He took up his quarters first at 10, Bentinck Street, but soon removed to the house indicated in the following letter, written by him to Franchomme on May 1, 1848:—­

Dearest friend,—­Here I am, just settled.  I have at last a room—­fine and large—­where I shall be able to breathe and play, and the sun visits me to-day for the first time.  I feel less suffocated this morning, but all last week I was good for nothing.  How are you and your wife and the dear children?  You begin at last to become more tranquil, [footnote:  This, I think, refers to some loss Franchomme had sustained in his family] do you not?  I have some tiresome visits; my letters of introduction are not yet delivered.  I trifle away my time, and voila.  I love you, and once more voila.

  Yours with all my heart.

  My kindest regards to Madame Franchomme.
       48, Dover Street. 
  Write to me, I will write to you also.

Were Chopin now to make his appearance in London, what a stir there would be in musical society!  In 1848 Billet, Osborne, Kalkbrenner, Halle, and especially Thalberg, who came about the same time across the channel, caused more curiosity.  By the way, England was just then heroically enduring an artistic invasion such as had never been seen before; not only from France, but also from Germany and other musical countries arrived day after day musicians who had found that their occupation was gone on the Continent, where people could think of nothing but politics and revolutions.  To enumerate all the celebrities then congregated in the British Metropolis would be beyond my power and the scope of this publication, but I must at least mention that among them was no less eminent a creative genius than Berlioz, no less brilliant a vocal star than Pauline Viardot-Garcia.  Of other high-priests and high-priestesses of the art we shall hear in the sequel.  But although Chopin did not set the Thames on fire, his visit was not altogether ignored by the press.  Especially the Athenaeum (H.  F. Chorley) and the Musical World (J.  W. Davison) honoured themselves by the notice they took of the artist.  The former journal not only announced (on April 29) his arrival, but also some weeks previously (on April 8) his prospective advent, saying:  “M.  Chopin’s visit is an event for which we most heartily thank the French Republic.”

In those days, and for a long time after, the appreciation and cultivation of Chopin’s music was in England confined to a select few.  Mr. Hipkins told me that he “had to struggle for years to gain adherents to Chopin’s music, while enduring the good-humoured banter of Sterndale Bennett and J. W. Davison.”  The latter—­the author of An Essay on the Works of Frederic Chopin (London, 1843), the first publication of some length on the subject, and a Preface to, or, to be more precise, a Memoir prefixed to Boosey & Co.’s The Mazurkas and Valses of F. Chopin--seems to have in later years changed his early good opinion of the Polish master.