familiar town of Erfurt. His last years were spent in the band of the court and town of Arnstadt, where he died at the age of forty-eight, on the 14th September, 1661, his widow following him on the 8th of the next month.

Georg Christoph, his eldest son, of whom a concerted piece of church music was long preserved in the family, retreated in middle life from the immediate circle of the Bachs; he became cantor at Schweinfurt, and founded the Franconian branch of the continually expanding house. Next to him came two sons, twins, Johann Ambrosius and Johann Christoph, born on the 22nd of February, 1645. The coincidence of their birth was, in their case, accompanied by an almost unique identity of physical nature, character, and taste. The brothers were so alike that their own wives could not tell them apart: both adopted the family profession, and both the same instrument, the viol. Their strange psychological affinity subjected the one with the other to the same illnesses; and the elder survived the younger by little more than a year. Johann Christoph is the subject of one of the few detailed narratives which we encounter in the history of the Bachs before Sebastian; and this, if it does not seriously damage his reputation, equally does not credit him with the prudence that is characteristic of his kin. It appears that an indiscreet though innocent friendship with one of the Arnstadt maidens, accompanied, most rashly, with an exchange of rings, brought upon the young fiddler a prosecution at the hands of his would-be mother-in-law. The consistory, it is presumed, urged amends by the marriage of the parties; but Bach was firm—this is a family trait—and appealed to the higher consistory at Weimar, from which at length he obtained release from his difficulty. An experience of this sort made him hesitate before he finally decided to take a wife; and, after his marriage, misfortune—not of his own making—followed him for some years more. His place in the Arnstadt band was harassed by the jealous persecution of the principal town musician. The Bachs of Erfurt and Arnstadt combined in a memorial in his favour, but nothing came of it. In the end the Count dismissed the entire band for indolence and disunion. Christoph, in his poverty, still helped his uncle Heinrich in the Sunday music of his church; but this brought no subsistence to his household. He was fain to go to Gehren, if he might but do some service with quiet music, whereby to support himself and his family in their need. The death of the Count at last brought them rescue, for his successor restored Bach to the posts of court musician and town piper. From this time, 1682, the musician lived in peace; but his death eleven years later left a legacy of new troubles to his widow and her five children, the eldest just ten years of age. They had a long time of poverty and sickness to struggle with, though the boy, Johann Ernst, did his best to gain a living for them in the family craft. But he was a poor musician, and fortune kept him waiting. Ultimately he got the organistship at Arnstadt vacated by Sebastian, who, himself ill-provided and on the point of marriage, left Ernst the arrears of his salary and ended his kinsman’s days of trouble.

Johann Ambrosius, the brother of the unlucky Christoph, has a meagre record. He was attached to the town band of Erfurt, afterwards of Eisenach; and married twice. His first wife, Elisabeth, daughter of Valentin Laemmerhirt, a furrier of Erfurt, gave him eight children, of whom six were sons. Three of these only grew to man’s estate; the youngest is the subject of the present study. Ambrosius’ second marriage was followed in two months by his death, in January, 1695. Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark the contrast with her two brothers: whom we see to be men of a good understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such wise that the work praiseth the Master. A portrait of Ambrosius, which looks down upon the precious reliques of his son in the Berlin library, is notable not only for its likeness to Sebastian but also for the simplicity of its manner. There he is, not sprucely dressed out for the occasion in wig and powder, but in plain working clothes, with brown hair and moustache. There is a certain pride in this disdain of outward decoration.

Before closing the recital of the genealogy of the Bachs, a word of notice is claimed by the Companies of Players that existed in Germany in their time, and with which they necessarily stood in close relation. The regulations of these fellowships are in some cases preserved, and are interesting memorials of the pious care which their framers took to guard against the abuses to which the musician’s craft was peculiarly exposed, to inflict the sternest penalties on profligate or irreligious conduct, and to exclude the singing or accompanying of any but virtuous music. It does not appear, however, that any of the Bachs belonged to such a company. Many of them held a better worldly position, most were better educated than the common town player. It is a plausible inference that their number alone served to constitute them an informal guild by themselves, of which the name was that of their family, and the only regulation that which sprang from the generosity of their nature and the close ties which knit the kin together in a common pride and emulation in their common art. Emanuel Bach, Sebastian’s son, has left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together, at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make merry. First they sang a chorale; and, this duty ended, soon turned to a medley of secular songs. The climax was reached in the quodlibet, when all joined in a sort of comic chorus. The music consisted of any scrap, no matter whether sacred or profane, that occurred to any of the assembled company. It was an improvised catch. Each man in turn gave his own part or refrain, all different and all in harmony. The words were as incongruous as the music, and every one added his own quip or jest to the general jollity. Such was the homely festival that held its place in the family life of the Bachs as late as the middle years of Sebastian’s career.

CHAPTER II.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on the 21st March, 1685.4 The Thuringian town had been a home of the Bachs ever since the two sons of Johann Bach had found their wives there. Two of the family, and no less men than Johann Christoph and Johann Bernhard, had successively filled the post of organist in the town church. The death of his parents, however, before he had completed his tenth year removed Sebastian from the surroundings that seemed so fitted for the training of his genius. Already he was his father’s apt pupil on the violin, and the music which was the daily occupation of the house was not lost upon the eager ears of the child. He passed from Eisenach into the care of his brother Johann Christoph, his elder by fourteen years, who was organist in the little town of Ohrdruf; and it was here, in one of the most beautiful of the valleys of Thuringia, that the rest of his boyhood was passed. The impression of this country of soft hills and warm wooded valleys became a part of Sebastian’s nature and still lives in his music. The least attentive listener cannot mistake the inclination