communication with my family. My mother and sisters had had news
of my doings somehow or other, and I was deeply touched, in the
letters which I was now receiving from them, to hear no
reproaches 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