It must long ago have been observed by the studious reader of these pages that a great deal of illuminative material in the life-story of Beethoven is found in the correspondence between the composer and his publishers; but these letters in the later years of his life, and especially in the period with which we are now concerned, were but sorry guides to the state of forwardness in which compositions found themselves at any stated time. Frequently they offer for publication works which, so far as they had been fixed on paper at all, existed only in the form of detached sketches; also some which, so far as we know, existed only in the plans or purposes of the composer of which the letters themselves are the only surviving records. It seems also to be a fair deduction from them that Beethoven’s attitude towards his publishers with reference to them depended to a considerable extent on his temporary financial condition, and sometimes they are an index of that consecration to high artistic ideals of which he remains an unapproached exemplar. The Mass in D is almost always ready for delivery when he is in financial extremities; but when he has helped himself with loans or the collection of advances, or the sale of old manuscripts or potboilers, his insatiable desire to revise, amend and improve his great work takes possession of him, and the vast amount of rewriting and recopying thus entailed pushes its ultimate completion into the future and precipitates another period of distress. He borrowed money from Brentano on the strength of the deposit which Simrock had made in Frankfort; collected the honorarium which Peters had advanced on the purchase of long undelivered songs, bagatelles and marches; postponed the evil day of liquidation with Steiner; finally borrowed money from his brother Johann, and to secure the debt practically hypothecated to him all the manuscripts which lay finished and unfinished in his desk by placing their sale in his hands, subject to his instructions and advice. This circumstance brings Johann van Beethoven back significantly into this history and invites an inquiry into his character and his conduct with reference to his famous brother. That, contemptible as his character may have been, he has yet been maligned and his conduct towards Beethoven falsified by Schindler and the romance writers who have accepted Schindler’s misrepresentations and embellished them with the products of their own unscrupulous imaginations, is scarcely open to doubt.