“Nothing can be more intense in feeling,” said a contemporary critic, “than his conception and delivery of an adagio passage.  His tone is, perhaps, not quite so full and round as that of a De Beriot or Baillot, for example; it is delicate rather than strong, but this delicacy was probably never possessed equally by another player.”  “There is no trick in his playing,” writes another critic; “it is all fair scientific execution, opening to us a new order of sounds....  All his passages seem free and unpremeditated, as if conceived on the instant.  One has no impression of their having cost him either forethought or labor....  The word difficulty has no place in his vocabulary.... etc.”  Paganini’s lengthened tour through London and the provinces was everywhere attended with the same success, and brought him in a golden harvest, for his reputation had now grown so portentous that he could exact the greatest terms from managers.

Paganini avowed himself as not altogether pleased with England, but, under the surface of such complaints as the following, one detects the ring of gratified vanity.  He writes in a MS. letter, dated from London in 1831, of the excessive and noisy admiration to which he was subjected in the London streets, which left him no peace, and actually blocked his passage to and from the theatre.  “Although the public curiosity to see me,” says he, “is long since satisfied; though I have played in public at least thirty times, and my likeness has been reproduced in all possible styles and forms, yet I can never leave my home without being mobbed by people who are not content with following and jostling me, but actually get in front of me, and prevent my going either way, address me in English of which I don’t know a word, and even feel me as if to find out if I am made of flesh and blood.  And this is not only among the common people, but among the upper classes.”  Paganini repeated his visit to England during the next season, playing his final farewell concert at the Victoria Theatre, London, June 17, 1832.  The two following years our artist lived in Paris, and was the great lion of musical and social circles.  People professed to be as much charmed with his lack of pretension, his naive and simple manners, as with his musical genius.  Yet no man was more exacting of his rights as an artist.  One day a court concert was announced at the Tuilleries, at which Paganini was asked to play.  He consented, and went to examine the room the day before.  He objected to the numerous curtains, so hung as to deaden the sound, and requested the superintendent to see that they were changed.  The supercilious official ignored the artist’s wish, and the offended Paganini determined not to play.  When the hour of the concert arrived, there was no violinist.  The royalties and their attendants were all seated; murmurs arose, but still no Paganini.  At last an official was sent to the hotel of the artist, only to be informed that the great violinist had not