Of course, if it expresses itself in the piano-concerto, on the podium of the orchestra, or even if it trusts itself, in trio or quartet, to the company of strings or wind, then it moves my compassion. A foreign atmosphere envelops it even if Beethoven’s concerto in E flat major is resounding; and a weakness haunts it, if in chamber music it alternates with the dominating melody of the singing violin. But when once the clang of the violin and of the Cor Anglais[1] has faded from our ears, and all comparison has been laid aside, then, and then only, the soul of the pianoforte rises before us. Every good thing must be considered _per se_ apart from all comparison. Is it no good thing to have the whole material of tone before one’s ten fingers, to penetrate it, _truly_ to penetrate it; to feel beneath one’s nerves all the subtleties of all music--the song, the dance, whispering, shrieking, weeping, laughter?--all, I mean, voiced in the tone of the pianoforte, the epic tone of this modern Cithara, which, in its own kind, embraces the lyrical nature of the violin and the dramatic nature of the orchestra? In such all-embracing power the piano is in the twilight chamber a strange and dear tale-teller, a _Rhapsode_ for the _intimate_ spirit, which can express itself in it by improvisation, and an archive for the historian to whom it unrolls the whole life of modern music in its universal speech from a point of view which gives us the whole in the average. Then only do I love the piano--then is it faithful, then noble, genuine, unique. * * * * * Queen Elizabeth of England is sitting in the afternoon at her spinet. She is thinking of the conversation which she has had this forenoon with Sir James Melville--a conversation which the latter has preserved for us in writing. He was in 1564 ambassador from Mary Stuart to Elizabeth. Elizabeth had asked him what was Mary’s style of dress, the colour of her hair, her figure, her way of life. “When Mary returns from the hunt,” he answered, “she gives herself up to historical reading or to music, for she is at home with lute and virginal.” “Does she play well?” asked Elizabeth. “For a queen, very well,” was the answer. And so, this afternoon, Elizabeth is sitting at the spinet, and playing Bird’s or Dr Bull’s Variations on popular airs. She plays from the very (or a similar) copy which to-day is marked in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge as Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book. She does not notice that Sir James and Lord Hunsdon are secretly listening. When suddenly she sees them standing behind her she stops playing. “I am not used,” she says, “to play before men; but when I am solitary, to shun melancholy.”