I believe he did so intend them; and finding that his contemporaries did not take his idea, he probably laughed in his sleeve, and exclaimed, "_O tempora!_" This conjecture seems the more plausible, from the fact that there was a pronounced ironic and comic vein in Chopin's character. The accounts of his melancholy, in fact, like those of his ill-health, have been too much exaggerated. He was often in a cheerful mood. Sometimes he would amuse himself 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.