imself for a whole evening playing blind-man's buff with
the children. As a mere child he had formed the habit of mimicking and
caricaturing pianists and other distinguished men. Liszt often
suffered from this mischievous habit, but he did not complain, and
even seemed to enjoy it. Of Chopin's wit, two specimens may be cited.
A rich Parisian one day invited him to dinner, with the intention of
getting him to entertain the guests afterward. In this case, however,
the host had reckoned without the guest, for, when asked to play,
Chopin exclaimed, "But, my dear sir, I have eaten so little." The
other instance occurs in one of his letters, where he says of the
pianist Aloys Schmitt, that he was forty years old, and his
compositions eighty--a _bon mot_ worthy of Heine.

There was much, indeed, in common between Chopin and Heine. Nothing is
more characteristic of Heine than the way in which he works up our
sentimental feelings only to knock us on the head with a comic or
grotesque line at the end. Similarly, Chopin, after improvising for
his friends for an hour or two, would suddenly rouse them from their
reveries by a _glissando_--sliding his fingers from one end of the
key-board to the other. In almost all of Chopin's or Heine's poems
there is this peculiar mixture of the sad and the comic veins--even
in the scherzos, which represent the gay and cheerful moods of
Chopin's muse.

Another point between these two poets is their elegance of style, and
their ironic abhorrence of tawdry sentimentality and commonplace.
Heine is the most elegant and graceful writer of his country, and
Chopin the most elegant and graceful of all composers. Not a redundant
note or a meaningless bar in all his compositions. Heine owed his
formal finish to French influences, but Chopin did not need them, for
the Poles are as noted as the French for elegance and grace. He
avoided not only the modulatory monotony of the classical school, but,
especially, the commonplace endings which marred so many classical
compositions. "All's well that ends well," is a rule that was
generally ignored by composers till Chopin taught them its value and
effect. Chopin's pen always stopped when his thoughts stopped, and he
never appends a meaningless end formula as if to warn the audience
that they may now put on their hats. On the contrary, some of his
later compositions, especially of the last period, end with exquisite
miniature poems, connected in spirit with the pr