It seems proper at this place for the English Editor to remark that Mr. Thayer’s argument in favor of the authenticity of the Bettina letters was printed in the Appendix to Vol. III of the original edition with a concluding foot-note by Dr. Deiters in which he said that he had not been convinced by his author’s painstaking exposition that the letters are genuine. Dr. Riemann in the second German edition prints the letters and the argument in the text, distributing the latter in two chapters and appending a foot-note in which he gives it as his opinion that only the second (that dated February 10, 1811, the autograph of which is in existence) is authentic ~as a letter~, while the other two, though probably based on observations made by Beethoven to Bettina, were put into epistolary shape by her. One of Bettina’s letters to Pückler-Muskau, which tells of Beethoven’s rudeness to Goethe as illustrated in the anecdote which plays so important a rôle in the third letter, would seem to bear out this theory. But it is also likely that Beethoven’s original letters were tricked out by her for literary effect, which would help to explain the disappearance of the autographs of the letters of 1810 and 1812. The second letter, which was printed in ~facsimile~ in the Marx-Behncke critical biography of Beethoven (4th ed., 1884), was in possession of Pastor Nathusius in Quedlinburg in 1902. Chapter XI Bettina Brentano Again--Letters Between Beethoven and Goethe--The B-flat Trio--The Theatre in Pesth--Opera Projects--Therese Malfatti--Sojourn in Teplitz. Beethoven’s intercourse with the Brentanos kept his interest in Bettina alive and to this we owe a characteristic and welcome letter which, like the first, is here taken from the Nuremberg “Athenæum”: Vienna, February 10, 1811. Beloved, dear Bettine! I have already received two letters from you and observe from your letters to your brother [“to Tonie” in the “Ilius Pamphilius,” Tonie being her sister-in-law], that you still think of me and much too favorably. I carried your first letter around with me all summer and it often made me happy; even if I do not write to you often and you never see me I yet write you a thousand times a thousand letters in my thoughts. I could have imagined how you feel amidst the cosmopolitan rabble in Berlin even if you had not written about it to me; much chatter without deeds about art!!!!! The best description of it is in Schiller’s poem “Die Flüsse,” where the Spree speaks.