From the above it may be suspected that Clementi was not only player and composer, but man of business. He had been very successful in money-making in England from the start, and it was not many years before he accumulated a sufficient amount to buy an interest in the firm of Longman & Broderip, "manufacturers of musical instruments, and music sellers to their majesties." The failure of the house, by which he sustained heavy losses, induced him to try his hand alone at music publishing and piano-forte manufacturing; and his great success (the firm is still extant in the person of his partner's son, Mr. Col-lard) proves he was an exception to the majority of artists, who rarely possess business talents. Clementi met many reverses in his commercial career. In March, 1807, the warehouses occupied by Clementi's new firm were destroyed by fire, entailing a loss of about forty thousand pounds. But the man's courage was indomitable, and he retrieved his misfortunes with characteristic pluck and cheerfulness. After 1810 he gave up playing in public, and devoted himself to composing and the conduct of his piano-forte business, which became very large and valuable. Himself an inventor and mechanician, he made many important improvements in the construction of the piano, some of which have never been superseded. III. Clementi numbers among his pupils more great names in the art of piano-forte playing than any other great master. This is partly owing to the fact, it may be, that he began his career in the infancy of the piano-forte as an instrument, and was the first to establish a solid basis for the technique of the instrument. In addition to John Field and J. B. Cramer, previously mentioned, were Zeuner, Dussek, Alex. Kleugel, Ludwig Berger, Kalkbrenner, Charles Mayer, and Meyerbeer. These musicians not only added richly to the literature of the piano-forte, but were splendid exponents of its powers as virtuosos. But mere artistic fame is transitory, and it is in Clementi's contributions to the permanent history of piano-forte playing that we must find his chief claim on the admiration of posterity. He composed not a few works for the orchestra, and transcriptions of opera, but these have now receded to the lumber closet. The works which live are his piano concertos, of which about sixty were written for the piano alone, and the remainder as duets or trios; and, _par excellence_, his "Gradus ad Parnassum," a superb series of one hundred studies, upon which even to-day the solid art of piano-forte playing rests. Clementi's works must always remain indispensable to the pianist, and, in spite of the fact that piano technique has made such advances during the last half century, there are several of Clementi's sonatas which tax the utmost skill of such players as Liszt and Von Billow, to whom all ordinary difficulty is merely a plaything. As Viotti was the father of modern violin-playing, Clementi