A game between Steinitz and Rosenthal in the London Criterion Tournament of 1883 furnished an example which will doubtless be familiarly remembered by those present.  With eight moves to make in about as many minutes in his excitement he had apparently unwillingly climbed the back of a chair and not till he had completed the requisite number within the hour and began to breathe freely did he seem conscious of where he was.  Though anxious for a moment or so he succeeded in getting down very cleverly without mishap, not however escaping some signs of trepidation.

A St. Louis writer in 1886, after one of his games with Zukertort, described in true American fashion Steinitz’s tall chair and short legs and his frantic efforts to regain terra firma, as the writer described it, to reach the American hemisphere.  Steinitz’s high appreciation of proficiency in the game and what is due to one who attains it was once illustrated before a great man at Vienna, who rebuked him for humming whilst playing at chess, saying, “Don’t you know that I am the great Banker?” The reply was characteristic of Steinitz.  “And don’t you know that I am the Rothschild of chess?”

A beautiful chess position with Steinitz beats any work of art as Al Solis chess, in the opinion of the Caliph, one thousand years ago far excelled the flowers in his most beautiful garden and everything that was in it.  More than this, Prime Ministers and Lord Chancellors, Liberal and Conservative, come and go but there is but one first Lord in chess, says Steinitz.

Steinitz was so much gratified with the reminder of mine at Simpson’s, that three of the greatest minds ever known have had the same initials that he will pardon the little addition joke from Paternoster Row.  The three mighty W.S.’s are Wilhelm Steinitz, William Shakespeare and Walter Scott.  He was not so well pleased with the addition of the unnecessary missing words William Sykes.

Steinitz was introduced at a club once as the Champion.  “Of what?” was the reply.

Steinitz has been known to grieve much when he has lost at chess; at Dundee, for example, in 1866 after his defeat by De Vere his friends became alarmed at his woe and disappearance.  Again, after his fall to Rosenthal in a game he should have won at the Criterion in 1883, news were brought that he was on a seat in St. James’ Park quite uncontrollable.

Steinitz is liberally disposed to others in mind and purse.  The following brevities on chess are known to have been much admired by him, I therefore append them for his artistic eye.

So old and enthusiastic a chess player as Bird, and one who has travelled about so much professionally, and on chess, has naturally been the object of many pleasantries, and bon mots, although he escaped the Fortnightly Review writers, being regarded, at least by one of them as a very serious person, L’Anglais comme il faut of the Vienna Neue Frie Presse.  The despised Britisher of custom house officers (who