and recommended by him should not be treated as "charlatans, liars, and impostors, who go abroad with his permission to throw dust in people's eyes like common conjurors"; and the Archbishop was implored to undertake Wolfgang's cause as identical with his own against people, who "because they sniff the air of the town where the Emperor happens to reside, look with disdain on those who serve foreign princes, and speak disrespectfully of the foreign princes themselves." Nay, he calls upon him as a Christian to convince the unbelievers that the Almighty has worked a miracle in the birth of this prodigy at Salzburg:-- If ever I considered it my duty to convince the world of this miracle I do so now, at a time when every effort is made to bring miracles into disrepute and ridicule. What greater joy and triumph could I enjoy than to hear the astonished exclamation of a follower of Voltaire (Grimm): _Now for once in my life I have seen a miracle; it is the first._ But because this marvel is too patent and too open to be denied, every effort is made to suppress it, and to deprive the Lord of the glory due to Him. There is an idea that in a few years the wonder will cease and will fall back into the natural. So it is to be hidden away from the eyes of the world; for what could manifest it more openly than a public performance in a large and populous city? This tone was undoubtedly adopted as an appeal to the Archbishop's bigoted piety. In spite of all discouragements, L. Mozart never swerved from his main object. He had an immovable faith in the Providence which had "so often and so evidently urged him on or held him back, and always led him in the right way." Just as firm was his confidence in the artistic gifts of his son, for whose glorious future he considered it his mission to prepare the way. His conviction that the opera in Vienna would be the pioneer on the road to Italy made him ready to sacrifice to it even his official position in Salzburg:-- I reckon upon this as a means of extorting permission for the journey to Italy, a journey which, all things considered, cannot be long delayed, and for which the Emperor himself has given me every possible assistance in the imperial towns, and in Florence and Naples. Failing {FORTITUDE OF L. MOZART.} (75) this, we must pine at Salzburg in the vain hope of better fortune, until I shall have grown too old to make the journey at all, and until Wolfgang has grown up, and his performances are deprived of everything marvellous. Can it be that the first step of this opera in Vienna shall have been made in vain, and that my son is not to advance with rapid strides along the path so plainly marked out for him?