The book was published in February 1820; it was announced, with a slightly differently worded title-page, in the _New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register_ for March 1820 (p. 341), and the _Scots Magazine_ for the same month ( vol. lxxxv. p. 263). The _New Monthly_ states the price as 5s., the _Quarterly Review_ (vol. xxiii. p. 281) as 6s. The book contains xi+116+3 pages of Music Figures, crown octavo, bound in dark unlettered cloth. It has neither Introduction, notes (other than Forkel’s), nor indication of the translator’s identity. Much of the translation is so bad as to suggest grave doubts of the translator’s comprehension of the German original; while his rendering of Forkel’s critical chapters rouses a strong suspicion that he also lacked technical equipment adequate to his task. It is, in fact, difficult to understand how such an unsatisfactory piece of work found its way into print. The character of the 1820 translation has a close bearing upon its authorship. In the article on Bach in the new _Grove_ it is attributed to Samuel Wesley (1766-1837), an attractive suggestion, since Wesley was as enthusiastic a Bach pioneer in this country as Forkel himself was in Germany. But the statement is not correct. In Samuel Wesley’s _Letters to Mr. Jacobs relating to the Introduction into this Country of the Works of J. S. Bach_ (London, 1875) we find the clue. On October 17, 1808, Wesley writes: “We are (in the first place) preparing for the Press an authentic and accurate Life of Sebastian, which Mr. Stephenson the Banker (a most zealous and scientific member of our Fraternity) has translated into English from the German of Forkel.” Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify Stephenson precisely, or to detect his activities in the musical circle in which Wesley includes him. In 1820 there was in Lombard Street a firm of bankers under the style of “Remington, Stephenson, Remington, and Toulmin,” the active partner being Mr. Rowland Stephenson, a man of about forty in that year. The firm was wound up in bankruptcy in 1829, Stephenson having absconded to America the previous year. He appears to have been the only banker of that name holding such a recognised position as Wesley attributes to him, though it remains no more than a conjecture that he was the author of the translation issued in 1820.(3) But whoever “Stephenson the Banker” may have been, the poverty of his work fails to support Wesley’s commendation of his “scientific” equipment, and suggests that his purse rather than his talents were serviceable to Wesley’s missionary campaign.