After such injustice in the case of Strauss, it does not astonish one to find that Max Bruch, one of the most noteworthy figures in modern German music, and Reinecke, an important composer and long a professor at the Leipsic Conservatory, should receive only thirty lines each. But the neglect of Strauss hardly prepared us for the brief and incomplete record which passes for Humperdinck’s biography—a biography shorter than that of Cramer, William Hawes, Henry Lazarus, the English clarinettist, and Henry Smart! Mendelssohn, the great English idol, receives a biography out of all proportion to his importance—a biography twice as long as that of Brahms, and considerably longer than either Schumann’s or Schubert’s! And it is full of effulgent praise and more than intimates that Mendelssohn’s counterpoint was like Bach’s, that his sonata-form resembled Beethoven’s, and that he invented a new style no less original than Schubert’s! Remembering the parochial criterion by which the Encyclopædia’s editors judge art, we may perhaps account for this amazing partiality to Mendelssohn by the following ludicrous quotation from his biography: “His earnestness as a Christian needs no stronger testimony than that afforded by his own delineation of the character of St. Paul; but it is not too much to say that his heart and life were pure as those of a little child.” Although Hugo Wolf’s biography is a column and a half in length, Konradin Kreutzer gets only eighteen lines; Nicolai, who wrote _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, only ten lines; Suppé, only fifteen; Nessler, only twelve; Franz Abt, only ten; Henselt, only twenty-six; Heller, only twenty-two; Lortzing, only twenty; and Thalberg, only twenty-eight. In order to realize how much prejudice, either conscious or unconscious, entered into these biographies, compare the amounts of space with those given to the English composers above mentioned. Even Raff receives a shorter biography than Mackenzie; and von Bülow’s and Goldmark’s biographies are briefer than Cowen’s. But where the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ shows its utter inadequacy as a guide to modern music is in the long list of omission. For instance, there is no biography of Marschner, whose _Hans Heiling_ still survives in Germany; of Friedrich Silcher, who wrote most of the famous German “folk-songs”; of Gustav Mahler, one of the truly important symphonists of modern times; of the Scharwenka brothers; or of Georg Alfred Schumann—all sufficiently important to have a place in an encyclopædia like the _Britannica_.