This was not the musician, but his grandfather, the metaphysician, and father of that happy and contentedly obscure intermediate Mendelssohn, who used to say, "When I was young, I was known as the son of the great Mendelssohn; and now that I am old, I am known as the father of the great Mendelssohn." But who ever was known to compose any thing while sitting with his feet in a tub of _hot_ water, and with the composing draught standing on the table at his side, to remind him that in the matter of composition he is to be a passive, and not an active subject? How many marriages may not have been prevented by colds? The gentleman is robbed of his courage, and does not use his opportunity for urging his suit; or the lady catches a cold, and appears blowing her nose, and with blanched cheeks and moist eyes: "The sapphire's blue within her eyes is seen; Her lips the ruby's choicest glow disclose; Her skin is like to fairest pearls I ween; But ah! the lucid crystal tips her nose." And so the coming declaration of love is effectually nipped in the bud by the unromantic realities of the present catarrh. Napoleon, as is well known, lost the battle of Leipsig in consequence of an indigestion brought on by eating an ill-dressed piece of mutton; and Louis Philippe, in February, 1848, fled ignominiously from the capital of his kingdom because he had a cold, and could not use the faculties which at least might have secured for him as respectable a retreat to the frontier as was enjoyed by his predecessor Charles the Tenth. He might have shown fight; he might have thrown himself upon the army, or upon the National Guard; he might have done a hundred things better for his own fame, rather than get into a hack cab and run away. But it was not to be: Louis Philippe had the influenza; and Louis Philippe with the influenza was not the same man who had shown so much craft and decision in the many previous emergencies of his long and eventful life. Louis Philippe, without a cold, had acquitted himself creditably in the field of battle, had taught respectably in schools, had contrived for himself and his family the succession to a kingdom, had worked and plotted through all the remarkable events with which his name is associated, and by which it will ever be remembered in the romance of history; but Louis Philippe, with a cold, subsided at once and ingloriously into simple John Smith in a scratch-wig.