[Footnote:  Two suggestions have been made to me in explanation of this change of opinion:  it may have been due to the fear that the rising glory of Chopin might dim that of Mendelssohn; or Davison may have taken umbrage at Chopin’s conduct in an affair relative to Mendelssohn.  I shall not discuss the probability of these suggestions, but will say a few words with regard to the last-mentioned matter.  My source of information is a Paris letter in the Musical World of December 4, 1847.  After the death of Mendelssohn some foreign musicians living in Paris proposed to send a letter of condolence to Mrs. Mendelssohn.  One part of the letter ran thus:  “May it be permitted to us, German artists, far from our country, to offer,” &c.  The signatures to it were:  Rosenhain, Kalkbrenner, Panofka, Heller, Halle, Pixis, and Wolff.  Chopin when applied to for his signature wrote:  “La lettre venant des Allemands, comment voulez-vous que je m’arroge le droit de la signer?” One would think that no reasonable being could take exception to Chopin’s conduct in this affair, and yet the writer in the Musical World comments most venomously on it.]

The battle fought in the pages of the Musical World in 1841 illustrates the then state of matters in England.  Hostilities commenced on October 28 with a criticism of the Mazurkas, Op. 41.  Of its unparalleled nature the reader shall judge himself:—­

Monsieur Frederic Chopin has, by some means or other which we cannot divine, obtained an enormous reputation, a reputation but too often refused to composers of ten times his genius.  M. Chopin is by no means a putter down of commonplaces; but he is, what by many would be esteemed worse, a dealer in the most absurd and hyperbolical extravagances.  It is a striking satire on the capability for thought possessed by the musical profession, that so very crude and limited a writer should be esteemed, as he is very generally, a profound classical musician.  M. Chopin does not want ideas, but they never extend beyond eight or sixteen bars at the utmost, and then he is invariably in nubibus...the works of the composer give us invariably the idea of an enthusiastic school-boy, whose parts are by no means on a par with his enthusiasm, who will be original whether he can or not.  There is a clumsiness about his harmonies in the midst of their affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies despite their evidently forced unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony.  When he is not thus singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder...such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently Chopin-ical; that do not we.

Wessel and Stapleton, the publishers, protested against