June the 29th, 1791."

This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
personage. May we be there to see!

Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English
Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
consumption.

Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.

Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, "In London, I fell in love with
a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time." But Mr. Krehbiel
shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not "though
she was sixty years old," but "though I was sixty years old." I think we
are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
of their most potent beauty.

Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous t