art, let us hear what his great contemporaries have to say of his playing from the æsthetic standpoint. We need not refer again to Lafont and Lipinski, but will begin with Spohr. It has been mentioned that Spohr met Paganini at Venice, in 1816. Spohr wished to hear the great Italian play something, but the latter declined. He afterwards explained to Spohr that his style of playing was calculated for the great public only; and that if he were to play to Spohr he must play in a different manner, for which he was not then inclined. So it was not until 1830 that Spohr heard Paganini at Cassel. This is what he wrote: "In June, 1830, Paganini came to Cassel and gave two concerts in the theatre, which I heard with great interest. His left hand, and his constantly pure intonation were to me astonishing. But in his compositions and his execution, I found a strange mixture of the highly genial and childishly tasteless, by which one felt alternately charmed and disappointed, so that the impression left as a whole was, after frequent hearing, by no means satisfactory to me." Paganini was playing to his "great public," and in that respect lost Spohr's esteem; but can a great violinist, of strong personality, be perfectly just to a contemporary of a different temperament? Schumann, as a composer, could look upon Paganini from a different point of view. This is what he says: "When I heard him for the first time, I expected him to begin with a tone such as had never been heard before. But with how small, how thin a tone he commenced! Then he began to weave his spells; invisibly he threw out his magnetic chains among the public; they oscillated above and around. And then the rings became more and more intricate; even the audience seemed to contract, while he interlaced his tones until they seemed melted into one--one with the master himself, all counterbalancing each other with sympathetic influence." This is not criticism; it is scarcely description: it is as fanciful as Heinrich Heine's description, but it is a proof of the great violinist's power to touch the imagination. Ignaz Moscheles, a virtuoso pianist, complains of his utter inability to find language capable of conveying a description of Paganini's wonderful performance. "Had that long-drawn, soul-searching tone lost for a single second its balance, it would have lapsed into a discordant cat's-mew; but it never did so, and Paganini's tone was always his own, and unique of its kind. The thin strings of his instrument--on which alone it was possible to conjure forth those myriads of notes and thrills and cadenzas would have been fatal in the hands of any other violin player, but with him they were indispensable adjuncts." Again: "Nothing could exceed my surprise and admiration; his constant and venturesome flights, his newly discovered source of flageolet tones, his gift of fusing and beautifying subjects of the most heterogeneous kind; all these phases of genius so completely bewildered