ch Vienna banker was proposed
as a suitable match, he said, "Ah! a man like Eskeles would greatly
please my pride!" Dorothea did marry Simon Veit, a banker, a worthy
man, who in no way could satisfy the demands of her impetuous nature.
Yet her father believed her to be a happy wife. In her thirtieth year
she made the acquaintance, at the house of her friend Henriette Herz, of
a young man, five years her junior, who was destined to change the
course of her whole life. This was Friedrich von Schlegel, the chief of
the romantic movement. Dorothea Veit, not beautiful, fascinated him by
her brilliant wit. Under Schleiermacher's encouragement, the relation
between the two quickly assumed a serious aspect. But it was not until
long after her father's death that Dorothea abandoned her husband and
children, and became Schlegel's life-companion, first his mistress,
later his wife. As Gutzkow justly says, his novel "Lucinde" describes
the relation in which Schlegel "permitted himself to be discovered. Love
for Schlegel it was that consumed her, and led her to share with him a
thousand follies--Catholicism, Brahmin theosophy, absolutism, and the
Christian asceticism of which she was a devotee at the time of her
death." Neither distress, nor misery, nor care, nor sorrow could
alienate her affections. Finally, she became a bigoted Catholic, and in
Vienna, their last residence, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn was
seen, a lighted taper in her hand, one of a Catholic procession wending
its way to St. Stephen's Cathedral.

The other daughter had a similar career. Henriette Mendelssohn filled a
position as governess first in Vienna, then in Paris. In the latter
city, her home was the meeting-place of the most brilliant men and
women. She, too, denied her father and her faith. Recha, the youngest
daughter, was the unhappy wife of a merchant of Strelitz. Later on she
supported herself by keeping a boarding-school at Altona. Nathan, the
youngest son, was a mechanician; Abraham, the second, the father of the
famous composer, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, established with the
oldest, Joseph, a still flourishing banking-business. Abraham's children
and grandchildren all became converts to Christianity, but Moses and
Fromet died before their defection from the old faith. Fromet lived to
see the development of the passion for music which became hereditary in
the family. It is said that when, at the time of the popularity of
Schulz's "Athalia," o