The grandfather, Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, was born in 1736, only a few years later than Haydn.  In 1769 he married the daughter of a charity-school master or caretaker; and in 1770, the year of Beethoven’s birth, his first child, christened Carl Friedrich Wilhelm, was born.  Four years later Adolph arrived.  Gottlob was a douanier, an exciseman, at the Rannstadt gate of Leipzig, and passed his days, I dare say, as honestly as an exciseman can, in examining incoming travellers to see that they did not bring with them so much as an egg that had not paid duty.  He died in 1795.  Meantime, Carl Friedrich had received a thoroughly sound education, and he became deputy-registrar to the Leipzig town court.  In 1789 he married Johanna Rosina Paetz (whose name, it seems, is susceptible of many spellings).

The scientific mind may after all find consolation in the all-illuminating truth that Friedrich and all his children were more or less passionately addicted to the theatre and attracted by it.  It was Friedrich’s one hobby; and though Friedrich’s brother Adolph had a horror of it, the feeling was not aroused by it as an artistic institution, but as an agency for the intellectual, moral and worldly ruin of young men and women.  In his leisure Friedrich arranged dramatic performances and took part in them, and, as amateurs go, he appears to have been highly successful.  Histrionic persons were constant guests at his house on the Bruehl—­amongst them notably one, Ludwig Geyer, who became a fast friend of the family and played an important role, off the stage, with regard to that family soon after Richard’s birth.  Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement.  Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again.  While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony was filled with the squalor and misery and loathsome terrors of war.  Leipzig was occupied by the French; Marshal Davoust was left there as commandant, with power of life and death, and all the other privileges of a military governor; and in the deputy-registrar of the law-court he found the man for the post of provisional chief of the police “of public safety.”  Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable to say.  Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon’s cannon.  Friedrich must have found his hands full day and night.  Richard was baptized on August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in need of a rest; on the 19th Napoleon was a beaten man, and