing to the vagueness of the information; difficulty of hearing appears to have shown itself about 1798 in singing and buzzing in his ears, loss of power to distinguish words though he could hear the tones of voice, and great dislike to sudden loud noise; it was even then a subject of the greatest pain to his sensitive nature; like Byron with his club-foot he lived in morbid dread of his infirmity being observed, a temper which often kept him silent, and when a few years later he found himself unable to hear the pipe of a peasant playing at a short distance in the open air, it threw him into the deepest melancholy, and he wrote the well-known letter to his brother in 1802, which goes by the name of his Will." The above passage is really an epitomization of Beethoven's case, and, in connection with the collateral evidence and viewed in the light of our present knowledge of aural disease, plainly sets forth the progress as well as the character of his disorder, the exciting cause of which must ever remain a question, though the inference from the course of his disease, from the report of the post-mortem examination and from the evidence afforded by Dr. Bartolini, is at least permissible, that Beethoven's deafness originated, in part at least, in a constitutional disorder which may have been one of his inheritances from his father. Be that as it may, it is shown that he first became definitely aware of his infirmity when he was twenty-eight years of age, that his attention was first drawn to it and his appreciation of it subsequently heightened by the concomitant symptom of subjective noises in the ears, rushing and roaring sounds which he designates as "sausen" and "brausen"; this symptom, common to many forms of aural disease, occurs in such cases as that of Beethoven's only after the changes in the ear have already become well established, it marks a definite stage in the progress of the malady and is explainable as follows: the normal circulation of blood through the blood-vessels is productive of sound, precisely as is the flow of water or other fluid through pipes; these sounds vary in pitch and in intensity in proportion to the size of the