Simonetti, Maximilian’s favorite and very fine tenor concert-singer, and some twenty-five members of the electoral orchestra, with Franz Ries as conductor--Reicha was too ill--including Beethoven, the two Rombergs and the fine octet of wind-instruments, formed an equally ample provision for the strictly musical entertainments. Actors, singers, musicians--Simonetti and the women-singers excepted--most of them still young, all in their best years and at the age for its full enjoyment, made the journey in two large boats up the Rhine and Main. Before leaving Bonn the company assembled and elected Lux king of the expedition, who in distributing the high offices of his court conferred upon Bernhard Romberg and Ludwig van Beethoven the dignity of, and placed them in his service as, kitchen-boys--scullions. It was the pleasantest season of the year for such a journey, the summer heats being tempered by the coolness of the Rhine and the currents of air passing up and down the deep gorge of the river. Vegetation was at its best and brightest, and the romantic beauty of its old towns and villages had not yet suffered either by the desolations of the wars soon to break upon them or by the resistless and romance-destroying march of “modern improvement.” Coblenz and Mayence were still capitals of states, and the huge fortress Rheinfels was not yet a ruin. When Risbeck passed down the Rhine ten years before, his boat “had a mast and sail, a flat deck with a railing, comfortable cabins with windows and some furniture, and in a general way in style was built like a Dutch yacht.” In boats like this, no doubt, the jolly company made the slow and, under the circumstances, perhaps, tedious journey against the current of the “arrowy Rhine.” But a glorious time and a merry they had of it. Want of speed was no misfortune to them, and in Beethoven’s memory the little voyage lived bright and beautiful and was to him “a fruitful source of loveliest visions.” The Bingerloch was then held to be a dangerous, as it certainly was a difficult pass for boats ascending; for here the river, suddenly contracted to half its previous width, plunged amid long lines of rugged rocks into the gorge. So, leaving the boats to their conductors, the party ascended to the Niederwald; and there King Lux raised Beethoven to a higher dignity in his court--Wegeler does not state what it was--and confirmed his appointment by a diploma, or letters patent, dated on the heights above Rüdesheim. To this important document was attached by thread ravelled from a sail, a huge seal of pitch, pressed into the cover of a small box, which gave to the instrument a right imposing look--like the Golden Bull at Frankfort. This diploma from the hand of his comic majesty was among the articles taken by the possessor to Vienna where Wegeler saw it, still carefully preserved, in 1796.