whose fame as an organist was national, and had long been the object
of Bach's enthusiasm. The aged man listened while his youthful rival
improvised on the old choral, "Upon the Rivers of Babylon." He shed
tears of joy while he tenderly embraced Bach, and said: "I did think
that this art would die with me; but I see that you will keep it alive."

Our musician rapidly became known far and wide throughout the musical
centres of Germany as a learned and recondite composer, as a brilliant
improviser, and as an organist beyond rivalry. Yet it was in these last
two capacities that his reputation among his contemporaries was the most
marked. It was left to a succeeding generation to fully enlighten the
world in regard to his creative powers as a musical thinker.


II.

Though Bach's life was mostly spent at Weimar and Leipsic, he was at
successive periods chapel-master and concert-director at several of the
German courts, which aspired to shape public taste in matters of musical
culture and enthusiasm. But he was by nature singularly retiring and
unobtrusive, and he recoiled from several brilliant offers which would
have brought him too much in contact with the gay world of fashion,
apparently dreading any diversion from a severe and exclusive art-life;
for within these limits all his hopes, energies, and wishes were
focalized. Yet he was not without that keen spirit of rivalry, that love
of combat, which seems to be native to spirits of the more robust and
energetic type.

In the days of the old Minnesingers, tournaments of music shared the
public taste with tournaments of arms. In Bach's time these public