With the expulsion from Stuttgart Weber's wanderings began again, and for several years, the rest of the time indeed which may be counted in the period preparatory to his entrance upon his estate as a genius conscious of a mission and equipped for its performance, his life is like that of a minstrel knight of old, save for the difference in social and artistic environment. At the very outset of these final peregrinations there is noticeable a sign of his moral regeneration, preceding only by a little most convincing evidences of a determination to make good also the artistic shortcomings due to his desultory early training and his later frivolities. Toward the close of 1810 he wrote in his journal: "I can say calmly and truthfully that I have grown to be a better man within the last ten months. My sad experiences have made me wiser, I am become orderly in my business affairs and steadily industrious." The men whose friendship he cultivated on his travels were worthy of the best he could offer, and he made no more companionships that were hindrances to his growth. In Mannheim, whither he first went with letters from Danzi, it was the theoretician Gottfried Weber who gave him encouragement, help and a friendship that lasted till death. In Darmstadt began a lovely intercourse with Meyerbeer, who was then studying with Vogler, and whose parents received him like one of the family when he went to Berlin. In Hamburg he met E. T. A. Hoffman, that incarnation of the Romantic spirit; and in Munich he formed a social and artistic connection with the clarinettist, Bärmann, which was a source of delight and profit to them both. Duke Emil Leopold August, of Saxe Gotha, with all his crazy eccentricities, was a kind patron, at whose court he came into close relationship with Spohr, whom he had first met at Stuttgart, and on whom he had made an unfavorable impression. He went to Weimar, and learned to love Wieland and would also doubtless have bent the knee to Goethe, had that great man treated him with a little more than scant courtesy. It would seem, however, as if the great poet had imbibed, consciously or unconsciously, some of the prejudice against Weber which his musical oracle, Zelter, cherished. Weber's resolve to give truer devotion to his art bore fruit first in a heightened appreciation of the value of criticism. Not only did he seek to profit by the censure bestowed on his own works on the score of a want of plastic beauty and soundness of form, but he sought to give greater dignity to criticism by cultivating it himself. In Darmstadt he joined Meyerbeer and others in organizing a secret society which had for a motto "the elevation of musical criticism by musicians." He even recurred to his old project of founding a critical journal, and though he did not carry it out, he was thus in a sense a forerunner of Schumann, as the "Harmonischer Verein" (thus the critical coterie called itself) was a prototype of the