me afforded me at last an affecting compensation for all the contrarieties and vulgar animosities which I had here endured.

“She and Prince Albert, who both sat immediately facing the orchestra, applauded after the Tannhaeuser overture—­with which the first part concluded—­with graciousness, almost amounting to a challenge, so that the public broke out into lively and prolonged applause.  During the interval the Queen summoned me to the salon, and received me before her court with the cordial words, ’I am delighted to make your acquaintance; your composition has enraptured me!’

“In a long conversation, in which Prince Albert also took part, she further inquired about my other works, and asked if it would not be possible to have my operas translated into Italian, so that she might be able to hear them, too, in London?  I was naturally obliged to give a negative answer, and, moreover, to explain that my visit was only a flying one, as conducting for a concert society—­the only thing open to me here—­was not at all my affair.  At the end of the concert the Queen and the Prince applauded me again most courteously.

“I relate this to you because it will afford you pleasure; and I willingly allow you to make further use of this information, as I see how much mistake and malice touching myself and my stay in London has to be set right or defeated.

    “The last concert is on the 25th, and I leave on the 26th, so as
    to resume in my quiet retreat my sadly interrupted work.”

Wagner was well paid for his work; he was well received in society; the band liked him and the audiences liked him—­the one cause of all his grumbling was the character of the bulk of the music he had to conduct.  One might expect even a Wagner to prefer conducting a few pieces of tedious stuff, even to put up with poor antediluvian Onslow, rather than to return to his daily task of writing begging letters to his friends from Zurich.  Still, these are matters of taste, and each to his own.

To those who only know the Philharmonic to-day, in its more or less repentant and reformed state, it may not seem odd that Wagner should have conducted its concerts.  But to those who remember it from, say, twenty-five years ago to quite recent times, a certain incongruity is apparent.  Wagner, the sincere, fiery artist, the man devoted to, swallowed up by, his art; the man who journeyed, with his wife and a dog, all the way from Russia to Paris with his bare travelling expenses in his pocket; who had been through a bloody revolution, and was now a political refugee; who had written part of the Ring and had Tristan “already planned in his head”; a conductor whose ideal was nothing lower than perfection—­this gentleman came from Zurich to conduct a society whose membership was compact of trim and prim mediocrity, and whose directors were mostly duffers.  Can we