The story of his fine life, watched over from the cradle as by fairies, is a poem. The family names are compound. Mendelssohn is German for son of Mendel; Bartholdy is Hebrew for son of Tholdy. One key to his artistic character is the general culture, intellectual and social, of the man, for which the opportunities were granted him from infancy in fuller measure than to any other great musician. Born in prosperity, amid refining influences; taught Greek and Latin classics; familiar with living poets, scholars and philosophers who frequented his father's house; passing a fortnight at the impressible age of eleven in the house of Goethe; imbued with reverence for the character and teaching of his wise Platonic grandfather, the Jew Moses Mendelssohn, the model for Lessing's "Nathan the Wise"; stimulated by the piquant and genial letters of his three gifted aunts (two of whom had turned Catholic), and above all by the tender, wise, exacting and appreciative oversight of his excellent father, to whom the best was only "just good enough," he grew unconsciously into a large and liberal way of thinking. He was at home in the most cultivated circles, "a native there, and to the manner born." What might it not have been to Schubert to have germinated and unfolded under such a genial sun in such a soil! Well was the youth named Felix! Moses Mendelssohn, a little humpbacked Jew peddler boy, with keen eyes and winning face, came to Berlin about the middle of the last century. He had a hard fight with penury, and an unconquerable passion for knowledge and the culture of his mind. At that time the Jews in Germany were at the lowest stage of social repression. Excluded from nearly all honorable and profitable pursuits, restricted to Jew quarters, outcast and despised, they were the chosen victims of Christian intolerance. On the other hand, driven back upon the synagogue, upon the even fiercer bigotry of their own priests and rabbis, with whom "to speak the German language correctly or to read a German book was heresy," the young man was caught between two fires. Yet so brave, so able was he, so faithful to his great life purpose, and withal so winning by his hearty, sterling honesty of spirit, that he became one of the lights of German literature, one of its recognized apostles; the intimate associate of Lessing, Herder, Kant, etc. His conversation had the Socratic quality; and his "Phaedo," a dialogue on immortality, founded on that of Plato, was so persuasive that it was translated into many languages. He married a Jewess in Hamburg, and grew prosperous as well as learned. He left three daughters and three sons. Abraham, the father of Felix, was the second son, a thriving banker, for a while in Paris, when he married Lea Salomon, of the Bartholdy family, a lady of wealth and culture, from Berlin, and formed a partnership with his elder brother in his native Hamburg. Their first child was Fanny, born,