royal palace, and had been rewarded by his friends with a banquet, appeared to me to have the right to be honoured as a great master.  I was very much astonished, therefore, when Franck calmly pitied the King of Saxony for having had his room ‘bedaubed’ by Bendemann!  Nevertheless, there was no denying that these people were ’good-natured.’  My intercourse with them became more frequent, and at all events offered me opportunities of mixing with the more cultured artistic society, in distinction to the theatrical circles with which I had usually associated; yet I never derived from it the least enthusiasm or inspiration.  The latter, however, appears to have been Hiller’s main object, and that winter he organised a sort of social circle which held weekly meetings at the home of one or the other of its members in turn.  Reinecke, who was both painter and poet, joined this society, together with Hubner and Bendemann, and had the bad fortune to write the new text for an opera for Hiller, the fate of which I will describe later on.  Robert Schumann, the musician, who was also in Dresden at this time, and was busy working out on opera, which eventually developed into Genovefa, made advances to Hiller and myself.  I had already known Schumann in Leipzig, and we had both entered upon our musical careers at about the same time.  I had also occasionally sent small contributions to the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, of which he had formerly been editor, and more recently a longer one from Paris on Rossini’s Stabat Mater.  He had been asked to conduct his Paradies und Peri at a concert to be given at the theatre; but his peculiar awkwardness in conducting on that occasion aroused my sympathy for the conscientious and energetic musician whose work made so strong an appeal to me, and a kindly and friendly confidence soon grew up between us.  After a performance of Tannhauser, at which he was present, he called on me one morning and declared himself fully and decidedly in favour of my work.  The only objection he had to make was that the stretta of the second finale was too abrupt, a criticism which proved his keenness of perception; and I was able to show him, by the score, how I had been compelled, much against my inclination, to curtail the opera, and thereby create the position to which he had taken exception.  We often met when out walking and, as far as it was possible with a person so sparing of words, we exchanged views on matters of musical interest.  He was looking forward to the production, under my baton, of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as he had attended the performances at Leipzig, and had been very much disappointed by Mendelssohn’s conducting, which had quite misunderstood the time of the first movement.  Otherwise his society did not inspire me particularly, and the fact that he was too conservative to benefit by my views was soon shown, more especially in his conception of the poem of Genovefa.  It was clear that my example had only made a very transient impression