who warmly admired the brilliant player who had so completely revolutionized the style of execution on instruments with a keyboard.  Here he also met Viotti, the great violinist, and played a duo concertante with the latter, expressly composed for the occasion.  Clementi was delighted with the almost frantic enthusiasm of the French, so different from the more temperate approbation of the English.  He was wont to say jocosely that he hardly knew himself to be the same man.  From Paris Clementi passed, via Strasburg and Munich, where he was most cordially welcomed, to Vienna, the then musical Mecca of Europe, for it contained two world-famed men—­“Papa” Haydn and the young prodigy Mozart.  The Emperor Joseph II, a great lover of music, could not let the opportunity slip, for he now had a chance to determine which was the greater player, his own pet Mozart or the Anglo-Italian stranger whose fame as an executant had risen to such dimensions.  So the two musicians fought a musical duel, in which they played at sight the most difficult works, and improvised on themes selected by the imperial arbiter.  The victory was left undecided, though Mozart, who disliked the Italians, spoke afterward of Clementi, in a tone at variance with his usual gentleness, as “a mere mechanician, without a pennyworth of feeling or taste.”  Clementi was more generous, for he couldn’t say too much of Mozart’s “singing touch and exquisite taste,” and dated from this meeting a considerable difference in his own style of play.

With the exception of occasional concert tours to Paris, Clementi devoted all his time up to 1802 in England, busy as conductor, composer, virtuoso, and teacher.  In the latter capacity he was unrivaled, and pupils came to him from all parts of Europe.  Among these pupils were John B. Cramer and John Field, names celebrated in music.  In 1802 Clementi took the brilliant young Irishman, John Field, to St. Petersburg on a musical tour, where both master and pupil were received with unbounded enthusiasm, and where the latter remained in affluent circumstances, having married a Russian lady of rank and wealth.  Field was idolized by the Russians, and they claim his compositions as belonging to their music.  He is now distinctively remembered as the inventor of that beautiful form of musical writing, the nocturne.  Spohr, the violinist, met Clementi and Field at the Russian capital, and gives the following amusing account in his “Autobiography”:  “Clementi, a man in his best years, of an extremely lively disposition and very engaging manners, liked much to converse with me, and often invited me after dinner to play at billiards.  In the evening I sometimes accompanied him to his large piano-forte warehouse, where Field was often obliged to play for hours to display instruments to the best advantage to purchasers.  I have still in recollection the figure of the pale overgrown youth, whom I have never since seen.  When Field, who had outgrown his