which Liszt’s personality could not gain over that of Thalberg. Thenceforward Liszt’s supremacy was uncontested. [Illustration: Lithograph of 1835 by Staub.] [Illustration: After Dantan’s Caricature of Liszt. From the Nicolas-Manskopf collection, Frankfort-on-Main.] [Illustration: Facsimile of Liszt’s Hungarian Storm-March.] [Illustration: Facsimile of Liszt’s Hungarian Storm-March.] [Illustration: The “jeune école” of Parisian Pianists. Lithographed by Maurin. _Standing_--J. Rosenhain, Döhler, Chopin, A. Dreyschock, Thalberg. _Sitting_--Edward Wolff, Henselt, Liszt.] [Illustration: Liszt in his youth. Engraved on steel by Carl Mayer.] In the same year, 1837, Liszt made a confession, in an essay written for the _Gazette Musicale_, which was the greatest flattery that ever the piano received from one of its masters. Liszt refuses to go nearer to the orchestra or to the opera. “My piano is to me what his boat is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay, more, it has been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice. Perhaps the secret tie which holds me so closely to it is a delusion; but I hold the piano very high. In my view it takes the first place in the hierarchy of instruments; it is the oftenest used and the widest spread.... In the circumference of its seven octaves it embraces the whole circumference of an orchestra; and a man’s ten fingers are enough to render the harmonies which in an orchestra are only brought out by the combination of hundreds of musicians.... We can give broken chords like the harp, long sustained notes like the wind, staccati and a thousand passages which before it seemed only possible to produce on this or that instrument.... The piano has on the one side the capacity of assimilation; the capacity of taking into itself the life of all (instruments); on the other it has its own life, its own growth, its individual development.... It is a microcosm, a micro-theus.... My highest ambition is to leave to piano players after me some useful instructions, the footprints of attained advance, in fact a work which may some day provide a worthy witness of the labour and study of my youth. I remember the greedy dog in La Fontaine, which let the juicy bone fall from its mouth in order to grasp a shadow. Let me gnaw in peace at my bone. The hour will come, perhaps all too soon, in which I shall lose myself and hunt after a monstrous intangible shadow.” [Illustration: Cartoon representing Liszt and his Works. 1842.]