el and Stanislas Kozmian, the elder,
came to London on the 11th of July and stayed till the 22nd. Pleyel
introduced him under the name of M. Fritz to his friend James Broadwood,
who invited them to dine with him at his house in Bryanston Square. The
incognito, however, could only be preserved as long as Chopin kept his
hands off the piano. When after dinner he sat down to play, the ladies
of the family suspected, and, suspicion being aroused, soon extracted a
confession of the truth.

Moscheles in alluding in his diary to this visit to London adds an item
or two to its history:--

Chopin, who passed a few days in London, was the only one of
the foreign artists who visited nobody and also did not wish
to be visited, as every conversation aggravates his chest-
complaint. He went to some concerts and disappeared.

Particularly interesting are the reminiscences of the writer of an
enthusiastic review [Footnote: Probably J. W. Davison.]of some of
Chopin's nocturnes and a scherzo in the "Musical World" of February 23,
1838:--

Were he [Chopin] not the most retiring and unambitious of all
living musicians, he would before this time have been
celebrated as the inventor of a new style, or school, of
pianoforte composition. During his short visit to the
metropolis last season, but few had the high gratification of
hearing his extemporaneous performance. Those who experienced
this will not readily lose its remembrance. He is, perhaps,
par eminence, the most delightful of pianists in the drawing-
room. The animation of his style is so subdued, its
tenderness so refined, its melancholy so gentle, its niceties
so studied and systematic, the tout-ensemble so perfect, and
evidently the result of an accurate judgment and most
finished taste, that when exhibited in the large concert-
room, or the thronged saloon, it fails to impress itself on
the mass. The "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik" of September 8,
1837, brought the piece of news that Chopin was then at a
Bohemian watering-place. I doubt the correctness of this
statement; at any rate, no other information to that effect
has come to my knowledge, and the ascertained facts do not
favour the assumption of its truth.

Never robust, Chopin had yet hitherto been free from any serious
illness. Now, however, the time of his troubles begins. In a letter,
undated, but very probably written in the summer of 1837, whic