ngely enough, was also Aloysia. And
Haydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way by
proposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with results
how unlike!

Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been
kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest
she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the
priests, who clustered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home.
Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home,
seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan
singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli.
The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of
their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to
"die by request," as Artemus Ward has it.

After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married
again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made
years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension.
Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, _sub rosa_,
with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of
gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been
writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does
not shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity.

Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so
much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in
history.

We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and
deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so
largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the
world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew,
whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more
vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his
letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for
a homelife in a woman's heart.

But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are often
resolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which he
claims to be willing, and at times even glad, to pass his life alone.
We are not justified, then, in taking Beethoven as a man of domestic
inclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt,
and Beethoven had every qualif