mutual friend which contained a comparison of Beethoven and Brahms. In it were these words: 'He is often offensively rough to his friends like Beethoven, and is as little able as Beethoven was to free himself entirely from the effects of a neglected education.' Hanslick was very much upset on remembering what he had done, and immediately wrote to Brahms to throw himself on his mercy and beg his silence on the matter. The master immediately answered: 'DEAR FRIEND 'You need not be in the least uneasy. I scarcely read ----'s letter, but put it back at once into the cover, and only gently shook my head. I am not to say anything to him--Ah, dear friend, that happens, unfortunately, quite of itself in my case! That one is taken even by old acquaintances and friends for something quite different from what one is (or, apparently, shows one's self in their eyes) is an old experience with me. I remember how I, startled and confounded, formerly kept silence in such cases; now however, quite calmly and as a matter of course. That will sound harsh or severe to you, good and kind man--yet I hope not to have wandered too far from Goethe's saying, "Blessed is he who, without hate, shuts himself from the world."' Brahms was ready for another journey to Italy in the spring, but Widmann was unable to accompany him, and he passed his sixty-third birthday anniversary in Vienna. When it dawned, the work that was for a short time generally accepted as his swan-song had been completed. Deiters writes that the immediate occasion of the composition of the 'Four Serious Songs' was the death of the artist Max Klinger's father, which occurred earlier in the year. The not unnatural assumption that has sometimes seen in these solemn utterances of the great composer a presentiment of his own fast-approaching end may or may not represent a fact. It has not been accepted by those of his friends amongst whom he passed the last few months of his life, and certainly nothing that is known of his individuality lends likelihood to the notion of his going out, as it were, to meet the thought of his death. On the other hand, his repeated assertion that the songs had been composed for his own birthday points to the possibility that his mind may have been under the influence of forebodings of which he was, perhaps, but vaguely conscious. 'Yes, Grüber, we are in the front line now,' he said to his landlord on hearing of the death of some of the old people in the course of one of his last summers at Ischl. The 'Four Serious Songs' were published in the summer of 1896 with a dedication to Max Klinger, his personal friend, of whose work, including that inspired by his own compositions, he became a warm admirer, though he at first disliked the painter's 'Brahms Fantasie.'