Czerny.  He was a shy and enormously diligent artist, who, however, on account of his nervousness, played, like Henselt, rarely in public.  His execution was extraordinary and his tone beautiful.  In 1855 he became professor at the Vienna Conservatorium.”  Mr. Pauer never heard him play Chopin.]

After this historical excursus let us take up again the record of our hero’s doings and sufferings in London.

Chopin seems to have gone to a great many parties of various kinds, but he could not always be prevailed upon to give the company a taste of his artistic quality.  Brinley Richards saw him at an evening party at the house of the politician Milner Gibson, where he did not play, although he was asked to do so.  According to Mr. Hueffer, [footnote:  Chopin in Fortnightly Review of September, 1877, reprinted in Musical Studies (Edinburgh:  A. & C. Black, 1880).] he attended, likewise without playing, an evening party (May 6) at the house of the historian Grote.  Sometimes ill-health prevented him from fulfilling his engagements; this, for instance, was the case on the occasion of a dinner which Macready is said to have given in his honour, and to which Thackeray, Mrs. Procter, Berlioz, and Julius Benedict were invited.  On the other hand, Chopin was heard at the Countess of Blessington’s (Gore House, Kensington) and the Duchess of Sutherland’s (Stafford House).  On the latter occasion Benedict played with him a duet of Mozart’s.  More than thirty years after, Sir Julius had still a clear recollection of “the great pains Chopin insisted should be taken in rehearsing it, to make the rendering of it at the concert as perfect as possible.”  John Ella heard Chopin play at Benedict’s.  Of another of Chopin’s private performances in the spring of 1848 we read in the Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Conversation, where Fiorentino writes: 

We were at most ten or twelve in a homely, comfortable little salon, equally propitious to conversation and contemplation.  Chopin took the place of Madame Viardot at the piano, and plunged us into ineffable raptures.  I do not know what he played to us; I do not know how long our ecstasy lasted:  we were no longer on earth; he had transported us into unknown regions, into a sphere of flame and azure, where the soul, freed from all corporeal bonds, floats towards the infinite.  This was, alas! the song of the swan.

The sequel will show that the concluding sentence is no more than a flourish of the pen.  Whether Chopin played at Court, as he says in a letter to Gutmann he expected to do, I have not ascertained.  Nor have I been able to get any information about a dinner which, Karasowski relates, some forty countrymen of Chopin’s got up in his honour when they heard of his arrival in London.  According to this authority the pianist-composer rose when the proceedings were drawing to an end, and many speeches extolling him as a musician and patriot had been made, and spoke,