Hans Richter had shared the duties of conductor at the Wagner Festival of 1877 with the great composer himself. The concerts which made his name a household word in the musical world began in 1879. His leonine appearance and Olympian calm, his wonderful memory, which enabled him to conduct the great masterpieces, classical and modern, without a score; and the dignity and authority of his interpretations soon gained for him an admiration which survived his repudiation in 1914 of all the honours and distinctions conferred on him by the country in which for many years he had made his home. There are still a good many orchestral players amongst us who have a warm corner in their hearts for the "Doctor," and a profound respect for his mastery of the high art of conducting. His quaint sayings are legion, and ought to be collected. One of the best is his rebuke of his band at a rehearsal of the _Venusberg_ music: "Gentlemen, you play it as if you were teetotallers, _which you are not_." _Punch_ acclaimed him as a master in 1886, and his tribute is all the more remarkable because it is coupled with an unexpected acknowledgment of the genius of Brahms, whose Fourth Symphony, a very tough nut to crack in those days, is contrasted with the "howling balderdash" of other moderns. Paderewski, who made his first appearance in the spring of 1890, is handsomely extolled. His first concert, which the present writer attended, only attracted a meagre audience, but the effect on his hearers was electrifying and the _crescendo_ of popularity was immediate and abiding. _Punch_, of course, made puns on his name, but in these years he was so consistent an offender that he might very well have appropriated the old doggerel confession:-- If for every pun I shed I were to be punishèd, I could not find a puny shed Wherein to hide my punnish head. [Sidenote: _The Plague of Prodigies_] London has never been free from the plague of prodigies, but the epidemic was acute in 1888, and _Punch_ treated the matter in a style which has a strangely familiar ring--when allowance is made for the usual puns:--