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On a plain tablet Steiner's name was found, together with the information, given in very old-fashioned German, that he had died there in 1683, "at the rising of the sun." The closing field of Mr. Mickley's travels covered Southern France and Spain, Lisbon, where he passed the winter of 1871-72, and Madrid.
This was splendidly illustrated in his famous library, which comprised many works of the utmost value and scarcity. A taste thus developed in early youth naturally became in the course of years a habit, a sentiment, a leading passion of Mickley's nature. By the year 1867 his coin-collection had become the most extensive in this country.
Mr. Mickley made at this period some valued acquaintances. Among these was the Italian composer Mercadante. At the time of Mickley's visit, in April, 1870, the composer, who was also president of the Conservatoire in Naples, had been blind for eight years.
While the matter still seemed indefinite, it was set at rest by the advice of an obliging street-urchin, who volunteered his information with appropriate brevity and directness: "Try the door. If it's loose, Daddy Mickley's home, sure. If it's locked, 'taint no use of knockin', for he's out." Thus instructed, I tried the door.
He was next asked if he could read and write, which question, however, was not pressed. The last scene in Mr. Mickley's life was as quiet and peaceful as its whole tenor had been. On the afternoon of February 15, 1878, Mr. Carl Plagemann, the well-known musician and a friend of many years' standing, called at his house. While he waited, Mr.
Mickley's intellect was so many-sided and so evenly balanced that it is difficult to name his predominant bias. It is very nearly safe, however, to say that this was his historic faculty. In the writings, still chiefly unprinted, which were left behind him, he was at once the most minute and the most compact of historians.
Such, however, was the completeness of Mickley's literary methods of condensing, that an entry of three or four lines made in his diary on the night of the robbery is all that he had to write about the appalling loss.
But in regard to none of these accidents, although an aged man, thousands of miles from home, and entirely alone, does he betray any symptoms of apprehension. He merely adds, on the date of his recovery from the attack at Leipsic, "This sickness has detained me much longer than I had expected to stay." In one of Mickley's trips he made a not unimportant contribution to musical history.
At that time, in his eighty-eighth year, Fétis was a fugitive from Paris, owing to the troubles of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Mickley's picture of the veteran littérateur and critic is an engaging one. He says, "Considering his great age, Mr. Fetis is very active. He climbed up the stepladder to get books and to show me such as he considered the most rare and interesting.
The social reunions at Mickley's were informal to the last degree, and the accommodations correspondingly primitive. They usually took place in his workshop. Crazy stools or empty piano-boxes generally served for seats. The surrounding furniture comprised barrels, cases, and chests, filled to overflowing with the host's ever-increasing antiquarian treasures.
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