It is clear that Beethoven’s character could not develop itself normally, until he had become to a considerable degree independent of his father; and, consequently, that certain peculiarities related of him in his boyhood were probably less the results of his natural tendencies than the consequence of these being checked and obstructed by adverse circumstances. Soon after the letter to Dr. Schaden came the turning-point in the boy’s fortunes. Beethoven was now substantially emancipated from his father; his talents opened to him a higher and finer-toned circle of society; a love for the best literature was cherished, if not created; and no long time elapsed before his father’s increasing moral infirmities made him virtually the head of the family. The nobler qualities of his head and heart now received a culture impossible before. At last his character could and did develop itself normally. In all the following fourteen years--during which the boy organist of Bonn rises step by step to the position of first of pianists and most promising of the young composers in Vienna--one seeks in vain for any trace of the assumed constitutional tendency to melancholy. Now come the pathetic letters to Wegeler and the “Testament” of 1802--dark, gloomy, despondent. But these were all written under the first pressure of a malady which, he justly foreboded, would in time unfit him for general society and debar him from every field of the musician’s activity and ambition save that of composition. It is perhaps worthy of remark, that among the well-known phenomena of mental action are the intellectual prostration and the consequent depression of spirits which follow the completion of any great work in literature or art that has been for some time engrossing the attention, absorbing the thoughts and straining the faculties; and that the “Testament” of 1802 belongs in the precise period of reaction after completing that first of his great works, the Second Symphony. The “Testament” is indeed a cry of agony; but, in the paroxysms of intense physical suffering, cries of agony are not proofs of a naturally weak or defective constitution of the body; that sort of patient suffers less--but dies. Had Beethoven’s temperament really been of the gloomy and melancholy cast supposed, suicide, insanity or--through seeking temporary alleviation of mental suffering in sensual indulgences--moral shipwreck would soon have ended his career. “Strength is the morality of men who distinguish themselves above others, and it is also mine,” he wrote to his “Dearest Baron Muck Carter”:--“Beethoven was, in fact, the personification of strength,” said the aged poet Castelli to the present writer. The thought of suicide is alluded to in both the “Testament” and the letter to Wegeler; but with him the “To be or not to be?” was only a momentary, a passing, question; not because “conscience does make cowards of us all,” but by reason of innate manliness to bear “the slings and