in art, and opened to our view the innermost and deepest depths of the human soul. It was more than all else, Vienna and Austria that helped him to do this. During the period, beginning with 1780, Austria had recovered from the effects of the wounds it received in the Seven Years’ War. The people were well-to-do, and the rich nobles of the eastern provinces, the Esterhazys, Schwarzenbergs, Thuns and Kinskys left immense amounts of money in the capital. The state of society was not yet disturbed. The nobility and middle class lived in harmony with one another. Above all and dearly loved by all, sat throned, the Emperor Joseph II., an ideal Austrian, whose like had not been seen since the time of Maximilian I. The emperor Joseph was, so to speak, the counterpart, both in disposition and education, of old Fritz (Frederick the Great), who was the ablest representative at that time of practical German energy and intelligence. This it was that gave the Austrian, and above all the Viennese, disposition that peculiar character from which sprang a style of art which had no predecessor and no counterpart that could be called its equal save in Raphael and the antique--German chamber music. Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s quartets alone sufficed to make this Viennese period, from 1775 to 1825, a stretch of fifty years, forever memorable. But besides, there was the instrumental music of this brilliant musical triad whom Gluck had preceded. Life at this time in Vienna was overflowing with a warm sensuousness, unpolluted by the coarseness of vice. Men gave themselves up unconstrained to their emotions. This itself is the most natural and most fertile soil for productions of the mind, intended, primarily, to operate on the senses, and through the senses to speak to our heart of hearts and to our mind of minds. It is the most fitting soil for art. And hence, we find here the first and most indispensable of all conditions precedent to the full bloom of music. Life in the Austrian capital, sunk apparently in sensuousness, had, like a reflection of the ever brightening and warming sun, in its depths, that German, joyous good-nature, that _deutsche Gemueth_, that leveling peace, and that beautiful disposition which allow every living creature to do what pleases him best and go his own way. Added to this was the high degree of education which distinguished Vienna at the time, and which was influenced, in part, by direct contact with the period of the highest Italian culture, the renaissance. It had noble houses, wealthy and refined families of the middle class and of the learned, and above all, its emperor--if not in music, in all else the most nobly cultured! We have only to think of the other capitals at the time, Paris, London, and even Berlin, to be convinced that a Gluck, a Haydn, a Mozart, or a Beethoven, could never have thrived in any of them. They thrived in Vienna; and the last two artists asserted that it was in Vienna only