d in several passages the most profound and sublime qualities of
his own mind. Moreover, he was much greater as a performer than Haydyn,
and as such expected more from instruments than the latter did. He also
allowed more merit to highly-wrought and complicated compositions, and
thus raised a gorgeous palace within Haydyn's fairy bower. Of this
palace Beethoven was an early inmate; and in order adequately to express
his own peculiar forms of style, he had no other means but to surmount
the edifice with that defying and colossal tower which no one will
probably presume to carry higher with impunity.

"If any man," says an able writer in the Quarterly, "can be said to
enjoy an almost universal admiration as composer, it is Beethoven--who,
disdaining to copy his predecessors in any, the most distant manner,
has, notwithstanding, by his energetic, bold, and uncommon style of
writing, carried away a prize from our modern Olympus."

Beethoven, like most great men, had many peculiarities.

In winter, well as in summer, it was his practice to rise at daybreak,
and immediately to sit down to his writing-table. There he would labour
till two or three o'clock, his usual dinnertime. Scarcely had the last
morsel been swallowed, when, if he had no more distant excursion in
view, he took his usual walk--that is to say, he ran in double quick
time, as if hunted by bailiffs, twice round the town--whether it
rained, or snowed, or hailed, or the thermometer stood an inch or two
below the freezing point--whether Boreas blew a chilling blast from the
Bohemian mountains, or whether the thunder roared, and forked lightnings
played, what signified it to the enthusiastic lover of his art, in whose
genial mind, perhaps, were budding, at that very moment, when the
elements were in fiercest conflict, the harmonious feelings of a balmy
spring.

The use of the bath was as much a necessity to Beethoven as to a
Turk--and he was in the habit of submitting himself to frequent
ablutions. When it happened that he did not walk out of doors to collect
his ideas, he would, not unfrequently, in a fit of the most complete
abstraction, go to his washhand basin, and pour several jugs of water
upon his hands, all the time humming and roaring. After dabbling in the
water till his clothes were wet through, he would pace up and down the
room with a vacant expression of countenance, and his eyes distended,
the singularity of his aspect being often increased by an