Howard, the secretary of the Philharmonic Society, a worthy and agreeable old man, was another person (the only one, he believed) in the circle of my English acquaintances who took the trouble to entertain me.  I had to go once or twice to the Italian Opera at Covent Garden with his daughter.  There I heard Fidelio, given in rather grotesque fashion by unclean Germans and voiceless Italians, and with recitatives.  I consequently managed to evade paying frequent visits to this theatre.  When I went to say good-bye to Mr. Howard on leaving London, I was surprised to meet Meyerbeer at his house.  He had just arrived in London to conduct his Nordstern.  As I saw him come in it occurred to me immediately that Howard, whom I had only known as the secretary of the Philharmonic Society, was also the musical critic of the Illustrated London News; it was in the latter capacity that the great operatic composer had called upon him.  Meyerbeer was absolutely paralysed when he saw me, and this put me into such a frame of mind that we found it impossible to exchange a word.  Mr. Howard, who had felt sure that we were acquainted, was much surprised at this, and asked me as I was leaving whether I did not know Meyerbeer.  I answered that he had better ask Meyerbeer.  On meeting Howard again that evening, I was assured that Meyerbeer had spoken of me in terms of the highest praise.  I then suggested his reading certain numbers of the Paris Gazette musicale, in which Fetis had, some time before, given a less favourable interpretation of Meyerbeer’s views about me.  Howard shook his head, and could not understand how two such great composers could meet in so strange a manner.

A visit from my old friend Hermann Franck was a pleasant surprise.  He was then staying at Brighton, and had come up to London for a few days.  We conversed a great deal, and I had to make a considerable effort to put him right in his ideas about me, as he had heard the most wonderful reports from German musicians during the last few years in which our intercourse had been broken off.  He was astonished, in the first place, to find me in London, where he considered it impossible for me ever to find a suitable field for my musical tendencies.  I did not understand what he meant by my ‘tendencies,’ but I told him quite simply how I came to accept the invitation of the Philharmonic Society, and that I proposed to fulfil my contract for this year’s concerts, and then to go back to my work at Zurich without further ceremony.  This sounded quite different to the state of things he had imagined, for he had felt bound to conclude that I proposed to create a stronghold in London from which to conduct a war of extermination against the whole race of German musicians.  This was the unanimous explanation of my intentions which he had heard in Germany.  Nothing could be more astounding, he said, than the surprising incongruity between the fictitious form in which I appeared to these people, and my real nature, which he had recognised