“The city of London consumes annually 800,000 cartloads of coal. Each cart holds thirteen bags, each bag two Metzen. Most of the coal comes from Newcastle. Often 200 vessels laden with coal arrive at the same time. A cartload costs 2-1/2 pounds.”
“Beginning of May, 1792, Lord Barrymore gave a ball that cost 5,000 guineas. He paid 1,000 guineas for 1,000 peaches; 2,000 baskets of gooseberries cost 5 shillings apiece.”
“On the 14th of December I dined at the house of Mr. Shaw. While I was bowing all round I suddenly perceived that the lady of the house, besides her daughters and the other ladies, wore on their head-dresses a pearl-colored band, of three fingers breadth, embroidered in gold with the name of Haydn, and Mr. Shaw wore the name on the two ends of his collar in the finest steel beads. N. B.—Mr. Shaw wanted me to give him a souvenir, and I gave him a tobacco-box which I had just bought for a guinea. He gave me his in exchange.”
The last sentence is particularly delicious for its revelation of Haydn’s usual canniness. Not even his enjoyment of fame could make him forget that the tobacco-box given away had cost him a guinea; but he is solaced by the thought that he had got another in return. One is reminded of the same trait in reading his comment on the high prices of race-horses:
“These horses are very dear. Prince Wallis a few years ago paid 8 thousand pounds for one, and sold it again for 6 thousand pounds. But at the first race he won with it 50,000 pounds.”
The entire diary exhibits a similar thriftiness, shrewdness, and practicality; by impressing the reader with the curiously prosaic and matter-of-fact quality of Haydn’s mind, it throws as much light on the essential character of his music as on that of his personality. Fancy Beethoven, or any other speculative, imaginative mind, going to see Dr. Herschel’s great telescope, looking through it at the stars, and then carefully recording in his journal: “It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter”!
One of the interesting revelations made by Haydn’s note-book is that of his sentimental attachment to a certain Mistress Shroeter. It is a charming and in a way a pathetic story; the beginning formal, the continuation touchingly human in spite of the old-fashioned phrases in which it reaches us, and the end mysterious. Mistress Shroeter, a widow, relict of a German musician, begins it in the following note, copied out carefully, together with all the subsequent ones, by Haydn:
“Mrs. Shroeter presents her compliments to Mr. Haydn, and informs him she is just returned to town and will be very happy to see him whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson. James St., Buckingham Gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.”
The lessons thus begun continued all through the period of the composer’s first London visit, and the correspondence soon begins to reveal a growing attachment between the lonely, unhappily married Haydn and, in his own simple words, “the English widow in London who loved me.” The letters, quaint, formal, tender, are couched in the vocabulary of “Evelina” and “Clarissa Harlowe;” their “fair author,” as one feels impelled to call her, might have been, with her funny little abbreviations, her odd admixture of grandiloquence and impulsive feeling, and her constant underscoring of unimportant words, Clarissa herself. A note of April 12, 1792, will perhaps sufficiently show her way of writing: