manager, who had been ruined by unsuccessful
speculations, and came to implore his assistance. Mozart gave him
the score without price, with full permission to perform it in his
own theatre, and for his own benefit; only stipulating that he was
not to give a copy to any one, in order that the author might
afterwards be enabled to dispose of the copyright. The manager
promised strict compliance with the condition. The opera was
brought out, filled his theatre and his pockets, and, some short
time afterwards, appeared at five or six different theatres, by
means of copies received from the grateful manager."

Mozart's career, when hastening to its close, was illumined by gleams
of prosperity that came but too late. On returning from Prague, in
Nov. 1791, from bringing out the _Clemenza di Tito_, at the coronation
of Leopold, the new Emperor--

"He found awaiting him the appointment of kapell-meister to the
cathedral church of St Stephen, with all its emoluments, besides
extensive commissions from Holland and Hungary for works to be
periodically delivered. This, with his engagements for the
theatres of Prague and Vienna, assured him of a competent income
for the future, exempt from all necessity for degrading
employment. But prospects of worldly happiness were now phantoms
that only came to mock his helplessness, and embitter his parting
hour."

"Now must I go," he would exclaim, "just as I should be able
to live in peace; now leave my art when, no longer the slave
of fashion, nor the tool of speculators, I could follow the
dictates of my own feeling, and write whatever my heart prompts. I
must leave my family--my poor children, at the very instant in
which I should have been able to provide for their welfare."

The story of his composing the requiem for a mysterious stranger, and
his melancholy forebodings during its composition, are too well known
to require repetition here. The incident, to all appearance, was not
extraordinary in itself, and owed its imposing character chiefly to
the morbid state of Mozart's mind at the time.

On the 5th of December 1791, the ill-defined disease under which he
had for some time laboured, ended in his dissolution; and subsequent
examination showed that inflammation of the brain had taken place. He
felt that he was dying--"The taste of death," he said to his
sister-in-law, "is already on