It has become the custom with most of the writers on Chopin to dilate on his weak and exhausted health. The grossest exaggerations have been current on this point, and, as is nearly always the case, more credence has been given to the exaggerations than to the truth. Goethe says truly, “People believe the truth so little because it is so simple.” It has been said of Chopin that he suffered from his earliest years from an incurable malady which might have caused death at any moment. This may have been the reason why Liszt describes him as very sickly when only a youth of fifteen or sixteen; among other things about him he says: “* * * * Chopin was more like one of those ideal creations with which the poetry of the middle ages adorned the Christian temples: a beautiful angel, with a form pure and slight as a young god of Olympus, with a face like that of a majestic woman filled with a divine sorrow, and, as the crown of all, an expression at the same time tender and severe, chaste and impassioned. “He daily accustomed himself to think that the hour of his death was near, and, under the influence of this feeling, he accepted the careful attentions of a friend, from whom he concealed how short a time, he believed, remained for him on earth. He possessed great physical courage, and, if he did not accept with the heroic carelessness of youth the idea of his approaching end, he at least cherished the expectation of it with a kind of bitter pleasure.” These remarks are not applicable to that period of Chopinʼs life, for they are not in accordance with the facts. Chopin neither looked like “a beautiful angel,” “a majestic woman filled with a divine sorrow,” nor “a young god from Olympus;” just as little did he imagine daily “that the hour of his death was near.” On the contrary, his cheerful letters, pervaded with the joy of youth, showed that Frederic had as good health as any other young man of his age. When travelling he saw all that was worth seeing, gave two concerts within a week, paid several visits, was present at long performances at the theatre, and wrote a great many letters besides. Undeniably, Chopin had a delicate constitution, but he was healthy, and strong enough to bear the fatigue of travelling in a diligence. It was not until ten years later that he was threatened with the illness brought on by the excitement of Paris life. And if Frederic had been sickly, would his parents have permitted their only, tenderly loved son to travel abroad? Would they have consented to an absence of two years—which followed the earlier journeys—if the young artist had been troubled with a dangerous malady? Only in the last years of his life his physical strength was often greatly exhausted, in consequence of the rapid strides of the disease which caused his early death.