Germany. He expanded the German section of this book and published it 1854 as Modern German Music. His masterpiece was Thirty Years' Musical Recollections (1862), which covers, year-by-year, the opera seasons of European operas in London between 1830 and 1859. In the work, he blames the autocratic manager of Her Majesty's Theatre, Benjamin Lumley, for a decline in the quality of performances there. On the other hand, he praises the efforts of Giulia Grisi, Mario and Michael Costa, together with a group of journalists (including himself), for successfully creating the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden in 1847. He also wrote the well-received Memorials of Mrs. Hemans (1836), Handel Studies (1859), an annotated edition Mary Russell Mitford's letters (2 vols., 1872) and The National Music of the World (1882). Fiction and playwriting Chorley also wrote, with far less success, novels, stories, drama and verse, and various librettos. His works of fiction included Sketches of a Seaport Town (1834), a collection of stories, essays, and novellas related to Liverpool. The next year, he wrote Conti the Discarded. Neither of these achieved success. His plays, Old Love and New Fortune (1850) and Duchess Eleanour (1854), did not gain a following. He wrote two novels, Roccabella (1859), under the pseudonym Paul Bell and dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and A Prodigy: a Tale of Music (1866). His libretti included The Amber Witch for composer William Vincent Wallace, The May Queen – A Pastoral (1858) for William Sterndale Bennett, and two for his friend Arthur Sullivan: The Sapphire Necklace and The Masque at Kenilworth. He published an English version of Meyerbeer's Dinorah, and wrote the words for several well-known songs, including Gounod's "Nazareth", Edward Loder's "The Brave Old Oak" and "The Three Ages", the English form of the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria", Sullivan's "The Long Day Closes", and the hymn "God, the Omnipotent!". Chorley wrote the English libretto for Gounod's Faust, for its first presentation in London in 1863 (at Her Majesty's Theatre). During rehearsals, it was found that the lines were unsingable. Both Sims Reeves and Charles Santley made strenuous and persistent complaints to Messrs. Chappell's, and new translations were made secretly, since no-one dared to tell Chorley. The first he knew of it was at the first performance. Chorley, as reviewer, waited to make his comment until the final announced performance, of which he wrote that it was "seriously imperilled by a singular