child and the welfare of the community. He was proud of the boy’s intellectual gifts, which were out of the ordinary; he dreamed of seeing him great and respected in the eyes of the world; he wanted loving companionship now, and in his old age; he hungered for sympathy and for help which would not keep him in bonds of obligation to men whose disinterestedness he could not understand because of his suspicious disposition; he desired to see by his side and in his kin an incarnation of that polite learning and that practical knowledge of worldly affairs which had been denied to him. All his aims were laudable, all his desires natural and praiseworthy; but he was the last man in the world to know how to attain them. There can be no doubt that his stubborn insistence upon making himself the sole director of the welfare of his ward cost him the sympathy, perhaps also the respect and regard, of many of those whose counsel he was perforce compelled to seek. For a long time until the final and woeful trial came it separated him from the oldest and truest friend that he had in Vienna--Stephan von Breuning. It tested the patience and tried the forbearance of those who helped him in his mistaken zeal. [Sidenote: BEETHOVEN’S MORAL NATURE MARRED] Moreover, it may be said without harshness or injustice to his memory that its consequences to his own moral nature were most deplorable. In a mind and heart prone to equity and tenderness it developed a strange capacity for cruel injustice. Aided by his native irresolution it twisted his judgment and turned his conduct into paradox. To satisfy his own love for the boy he strove fiercely to stifle a child’s natural affection for its mother. He thought that love for himself would grow out of hatred of the woman, though the passion which he tried to evoke was abhorrent to every instinct of nature. It matters not that the mother of Karl was profligate and lewd. Once a glimmer of that fact dawned upon him. It was while he was struggling to prevent all intercourse between the widow and her child in the early years that he was compelled to admit that to a child under all circumstances a mother is a mother still; but he made the confession to extenuate the conduct of the boy, not to justify the solicitude of the woman. His memory of his own mother, the sweet, patient sufferer of Bonn, was to him like a benison his whole life long. “Who was happier than I when I could still speak the sweet word ‘mother’ and have it heard,” he wrote to Dr. Schade, who had helped him on his sorrowful journey from Vienna to Bonn in 1787. But from the time that his brother Kaspar died until he himself gave up the ghost he was unswervingly occupied in preventing communication between Kaspar’s widow and her son. After more than twelve years he found that what he had tried to eradicate in the child, still lived in the youth. He had fought against nature and failed; and the failure filled him with bitterness, added to his