Unless an author proceeds in this way, the reader never knows how far he may trust him, how far the evidence justifies his judgment.

For--not to speak of cheats and fools--the best informed are apt to make assertions unsupported or insufficiently supported by facts, and the wisest cannot help seeing things through the coloured spectacles of their individuality.

The foregoing remarks are intended to explain my method, not to excuse carelessness of literary workmanship.

Whatever the defects of the present volumes may be--and, no doubt, they are both great and many--I have laboured to the full extent of my humble abilities to group and present my material perspicuously, and to avoid diffuseness and rhapsody, those besetting sins of writers on music.
The first work of some length having Chopin for its subject was Liszt's "Frederic Chopin," which, after appearing in 1851 in the Paris journal "La France musicale," came out in book-form, still in French, in 1852 (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel .-- Translated into English by M.W.

Cook, and published by William Reeves, London, 1877).