 Following private correspondence with Jacobi on the issue and an extended period when Jacobi (in personal straits at the time) did not respond to his objections, Mendelssohn attempted to set the record straight about Lessing’s Spinozism in Morning Hours. Learning of Mendelssohn’s plans incensed Jacobi who expected to be consulted first and who accordingly responded by publishing, without Mendelssohn’s consent, their correspondence — On the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn — a month before the publication of Morning Hours. Distressed on personal as well as intellectual levels by the controversy over his departed friend’s pantheism, Mendelssohn countered with a hastily composed piece, To the Friends of Lessing: an Appendix to Mr. Jacobi’s Correspondence on the Teaching of Spinoza. According to legend, so anxious was Mendelssohn to get the manuscript to the publisher that, forgetting his overcoat on a bitterly cold New Year’s eve, he delivered the manuscript on foot to the publisher. That night he came down with a cold from which he died four days later, prompting his friends to charge Jacobi with responsibility for Mendelssohn’s death.