All in all, in spite of certain ficklenesses in which this immortal musician has been surpassed by lovers of all walks of life, from blacksmiths to bishops, music has created one of tenderest, most honest of all romances. But then there was a man whose life encompassed Mozart's, as a long brace encompasses a stave of music. For Joseph Haydn was born twenty-four years before Mozart, and died eighteen years after him. And this man's love affairs were of altogether different fabric. While Mozart died in his poverty at thirty-five, Haydn, dying at seventy-seven, was worried over the endowment he should leave to a discarded mistress, whose name, strangely enough, was also Aloysia. And Haydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way by proposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with results how unlike! Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the priests, who clustered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home. Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home, seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli. The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to "die by request," as Artemus Ward has it. After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension. Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, _sub rosa_, with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does not shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity. Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in history. We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew, whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for a homelife in a woman's heart.