Putting aside Johann Gottfried Walther’s brief epitome in his _Lexikon_ (1732), the first and most important of the early notices of Bach was the obituary article, or “Nekrolog,” contributed by his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach’s most distinguished pupils, to the fourth volume of Mizler’s _Musikalische Bibliothek,_ published at Leipzig in 1754. The authors of this appreciation give it an intimacy which renders it precious. But Mizler’s periodical was the organ of a small Society, of which Bach had been a member, and outside its associates can have done little to extend a knowledge of the subject of the memoir. Johann Friedrich Agricola contributed notes on Bach to Jakob Adlung’s _Musica mechanica Organoedi,_ published in two volumes at Berlin in 1768. The article is valuable chiefly for Agricola’s exposition of Bach’s opinions upon Organ and Clavier building. With the intention to represent him as “the coryphaeus of all organists,” Johann Adam Hiller, who a few years later became Cantor at St. Thomas’s, Leipzig, published there in 1784 a brief account of Bach in his _Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit._ Four years after Hiller’s notice, Ernst Ludwig Gerber published at Leipzig, in two volumes, 1790-92, his _Historisch-biographische Lexikon der Tonkünstler._ As in Hiller’s case, Gerber, whose father had been Bach’s pupil, was chiefly interested in Bach as an organist. Coincidently with Gerber, another of Bach’s pupils, Johann Martin Schubart, who succeeded him at Weimar in 1717, sketched his characteristics as a performer in the _Aesthetik der Tonkunst_, published at Berlin by his son in the _Deutschen Monatsschrift_ in 1793. In 1794 appeared at Leipzig the first volume of a work which Spitta characterises as fantastic and unreliable, so far as it deals with Bach, Friedrich Carl Gottlieb Hirsching’s _Historisch-literarisches Handbuch_ of notable persons deceased in the eighteenth century. Last of Forkel’s forerunners, A. E. L. Siebigke published at Breslau in 1801 his _Museum deutscher Tonkünstler,_ a work which adds nothing to our knowledge of Bach’s life, but offers some remarks on his style.