“I might have replied, but did not, that there were lots of duffers. Soon after he asked to see my King Lear. He read it through slowly, then, just as he was going to play it (his talent for score-reading was incomparable), said:
“‘Give me the time.’
“‘What for? You said yesterday that only duffers needed to be told the time of a piece.’
“He did not show it, but these home thrusts annoyed him intensely. He never mentioned Bach without adding ironically, ‘your little pupil.’ In fact, over music he was a regular porcupine; you could never tell where to have him. In every other way he was perfectly charming and sweet-tempered.
“In Rome I learnt to appreciate the beauties of his marvellous Fingal’s Cave. Often, worn out by the scirocco and thoroughly out of sorts, I would hunt him out and tear him away from his composition. With perfect good humour—seeing my pitiable state—he would lay aside his pen, and, with his extraordinary facility in remembering intricate scores, would play whatever I chose to name—he properly and soberly seated at the piano, I curled up in a snappy bunch on his sofa.
“He liked me, with my wearied voice, to murmur out my setting of Moore’s melodies. He always had a certain amount of commendation for my—little songs!
“After a month of this intercourse—so full of interest for me—he disappeared without saying good-bye, and I saw him no more.
“His Leipzig letter, therefore, the more agreeably surprised me, for it showed an unexpected and genial kindness of heart that I found to be one of his most notable characteristics.
“The Concert Society has a magnificent hall—the Gewandhaus—of which the acoustic is perfect. I went straight to see it, and stumbled into the middle of the final rehearsal of Mendelssohn’s Walpurgis Nacht.
“I am inclined to think[18] that this is the finest thing he has yet done, and I hardly know which to praise most—orchestra, chorus, or the whole combined effect.