bonnes affaires la-bas?" To which he
replied, "Pardon, Madame la Princesse, j'ai fait un peu de musique;
je laisse les affaires aux banquiers et aux diplomates." Later in
the evening, the lady, probably not well pleased with this rebuff,
accosted him again, as he stood talking to Thalberg, with a sneering
compliment on his apparent freedom from all jealousy of his musical
rival; to which Liszt, who was very sallow, replied, "Mais, Madame
la Princesse, au contraire, je suis furieusement jaloux de
Thalberg; regardez donc les jolies couleurs qu'il a!" After which
Madame la Princesse _le laissa en paix_.

Between Thalberg and Liszt I do not think there could be any
comparison. The exquisite perfection of delicate accuracy, combined
with extraordinary lightness and velocity of execution, of Thalberg
was his one unapproachable excellence, and as near the unerring
precision of mere mechanism as possible: it was absolutely
faultless; but it paid the penalty for being what things human may
not be--it wanted the human element of passion and pathos. His
performance was a miracle of art, and left his admiring auditors
pleasingly amazed, but untouched in any of the deeper chords of
sympathetic emotion. He had not a spark of the original genius or
fire of Liszt. Moscheles, whom I have only named with the other two
because he was a highly popular performer at the same time, was a
more solid musician than either of them, and infinitely inferior as
an executant to both. He was the most excellent of teachers, for
which valuable office Thalberg would have wanted some and Liszt all
the necessary qualifications. Of Chopin it is useless to speak:
exceptional in his artistic nature and in his circumstances, he
played his own most poetical music as no one else could; though his
friend Dessauer, who was not a professional player at all, gave a
most curious and satisfactory imitation of his mode of rendering his
own compositions. But between Chopin and any other musical composer
or performer there was never anything in common; he was original and
unique in both characters.

As for Mendelssohn, the organ was his real instrument, though he
played very finely on the piano. He was not, however, a pre-eminent
performer, but a composer of music; and I should no more think of
comparing the quality of his geni