Beethoven’s complaints concerning his financial condition were chronic and did not cease even in periods where extraordinary receipts make them difficult to understand. That the lamentations in his letters during the two years which we have in review were well-founded, however, is no doubt true. With so engrossing a work as the “Missa solemnis” on hand there could not have been much time for such potboilers as he mentions and the other sources of revenue were not many. From the records which are at hand, we know something about a few of his monetary transactions. On October 26, 1820, he collected 300 florins on account, apparently, from Artaria and Co., through his old friend Oliva. Shortly after his return to Vienna from the country, he asks the same firm, from which he had borrowed 750 florins,[30] for a further loan of 150 to save himself the necessity of selling one of his bank shares. These shares, it will be remembered in partial extenuation or at least explanation of some of his actions which are scarcely compatible with his protestations of his unswerving honesty in business transactions, had been set apart by him as his nephew’s legacy and he clung to them as to a sacred pledge. He promises to repay Artaria in three months and meanwhile to send him a composition in one, two or more movements, without honorarium. An incident which shows him in an unamiable light is connected with his financial relations with the publisher Steiner. On December 29, 1820, Steiner wrote him a letter which did not see the public eye until published in the “Neue Freie Presse” newspaper of Vienna on August 17, 1900. Steiner had sent Beethoven a dun, or at least a statement of account, and Beethoven had, evidently, been both rude and unreasonable in his reply. We quote from Steiner: [Sidenote: INDEBTEDNESS TO STEINER]