anent my headstrong and apparently heartless behaviour, but only sympathy and heartfelt solicitude.  My family had also received favourable reports about my wife’s good qualities, a fact about which I was particularly glad, as I was thus spared the difficulties of defending her questionable behaviour to me, which I should have been at pains to excuse.  This produced a salutary calm in my soul, which had so recently been a prey to the worst anxieties.  All that had driven me with such passionate haste to an improvident and premature marriage, all that had consequently weighed on me so ruinously, now seemed set at rest, leaving peace in its stead.  And although the ordinary cares of life still pressed on me for many years, often in a most vexatious and troublesome form, yet the anxieties attendant on my ardent youthful wishes were in a manner subdued and calm.  From thence forward till the attainment of my professional independence, all my life’s struggles could be directed entirely towards that more ideal aim which, from the time of the conception of my Rienzi, was to be my only guide through life.

It was only later that I first realised the real character of my life in Riga, from the utterance of one of its inhabitants, who was astonished to learn of the success of a man of whose importance, during the whole of his two years’ sojourn in the small capital of Livonia, nothing had been known.  Thrown entirely on my own resources, I was a stranger to every one.  As I mentioned before, I kept aloof from all the theatre folk, in consequence of my increasing dislike of them, and therefore, when at the end of March, 1839, at the close of my second winter there, I was given my dismissal by the management, although this occurrence surprised me for other reasons, yet I felt fully reconciled to this compulsory change in my life.  The reasons which led to this dismissal were, however, of such a nature that I could only regard it as one of the most disagreeable experiences of my life.  Once, when I was lying dangerously ill, I heard of Holtei’s real feelings towards me.  I had caught a severe cold in the depth of winter at a theatrical rehearsal, and it at once assumed a serious character, owing to the fact that my nerves were in a state of constant irritation from the continual annoyance and vexatious worry caused by the contemptible character of the theatrical management.  It was just at the time when a special performance of the opera Norma was to be given by our company in Mitau.  Holtei insisted on my getting up from a sick-bed to make this wintry journey, and thus to expose myself to the danger of seriously increasing my cold in the icy theatre at Mitau.  Typhoid fever was the consequence, and this pulled me down to such an extent that Holtei, who heard of my condition, is said to have remarked at the theatre that I should probably never conduct again, and that, to all intents and purposes, ’I was on my last legs.’  It was to a splendid homoeopathic physician, Dr. Prutzer, that I owed my