They left Munich on the 11th of October, 1777--that is, a full fortnight after their arrival. The father reminds them that neither “fair words, compliments nor _bravissimos_ pay the postmaster or the host.” “Do all you can to earn some money, and be as careful as possible about your expenses. The object of your journey is, and must be, either to obtain employment or to earn money.” This last, however, was not their object in the rich and free imperial city of Augsburg, whither they first directed their steps, because it was their father’s birthplace. They received a warm welcome there from the father’s brother, like Wolfgang’s grandfather, a book-binder. Mozart’s playing and composition, as well as himself, here as everywhere else, met with the greatest recognition, both in public and private, but he did not succeed in giving a concert. The “patricians” were not in funds. And when the Protestant patricians invited them to their boorish academy (to the _vornehmen Bauernstub Akademie_), the total amount of the present made was--two ducats. “I’m very sure,” the father says, “they would scarcely have gotten me into their beggarly academy;” and, we may add: “The prophet is without honor in his own country.” But he has erected the best possible monument to those Gothamites, so foolishly proud of their old imperial-city denizenship. In Mozart’s letters to his father, we get an exquisitely faithful picture of “free city” life and “free city” men, with the exaggerated self-consciousness and self-satisfaction of inherited possession and honor, so frequently met with in them that even mere youths seemed almost in their dotage. One cannot but grow merry at the expense of that narrow little world. “His grace,” the chamberlain to the exchequer of the town, Herr von Langenmantel the “my lords,” his sons, and his “gracious” young wife, fare all the worse under the lash of the Mozart’s well-known “wicked tongue,” because Mozart might reasonably have hoped to find a becoming welcome in his father’s birthplace. Even the golden spur given Mozart by Pope Ganganelli did more to charm these “free citizens” than it did to remind them of the honors so young an artist had already won, and that he was, in consequence, the peer of any one of them. One officer of the imperial army, especially, who ignored this fact, was very properly snubbed, and taught the lesson that Mozart was not to be made sport of. We read in one of the father’s letters, “Whenever I thought of your journey to Augsburg, I could not help thinking of Wieland’s Abderites; a man should get an opportunity to see _in natura_ what in reading he considers a pure ideal.” But Mozart had here the best of opportunities to pursue those studies which the artist needs, in order to paint from life. We are reminded of his experiences, like those in Augsburg, by the brutal, self-destructive, ridiculous haughtiness of Osmin in the “Elopement from the Seraglio.”