This cruel and sudden ending to Johnstone's career, at a moment when he had reason to be reconciled to life and to forgive circumstance, when he was wider in his critical sympathies and more thoroughly master of his means of expression than ever before, and when his public influence was strong, stirred the musical society of north-western England. North and South are two different nations--neighbours that often carefully ignore and misunderstand each other. This appears to be specially the case in musical criticism. The London press said much too little. But the word "provincial" has no application to the musical energies of Manchester. It is like one of the great German towns, Munich or Frankfurt, being wholly independent of the capital, of which it is not a colony. The mark made by Johnstone in this region was attested in a measure that he would never have foreseen. The _Manchester Guardian_, besides giving an honourable obituary notice to its critic, received far more letters in his honour, expressing sorrow at his early death and admiration of his character, than it found space to print, although the most salient of them filled its columns. They were written with knowledge, not by laymen, but by persons with whom Johnstone had worked and had dealt faithfully, sometimes stringently. The remark of Canon Gorton, "I began my friendship with a quarrel," might be echoed more than once. Johnstone's clean, hard literary thrust, or _punch_, free from noisy hammering violence, was a not infrequent introduction to his acquaintance. It was given with a will, but in a spirit thoroughly, and to third parties amusingly, impersonal. The letters as a whole give a clear notion of the intelligent professional view concerning him; of his honesty, catholicity, and knowledge. He had been everywhere, he counted, and when he had gone he was missed. One of Johnstone's brothers in the craft, Mr. Ernest Newman, after referring to a dispute which had led to their friendship, spoke of him as "the best and strongest Englishman of our time in this line." Dr. Adolph Brodsky, after praising in especial Johnstone's accounts of pianoforte performances, singled out his services in breaking down the popular prejudice in England against Bach. Others wrote of his musical erudition and his "laudable desire to prevent anything in the form of charlatanism from finding a place in the musical assemblies of Manchester." Canon Gorton, who, as we quoted above, wrote with gratitude of the high stimulus given by Johnstone to those local efforts which save music from being unduly centralised in the bigger cities, and his pertinent remarks upon the rarity and value of great musical critics claim quotation, as they bring home the public sense of loss in Johnstone's death.