About this time the English Ambassador to the Elector’s court, named Kressner, who had extended help to the Beethoven family, living scantily on a salary of 400 fl. [?], died. Louis composed a funeral cantata to his memory--his first composition. He handed his score to Lucchesi and asked him to correct the errors. Lucchesi gave it back with the remark that he could not understand it, and therefore could not comply with his request, but would have it performed. At the first rehearsal there was great astonishment at the originality of the composition, but approval was divided; after a few rehearsals the approbation grew and the piece was performed with general applause. George Cressener came to Bonn in the autumn of 1755, and died there January 17, 1781, in the eighty-first year of his age. The “about this time” in Mäurer’s story agrees, therefore, well enough with that date; it is, however, a suspicious circumstance that Mäurer had left the service and returned to Cologne in the Spring of 1780 and, therefore, was not eye-witness to the fact; and another that the circumstance was not remembered by other members of the court chapel, not even by Franz Ries, nor by Neefe, who, though not then a member, was already in Bonn. “In 1780,” continues Mäurer, “Beethoven got acquainted with Zambona, who called his attention to his neglected education, gave him lessons daily in Latin, Louis continuing a year (in six weeks he read Cicero’s letters!)--also logic, French and Italian--until Zambona left Bonn in order to become bookkeeper for Bartholdy in Mühlheim.” In the “Geheime Staats-Conferenz Protocollen,” May 20, 1787, one reads: “Stephan Zambona prays to be appointed, _Kammerportier_, etc.,” to which is appended the remark: “the request not granted.” Zambona is a name, too, which, half a dozen years later, often appears in the Bonn “Intelligenzblatt,” as that of a shopkeeper in the Market Place of that town. If the story of the cantata be doubtful, that of these private studies on the part of a boy in Beethoven’s position, only in his tenth year and a schoolboy then if ever, like Hamlet’s possible dreams in the sleep of death, must “give us pause.”