The Sun.
London, England, 1854-04-17 00:00:00

BEETHOVHY.

The taste of all this is quiet and good, if not exalted.
But it is hard to express how the air of placidity, not to
say prosperity, belonging to that tomb, struck my ima-
gination as curiously at variance with the youth, the
life, and the death of the stormy being who sleeps there.
Never was the dark and cureless unhappiness of his life
so forcibly made present to me as by that contrast. It
might be owing merely to the influences of day and
noon, working by antipathy ; but I never felt the weight
of Beeth ;yen's sorrow so gravely as in that place, where
every object conspires to soothe the senses, and to sug-
gest the thought of honour, love, obedience, troops of
friends,' around the deathbed of the man of genius.
I thought of his early difficulties not those com-
monplace and unimportant struggles to gain hear-
ing and opportunity, which form a part of the
class education of every artist, essential to the
free play of his faculties and to that self reliance
without which no great work is achieved—but of the
waking up of a rugged temper and a suspicious spirit
in the midst of impulses the most generous—in the
midst of affections which lacerated their possessor in the
shape of self remorse after those moods in which the
dark angel got the ascendancy. I thought, too, what
must have been the peculiar terrors o slow-growing
deafness to one of such a harsh, singular, intractable
nature as his—vexed by the misdeeds of rapacious and
disreputable kindred, and aware that the sense essential
to the delight of his existence was dying out, day by day,
sound by sound. I thought now the struggles of Bee-
thoven with his calamity, instead of converting it into a
disguised blessing, resembled the ferocious strength and
the aimless impotence of the writhings of an animal in
torture. Like a child ho tried to hide his malady, as if
concealment could give bim back consciousness of sound.
gloomy despondency—' rages ' not like those
childhood, 'silent,' but immoderate, striking
sleft, often heavily wounding those steady and
Thenorifg
Bhty
racolninme
d,
considerate friends of whom, beyond all other men of
genius, he stood in need. Then came death, after a long
time of disease—to a body worn with pain—to a mind
haunted by ceaseless fears of want, and by cruel convic-
tion that he was dying forsaken and ungratefully
treated."
The musical student will find in this work many
interesting criticisms, analyses, and comparisons,
which may afford him profit as well as pleasure.
The contrasts between the various styles and ex-
cellences of different composers is effectively shown
by one who has evidently studied the subject.

THE FOREIGN-OFFICE.— Mr. Henry Unwin Adding-
ton has resigned his office of Under-Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs, which he has held since March 4,
1842. Mr. Addington entered the service of the
Foreign-office as far back as 1807. After having been
successively attached to the missions in Sicily, Spain,
Berlin, Stockholm, and Switzerland, Mr. Addington
was appointed Secretary of Legation at S. witzerland in
1814 ; at Copenhagen, 1821; at Washington, 1822
and Minister Plenipotentiary at Frankfort in 1823 ; and
at Madrid in 1829. He is, of course, entitled to his
diplomatic pension after so many years' service, and on
his retirement has been elevated by the Queen to the
rank of a Privy Councillor. Mr. Addington is suc-
ceeded as permanent Under Secretary of State in the
Foreign Department by Mr. Edmond Hamond, who en-
tered the Foreign-office in 1824, and who has been a
clerk of the first class since 1841, at the head of one of
the departments.