[112] His biographer tells us that the King of Prussia offered him three thousand crowns a year, to attract him to Berlin; but he declined to quit the service of the Emperor Joseph, who paid him only eight hundred florins; and that he was often reduced to painful distress for want of money while he lived in Vienna.
[113] We see that which we bring eyes to see, and appreciation presupposes a degree of the same genius in ourselves. Mozart's wife said of him that he was a better dancer than musician. Leigh Hunt tells us that when Mozart became a great musician, a man in distress accosted him in the street, and as the composer had no money to give him, he bade him wait a little, while he went into a coffee-house, where he wrote a beautiful minuet extempore, and, sending the poor man to the nearest music-dealer's, made him a present of the handsome sum gladly paid by the publisher.
[114] This book, which none of us fail to read and read again with delight, was at first very coldly received, and severely attacked by the reviewers; until Lord Holland, being ill, sent to his bookseller for some amusing book to read, and received the "Vicar of "Wakefield." He read it, and was so much pleased with it that he mentioned it wherever he visited. The consequence was, the first edition was rapidly exhausted, and the fame of the book established.
[115] Perhaps the cause of Dante's struggle through life lay in that reckless sarcasm which prompted his answer to the Prince of Verona, who asked him how he could account for the fact, that in the household of princes the court fool was in greater favor than the philosopher. "Similarity of mind," said the fierce genius, "is all over the world the source of friendship."
[116] Kotzebue was fifty-eight years of age when he was assassinated at Mannheim, in 1819, by Karl Ludwig Sand, who was actuated by a fanatical zeal against one whom he considered a traitor to liberty. Kotzebue was a prolific writer, and has left several dramas.
[117] The sad lines in his last poem, entitled "Waiting for Death," will long be remembered:—
"Deformed and wrinkled; all that I can crave
Is quiet in my grave.
Such as live happy hold long life a jewel;
But to me thou art cruel
If thou end not my tedious misery,
And I soon cease to be.
Strike, and strike home then; pity unto me,
In one short hour's delay, is tyranny!"
[118] "Schiller," says Coleridge, "has the material sublime to produce an effect; he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effect follows."
[119] "'Hudibras,'" says Hallam, "was incomparably more popular than 'Paradise Lost.' No poem in our language rose at once to so great reputation; nor can this remarkable popularity be called ephemeral, for it is looked upon to-day as a classic." Butler died in 1680.
[120] "Benvenuto Cellini, the jeweller, engraver, poet, musician, soldier, sculptor, and lover: and in all so truly admirable!" His autobiography remained in dusty oblivion for the period of two hundred years after his death before it met the public eye.