It was the golden age of virtuosity. The technical facility of such men as Kalkbrenner and Czerny came to dazzling fruition in Liszt and Paganini, whose concert tours were triumphal journeys and whose names were on people’s lips like those of great national conquerors. This virtuosity took hold of people’s imaginations; Liszt and Paganini became, even during their lifetimes, glittering miracular legends. Their exploits were, during the third and fourth decades of the century, the substitute for those of Napoleon in the first fifteen years. Their exploits expanded with the growing interrelation of modern life. The great growth of newspaper circulation in the Napoleonic age, and the spread of railroads through the continent in the thirties, increased many times the glory and extent of the virtuoso’s great deeds. But the travelling virtuoso was a symbol of a far more important fact. For in this age musicians began to break away entirely from the personal patron; they appealed, for their justification and support, from the prince to the people. The name of a great musician was, thanks to the means of communication, spread broadcast among men, and there was something like an adequate living to be made by a composer-pianist from his concerts and the sale of his compositions. From the time of the revolution on it was the French state, with its Conservatory and its theatres, not the French court, which was the chief patron of the arts. And from Napoleonic times on it was the people at large, or at least the more cultured part of them, whose approval the artist sought. In all essentials, from the fall of Napoleon onward, it was a modern world in which the musician found himself. But it is evident that we cannot get along far in this examination of romantic music without reviewing the outward social history of the time. It is a time of colors we can never discover from a mere observation of outward facts and dates, for it is a time of complexities of superficial intrigue likely to obscure its meaning. We must, therefore, see the period, not as most historians give it to us, but as a movement of great masses of people and of the growing ideas which directed their actions. Royal courts and popular assemblies were not the real facts, but only the clearing houses for the real facts. The balances, on one or the other side of the ledger, which they showed bear only the roughest kind of relation to the truth.