tribute of gratitude to many. After reading these letters one
comes to the conclusion that they are the expression of a plain
fact. It is a well-known French saying that in every love affair
there is one person who adores while the other allows himself to
be adored, and that saying may, with equal justice, be applied to
the many literary and artistic friendships of which, pace the
elder D'Israeli, history knows so many examples. Petrarch and
Boccaccio, Schiller and Goethe, Byron and Shelley immediately
occur to the mind in such a connection; but in none of these is
the mutual position of giver and receiver of worshipper and
worshipped so distinctly marked as in the case under discussion.

Nature itself, or, at least, external circumstances, had indeed
almost settled the matter. In the earlier stages of this
friendship the worldly position of the two men was a widely
different one. Liszt was at the time perhaps the most famous
musician alive, and although he had voluntarily abandoned an
active career, he remained the friend of kings and ecclesiastic
potentates, and the head and centre of an admiring school of
disciples.

Wagner at the same period was, in familiar language--nobody. He
had lost his position at the Royal Opera at Dresden through his
participation in the revolutionary rising of 1849, and he was an
exile from his country. As an artist his antecedents were not
very glorious. He had written three operas, all of which had met
with fair success, but none of which had taken real hold of the
public, and the Court theatres of Germany were naturally not very
prone to favour the interests of an outlawed rebel. In spite of
this disparity of fortune, it is curious to see how the two men,