One day I went with the Ewings to a Wagner concert. […] Wagner, who was almost unknown in England, had rashly contracted for a series of concerts conducted by himself, which I afterwards heard were a failure financially. My party were all hard up, and we sat so far away from the platform that all I saw was an undersized man with a huge head, apparently in a towering rage from start to finish of the concert; I thought he could hardly refrain from whacking heads right and left instead of merely the desk. No doubt the performance was insufficiently rehearsed and execrable; anyhow I was not as much carried away as I expected.