Without underestimating the musical and technical value of Clementi's «Gradus ad Parnassum» on whose broad and solid foundation rests all modern pianoforte playing, and without in the least belittling the contributions of Cramer, it may be asserted that the Etudes of Chopin are revelations in technique. Of all their class, they alone anticipate the virtuoso requirements of to-day, while some, like Nos. 3 and 6 of op. 10, are, as inspired music, unmatched in the world's repertory of piano studies. Painstaking authorities have edited, and eminent critics have almost extravagantly praised them. Hunaker holds them monumental of our nineteenth century attainment in piano music. However, Chopin's twenty-seven Etudes have little place in this present enumeration, for, excepting two or three in the second book, op. 25, they, like the Concertos, the Bolero, the Rondos op. 1 and op. 16, and the Variations op. 2, all of them antedate the year 1831. The weight of evidence would prove that of the twenty-four Preludes op. 28, the bulk was composed prior to Chopin's visit to Majorca in 1839. Schumann called them «ruins, eagle feathers all strangely intermingled.» To Kullak they are «little masterpieces of the first rank.» Hunaker holds them «a sheaf of moods.» Rubinstein believes them the pearls of Chopin's works. They are in fact autobiographical poems in brief stanzas. Though we grant the excellence and completeness of many, and the individuality of all these Preludes, certain of them seemed fragmentary. The sixteen measures comprised in No. 7, may be the sole remnant of some discarded Mazurka. Those thirteen measures of solemn moving chords in C minor, the total of No. 20, suggest the episode in the G minor Nocturne, and may have been preserved from some such composition. We have, by Chopin, four Impromptus all written later than the year 1831: op. 29 in A flat, op. 36 in F sharp major, op. 51 in G flat, and the posthumous Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor. The word Impromptu is usually a misnomer betraying, to the discerning, the vanity of an author who would have his public suppose him capable of off-hand effusions in all ways superior to the careful work of others.