"Stevens’s writings are a mine of information about the social and musical life of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. . . . Nothing came amiss to his pen; anecdotes of Mr. Handel, eyewitness accounts of the first balloons, biographical sketches of persons as different as Lord Thurlow and ‘Poor Bat’ [Jonathan Battishill]—they were all there."—Charles Cudworth, Musical Times