We have been turning over the leaves of a book from which Schumann and Chopin might have found matter to fill years of their lives. In form and colour, melody and movement, the model was before them. This modest man, who in his Vienna solitude wrote such things as these for himself, loved a few good friends, but publicity he hated. A composer who never appeared in public--was the like ever seen before? In the aged Beethoven the world understood it; but in this young man it could only reward it with indifference. He remained willingly unknown, like so many of his companions in sorrow who wished to be artists in themselves without relation to others, and without the encumbrance of patronage. The times were altering in music as in painting. The patronage of the State or of the Prince is disappearing; the commissions the artist receives become fewer and more distasteful; he becomes more intimate and is constrained to offer his works to the public, and to supply what it will purchase. Supply and demand rule art as well as anything else: but nowhere is the severance so painful. Pensions are irksome, and official posts are not to be had otherwise than indirectly. The struggle after the ideal which is the life of the artist is purer than it ever was. The type which Feuerbach and Böcklin represent in painting, that new type of artist who can be happy without commissions and without honorarium, is first clearly exhibited by Schubert in the musical world. Publicity, to which Beethoven at first had recourse, and which he would have carried further had fate not opposed, was impossible to Schubert. He had to live on a pension, his applications for posts were rejected, publishers were timid, and very slowly indeed did his songs win their way to favour. Goethe never answered him on receiving his songs; and Beethoven, to whom he shyly dedicated his Variations (Op. 10) as “admirer and worshipper,” only learnt to know him in the last days. As he began, so he died. The publishers had still to work through the whole century in order to bring out his works, which they dedicated in very stylish manner to Liszt, Mendelssohn, or Schumann: as Schubert closed his eyes he knew as little as the world that his simple integrity had won a new realm for art.