gang Mailer, founded on a diary written by Professor Wegeler,
an early friend of Boethoven. We can hardly suppose that this account of Beethoven's youth is to be taken as history. It reads more like a romance founded on facts, and indeed some of our contemporaries have cruelly set themselves to prove that the meeting between Mozart and Beethoven in Vienna could not have taken place, for the simple reason
that Mozart was at the date given somewhere else. Fact, however, or
fiction, the narrative of interviews at which Professor Wegeler does not pretend to have been present must have been embellished. With this warning we must say that our readers will find Furioso very agreeable reading. Beethoven's youth is in this book just what one would expect it to have been, and if that rather militates against the truth of the picture it is a proof of the painter's powers. These " passages " relate only to the great musician's youth, terminating in 1791, when he removed to Vienna, being then twenty-one years of age, and something of their merit consists in this—that they give some idea of the state of society in Bonn and the Rhineland when it was still ruled by the ecclesiastical electors. Beethoven's first patron was the Elector, Archbishop of Cologne, Max Franz, the brother of the Emperor Joseph. Really people seem to have been shamefully happy in those unreformed times.
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