Excerpt from My Musical Memories I think it was Lord Beaconsfield who said that a man is usually interesting in proportion as his talk runs upon what he is familiar with; and that as a man usually knows more about himself than about anything else, he seldom fails to be tolerable if his self-centred talk turns out to be unaffected and sincere. To talk about one's self and to be dull is nevertheless possible. In the early pages of this volume I shall have to do the first to a considerable extent; let me hope to avoid the second. Music is not the business of my life, but it remains its sweetest recreation; and there is one opinion which used to be widely held by my friends in the old days, and to which I subscribed for many years. Nature, they often said, intended me for a violinist. In fact, my musical life starts from the violin; and, "Stradivario duce" - Stradivarius leading the way - I feel inspired, "after long years," to retrace with a certain keen pleasure these labyrinthine passages of Musical Memory. There is something about the shape of a violin - its curves, its physiognomy, its smiling and genial 's - which seems to invite and welcome inspection and handling. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.