Schubert was a man to whom friends became devotedly attached. He was faithful and true, a man of thoroughly sound character, disinterested and unselfish, without a particle of envy or jealousy about him. He won affection without demanding it or seeming to need it. He was one of those men whom one naturally and instinctively loves. Among his special friends we have already mentioned Spaun. Toward the end of 1814 he became acquainted with the poet Johann Mayrhofer, about ten years his senior, and the acquaintance ripened into a life-long intimacy. Mayrhofer was a man of eccentric nature, with a tinge of melancholy, possibly an incipient symptom of the insanity which many years afterward drove him to suicide. Perhaps the most interesting feature of his intimacy with Schubert was the powerful influence which the latter's music exercised upon the development of his poetical genius. It was under the spell of Schubert's charm that Mayrhofer's best poems came to blossom; and many of them were set to music by Schubert, among which "Erlasse," "Sehnsucht," "Nachtstück," "Die zürnende Diana," "Der Alpenjäger," "Der Schiffer," "Am Strome," and "Schlummerlied" deserve especial mention. Another of Schubert's friends, and the one who probably exerted the most influence upon him, was Franz von Schober. Their acquaintance began at a critical moment. After three years of faithful and conscientious work in school-teaching, Schubert began to find the drudgery of his position intolerable, and in 1816, as a public school of music was about to be opened as an appendage to the normal school at Laybach, near Trieste, he applied for the post of director. To appreciate the situation, we must not fail to note the amount of the director's salary, five hundred Viennese florins, or about one hundred dollars, a year! Such was the coveted income to which the _alternative_ seemed to be for Schubert, in Herr Kreissle's phrase, "an impecunious future." From Salieri and from Spendon recommendations were obtained, such as they were. There was nothing cordial in them, nothing to indicate that Schubert was a person of greater calibre than a certain commonplace Jacob Schaufl who obtained the appointment instead of him. Perhaps, however, they may only have doubted Schubert's capacity for a position of executive responsibility. It was at this juncture that young Schober came upon the scene, a student in comfortable circumstances, about eighteen years of age, who came to Vienna to continue his studies. He had fallen in with some of Schubert's songs a year or two before, and had conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the composer. When he found that the wonderful genius was a boy of about his own age, wearing out his nerves in a school room, and yet turning off divine music by the ream, he made up his mind to interpose. He could at least offer a home, and he persuaded Schubert to come and occupy his rooms with him. There Schubert began to give music lessons, but his