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"My father, the late Count Ostroróg, at an early age held a captaincy in the Russian Imperial Guard. At the outbreak of the Crimean War he became aide-de-camp to General Count Zamoiski, who had formed a body of Polish Lancers, and in this capacity he served with the British Army throughout the campaign, at its conclusion coming to England. At this period he was in very straitened circumstances, as the whole of his property in his native land, Poland, had been confiscated by the Russian Government during the rebellion. Under these conditions he had to set his wits to work to obtain a means of livelihood. Being an exceedingly ingenious man, and a good musician, he succeeded in perfecting an invention for using percussion in organs, the patent of which he eventually sold for a small sum, and with the proceeds opened a photographic studio in Marseilles; and here he remained until after the Franco-German war, when he opened a studio in Paris, quite revolutionising photography in that city.

"The failure of the Union Général ruined him almost entirely in a few months, and having sold his three beautiful villas at Nice to Baron Reuter, he, with the money obtained by the sale, opened in 1881 a small studio in Conduit Street, his original intention being to direct his energies solely to the production of enamels on copper; but finding this particular line of art not sufficiently remunerative, he had again to turn his attention to portraiture. His skill soon won Royal patronage, and in 1886 he transferred his studio to the present house, 164, Regent Street.

"As to myself," continued the Count, "I was born in England, spending my early years in Poland. In 1871 I was in Paris during the Commune, afterwards coming to England and studying at Woolwich, where I subsequently obtained my commission in the Royal Artillery. It was my father's intention that I should remain in the service, but I could not bear the idea of his struggling without my assistance, and so I resigned my commission, not without a severe pang, as I was dovoted to the army. I then spent two years of hard work studying under an eminent chemist in Paris, thus learning all the technicalities of portraiture as well as every other branch of photography. I then joined my father. It was a few years later, upon my return from South Africa, where I had spent a holiday with camera and surveying instruments in Natal and Zululand, that I had the misfortune to lose my father, since which time the business has been under my management."

PECULIARITIES OF SITTERS.

"I believe you have a great deal of trouble with some sitters, have you not?"

"Yes!" answered Count Ostroróg, "I should think we have. People will not sit as they are asked; they get nervous and excited. So many people say, 'Why do you place us in such awkward positions? let us sit naturally,' forgetting that if we allowed them to sit as they consider naturally, in all probability every part of their body, except the head, would be more or less out of focus. Then there is a stock phrase amongst sitters; how it could have originated I cannot conceive; it never strikes me as either being clever or humorous, and I have heard it so often I am a little weary of it. A sitter will come in and say, 'I hate having my portrait taken. I would far rather have a tooth out.' Then a man will rush in saying, 'I have been bored to death by my friends and relatives to have my portrait taken. I have to catch a train in ten minutes, and I should like to be taken in three or four positions, so fire away.' He will then fling himself into a chair, and I take him, and I am bound to own, often with the most excellent results. Then there is another class of man who will come in and say, 'Now look here, I want to be taken naturally, don't you know; none of your stiff positions for

me.' 'Certainly,' I answer; 'you place yourself as you like, and then if you will allow me I will place you as I think correct, and take one photo each way.' It is almost needless to add how disappointed the man invariably is with the result of what he conceived to be an extremely natural attitude."

"Whom do you consider the more troublesome sitters, ladies or gentlemen?"

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Men are by far and away the more fussy. I can assure you a man will often fidget twice as much over the arrangement of his tie as a woman will over her dress."

HOW ROYALTIES ARE PHOTOGRAPHED.

"I believe you have photographed members of the Royal Family?" I said.

"Yes, we have taken nearly all their portraits, I believe. Her Majesty the Queen will communicate, with us, fixing a date. Upon the day appointed we proceed with a camera, backgrounds, etc., to Windsor, where Her Majesty is photographed in a studio, which was, I believe, originally used by the late Prince Consort, one of whose hobbies was photography. Some photographers have three or four cameras going at once, so that they may be sure of the result, but we have never had more than one. Her Majesty is an excellent sitter, most gracious, kind and considerate. The Princess of Wales always makes an admirable photograph, although she is taken under the most disadvantageous circumstances possible; at Marlborough House there is absolutely no suitable place for portrait taking, the only spot where sufficient light can be obtained for the purpose is upon a sort of verandah. But, as I before remarked, the Princess always makes a good photograph; her features are so regular and so peculiarly adapted to portraiture that it would be almost impossible to produce a bad picture. The Duke of Connaught is one of the few members of the Royal Family who have honoured us with sittings at our studio."

A BUSY NIGHT WITH A CAMERA.

"Can you tell me how many photographs you take in a year?"

The Count thought a little. "That would be difficult to say," he replied; "but I can tell you that since we started in London ten years ago we have used over one hundred and fifty thousand plates of all sizes, so you may reckon we have taken say between forty and fifty thousand photographs. The greatest number we have ever taken in one day, or night, I suppose I ought to say, was at a ball given at the Hotel Métropole by Colonel North. My father and myself started at eight o'clock in the evening with one camera, and went on without intermission until seven o'clock the next morning; we used four hundred plates, and took in all one hundred and fifty groups and single figures. That, I think, was a record performance," concluded the Count.

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Novel Cure for the Tenement Evil. BUILD square not oblong-that is in essence the "cure which Mr. Ernest Flagg prescribes in Scribner for July for the New York Tenement House evil.

"The greatest evil which ever befell New York City was the division of the blocks into lots of 25 × 100 feet, for from this division has arisen the New York system of tenement-houses, the worst curse which ever afflicted any great community." All the evils of the system lie entirely in the plan-rear-tenements, facing-windows, lack of light, air, and space. "It is a curious fact that, although thousands of books have been written upon architecture, there are none on planning, which is unquestionably the most important part of architecture. . . . We can say definitely that the most economical plan is an exact square, for every deviation from it, except the circle, which is impractical, involves the erection of more wall to enclose a given area in rooms."

The more nearly we can conform to the square, the more we economise walls. Fifteen per cent., or nearly fifty million dollars, might have been saved on New York tenement property had the square house been the ideal.

MR. LE GALLIENNE ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY. Great Thoughts for August, among a number of other articles of interest, has a paper from the pen of Mr.

MR. RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. (By permission of the Idler.)

Richard Le Gallienne on "The Prospects of Poetry," from which I take the following encouraging passage:

Another tiresome platitude to which we are periodically treated is that about poetry having exhausted itself, like, say, the drama. The age of poetry, like that of miracles, has passed! and so on. One might as well say that the age of cowslips or primroses is passed; for, surely, poetry is no less a part of nature's perennial youth. In poetry, as in everything else, there are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught. That they may not chance to be caught in our generation or the next does not alter that natural law. And even at the present moment, if we can observe no one incipient great poet, the poetical faculties both creative and receptive are surely more widely diffused than ever. Besides, when has an incipient great poet been known for great at the beginning of his career? Were Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, or Browning? They had, it is true, their little circles of appreciation, who swore by them from the beginning, but the contemporary critics in power did their best to buffet them and sncer them down as minor poets. Every poet is a "minor poet" at one period of his existence, till he has been able to force the world to confess him of the dii majores. So, nowadays, there are not wanting those generous souls who see in one or other of our so-called minor singers poets in the bud-as assuredly great on the other hand, there are not wanting others who do their petty best to spitefully nip that bud. For some it is Mr. John Davidson, others Mr. Francis Thompson, Mr. William Watson, Mr. Norman Gale, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and to these might be added many other names of great interest and promise: Mr. Ernest Rhys, Mr. John Gray, Mr. Dalmon, Mr. Eugene Lee Hamilton, Mr. Arthur Symons, Mr. R. K. Leather, and such women poets as Mrs. Dollie Radford, Mrs. Meynell, and Mrs. Hinkson. Indeed, if ever there was a poetical spring in the air, it is at the present moment. What the autumn following so much blossom may be like it would be futile to prophesy. But, even supposing none of the poets I have named should set into absolute "greatness," what, after all, does it matter? Can we not be grateful for the charming work, great or small, they bring us, rather than be continually and ungraciously finding fault with it because it is not something better?

MR. R. H. HUTTON.

A JOURNALIST IN LITERATURE.

By far the most important and the most interesting article in the Scottish Review is Mr. William Wallace's appreciation of the literary work of the Editor of the Spectator," a writer who has been a power in British thought and criticism for at least two generations." Mr. Hutton, says Mr. Wallace, is "to the journalism of the last twenty-five years what Mr. Gladstone-the Mr. Gladstone whom he has loved and lost-has been to the politics of the same period."

And apart altogether from the intrinsic value of his literary. religious, and ethical pronouncements, these two volumes of essays ("Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers") are of interest, as examples less of the journalism of the present than of the journalism of the future. Mr. Hutton is in spite or is it in virtue ?-of his power as a journalist, one of the preachers of and to the age. But no preacher ever depended less on pose, gesticulation, or pulpit-thumping.

Mr. Wallace finds it evident from Mr. Hutton's writings that "among the British thinkers of the past two generations, the late Mr. Maurice and Cardinal Newman, and the (happily) still living Dr. Martineau, have influenced him most," and says that Mr. Hutton, recalling Mr. W. R. Greg, Mr. Walter Bagehot, and Mr. John Morley, rather than "the hierophants of the New Journalism," has on the spur of the moment said more true and sagacious things with more point than any public writer of the present generation or its predecessor. The following passage gives the gist of Mr. Wallace's able paper:

They have not, it is true, the special and purely literary delicacy which distinguishes Mr. Matthew Arnold's "Essays in Criticism," and which mark out their author as the British Erasmus. They do not present that combination of man-ofthe-worldliness and culture which make Mr. Leslie Stephen's "Hours in a Library" a veritable arm-chair delight. They have none of that delicious pensiveness-the pensiveness of the traveller through life who nevertheless can take his ease and his flask of wine in his inn, and admire a golden sunset from his bedroom window, although he knows that the end of his pilgrimage is dusty death-in which Mr. Stevenson's art is seen at its best. Even when he is most touched with religious emotion, Mr. Hutton never rises into that mournful eloquence which fills, as with the swell of an organ, the pages of Mr. Rathbone Greg's "Enigmas of Life." Yet with all their limitations-perhaps on account of them-Mr. Hutton's papers represent at its richest the serious thought of the serious, yet cultured, Englishman (I say Englishman advisedly) who likes to keep abreast of the times, but is incapable of breaking abruptly or irreverently with the past. They represent the cream of the best English Sunday afternoon talk; and, like such talk, it is occupied to a not inconsiderable extent with matters of religion. Mr. Hutton has here been described as a journalist in literature, but not a few readers of his papers will be tempted to say rather that he is a preacher in journalism.

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The Cost of Keeping a Yacht.

MR. W. J. GORDON'S paper in this month's Leisure Hour is on yachts and yacht-racing. In describing the Prince of Wales's yacht Britannia, which is the seventh owned by the Prince, and the best of them all, he says it is reported that the Britannia cost over £12,000 to start with, and takes £1,500 a year to keep her going in wages, gratuities, and other expenses; for the running of a big racer, with the tips of a sovereign to each man when she wins and half a sovereign when she loses, and the 5 per cent. of the value of the prize to the skipper, besides the replacement of spars and gear-the Britannia had three new masts last year-costs almost as much as a grouse moor. Of course her cabins are beautifully fitted, although the upholstery is not of the gorgeous kind; for to keep the weights low, the decorations above the dado are merely tapestries and cretonnes, while the polished woods beneath are yellow pine and mahogany. The largest racing yacht owned in this country is the Satanita, whose length (over all) is 131 feet, almost two cricket-pitches. "There can be," says Mr. Gordon, "no finality in yacht racing; boats must be built to beat boats as long as the measurement lasts, and when the utmost has been obtained out of one formula, we will start afresh under another, until, perhaps, we develop a racer we can live in, instead of riding on like so many jockeys."

. THE RURAL COMMUNE IN RUSSIA.

THE GERM OF SELF-GOVERNMENT.

THE rural commune as it exists in Russia is described in the Leisure Hour this month in one of the series of papers," Peoples of Europe." The existence and constitution of these village communes will surprise many readers. Here is the description of the rural commune:

An institution entirely distinctive of Russia is the Mir or rural commune. The father of the family, according to old Russian traditions, is sovereign in his house, and this sovereignty has remained intact throughout all transformations and revolutions. To the paternal authority is conjoined, in the still entirely patriarchal family of the moujik, the régime of the commune with its undivided property.

In the days of serfdom rural families liked to remain agglomerated. Nowadays partition of goods is less rare. Few huts, or isbas, as they are called, shelter several married couples under their roof as formerly. Communal possession is generally divided into pasture land and arable. The first has been much curtailed owing to the emancipation, and is nearly all exploite in common. Every family sends its animals to graze on the same spot, the flocks only being known by their distinctive mark. The shepherd is also a communal servant.

PERIODICAL REDISTRIBUTION OF THE SOIL.

These fields are redivided at intervals of more or less regularity between the members of the commune, to be cultivated by each person separately at his own risk and peril. The fundamental idea of the régime of the Mir rests upon this periodical redistribution of the soil.

There are three points that are considered in this division: first, the titles that give the right to have a lot, then the epochs of the division of the communal property, finally the method of parcelling out or of allotment. The division is made according to souls (douchi)—that is to say, per head for each mile inhabitant, or per family; and in the latter case account is taken of the capacity for work displayed by the different families and the amount of labour that each one of them is able to contribute.

Under this system a lot having been given to a couple, it is the woman who gives her husband access to the property, on which account, perhaps, Russia is the land in which marriages are most fecund. The more the population augments the more frequent must be the redivision of the land.

THE COMMUNE OF THE FIRST DEGREE.

The principle of the Mir demands that each lot of ground should be rigorously equal, because it has to support an equal share of the imposts, and the Mirs endeavour to exercise an absolute impartiality and justice. In making this division, superfices is first considered, then value, and occasionally there is resort to drawing by lot.

The peasants thus held together by the double chain of collective possession and solidarity of taxes, form the village commune or commune of the first degree, obstchestro, as it is called. According to the act of emancipation these firstclass communes are composed as a rule of peasants who formerly had the same masters, and who to-day possess the same lands.

Many of these neighbouring communes are reunited into sodalities called volost. The Russian rolost, like the American townships, holds a mean place between the canton and the communes of France. By its administrative rule it more nearly approaches the commune.

The colost and obstchestvo play different roles. The smaller commune is more concerned with economic affairs; to the larger commune pertain the administrative functions; but the principles that guide the two are absolutely identical.

VILLAGE ASSEMBLIES.

The assembly of the rolost is composed of all the functionaries belonging to the Mir conjoined to the delegates chosen by the village assemblies in proportion to the number per ten hearths (deor). The council must in all cases count at least one representative of each hamlet, and possesses a sort of permanent commission formed of the chiefs of the divers communities.

The assembly of the volost has as its prime mission the duty of electing functionaries and local judges, and of nominating representatives at the district assemblies or zemstva, a sort of general council at which all classes meet. The rolost may undertake publie works, such as would transcend the capacity of individual communes, construct roads, build schools or hospitals and for such purposes it has the right to vote local taxes. The village assemblies are composed only of heads of houses.

COMMUNAL ASSEMBLIES OF WOMEN.

Under this denomination widows or women temporarily deprived of their husbands may take their place. In the sterile regions of the north, where the men go to seek work afar, the communal assemblies will sometimes consist entirely of women who represent the heads of the house and take upon their shoulders the deliberation of all communal interests.

THE BEAUTY OF AMERICAN WOMEN. THE first place in the Cosmopolitan is given to an illustrated article by N. E. W. Sherwood on "Beauty." The writer, after remarking that beauty has done much to disturb the eighteen Christian centuries, and that not even dynamite has done more to disintegrate and to destroy this immense power, proceeds to describe the famous beauties of the old masters and of modern painters. Having done this, we are assured that the "combination of all beauty of all the ages is now seen in the American woman, who is, curiously enough, a composite photograph of all these various types,” apparently for the following reasons:

We have preserved the Puritan model, the beautiful and lovable woman in the cold, remorseless Plymouth Rock landscape of Boughton and Hawthorne. We find neither foolish sports, pagan imagery, radiant pleasure, nor brilliant cavaliers in those immortal works; but a girl walks by the sad seawaves who is all these, and more. She fills the calm New England meadow with her youth and delicious beauty. The silence, the cold, the renunciation, the self-discipline, the joylessness, the unconquerable will of the Puritan is there' but he cannot banish the beauty. Priscilla extends her white hand, saying, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" and Arcadia comes again.

It is now, fortunately, the fashion to allow girls to live in the open air, to play games which were formerly called hoidenish, to train themselves through gymnastics with scientific attention and regularity. They may take as much exercise as they like, and they can ride 'cross-country. They stand straight on their feet like soldiers, without their stiffness, and they have fallen instinctively into a style of dress which recognises the place of the waist in the human figure. The beauty of to-day does not tie her waist-belt five inches too tight; she needs all her muscles for lawn-tennis, and she does not overtax her spine. The doctors have cut off the heels of her slippers, and her pretty foot has its chance. We need to take no credit to ourselves for the beauty of our women-we need not plume ourselves on this gratifying fact. We can only legitimately be grateful for this accident of race or the mixture of races, climate, we do not know what. The fact remains, and we can only hope that good living and high thinking may continue to result in the beauty of woman.

IN the Young Man this month there is an interview with Professor Drummond on the subject of Boys' Brigades, a movement with which the Professor is actively identified. He does not admit that there is much in the objection often made that the Brigades tend to develop a barbaric and militant spirit. The officials, he says, never encourage the fighting instinct. They simply take the love of military organisation and drill, which are natural to the boys, and turn them to higher uses. They take the old form and put into it a new spirit, stopping at the drill and accoutrements.

SOME NATIONAL SONGS.

GERMANY, PRUSSIA, THURINGIA, AMERICA.

A WRITER in a recent number of the Chorgesung compares the German Volkslied, or song of the people, to a Sweet-scented tender blossom nestling among moss, and no one will deny that in this particular realm of poetry and music the German nation occupies a foremost place. The Chorgesang has given a brief history of the German Lied. The Preussische Jahrbücher for August also contains an interesting study of the German Volkslied by Professor Carl Voretzsch.

THE GERMAN LIED.

From the days of Tacitus, the Germans, says the writer in the Chorgesang, honoured in song the noble deeds of their heroes, but it was not till the livelier lyrics of Provence had found their way into Germany that the Volkslied proper can be said to have come into existence. It won the hearts of the people at once, however, and it was not long before the peasant, the shepherd, the huntsman, the sailor, the wanderer, each came to have his own songs in which to celebrate the pleasures and bewail the pains of his calling. The mourner, too, turned to the song for comfort and consolation, while the devout found in it the happiest means of expression for his aspirations and his prayers to the throne of the Eternal. Thus each singer felt that the joy and the sorrow of his song were his own joy and his own sorrow, and hence, also, the abundance of this poetry and the great variety of its contents and moods. There is, in fact, not a human emotion that is not depicted in the German Lied.

LOVE SONGS.

In these songs the expressions of love are naturally among the most tender-from innocence to the trembling heart that has been disappointed and deceived. singer will express in gentle whispers his longing for his The chosen one; he will murmur notes of dull despair over faithless love; he will praise beauty, the blue eyes, and "rosy cheeks red as the wine"; he will call his beloved my thought by day and night," "my light, my sun," or "my soul, my flesh and blood." Sometimes, indeed, he compares her to the flowers-the red rose, the white lily, the forget-me-not.

AUF WIEDERSEHEN !

More pathetic is he at the bitter hour of parting and during absence. He cannot go forth on his wanderings without looking back to get a last glimpse of his love and when he is far away, he recalls the last evening with her who must now be working alone in the stillness of her little chamber; he stands at the window by moonshine and laments the distance between them, and a longing for home goes out in his song. He would fly back, had he but wings; no hour passes in the night that his thoughts are not of the object of his heart; but when he finally does return, his mood is changed, and it is "with a wreath of gay flowers in his hat and his staff in his hand" that he sounds his new note of triumph to smiling Heaven," which has restored him in safety to "his treasure."

The song does not always tell us of such a joyful meeting, however. When "Herr Ulrich" returns from the

Wars

singing till forest and field echo with his song," he is interrupted by the melancholy tolling of the church bell, and he meets a funeral procession wending its way to the grave with his beloved. "When he lifts the coffinlid and the wreath which conceals the face of his Annelis, he utters not a syllable, for his heart is broken with a yearning sorrow, Saddest of all is the sorrow of the returning lover at breach of faith during his absence.

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He wanders through the meadows plucking the flowers,
and moans, 66
Were she only dead! I could put a wreath
on her grave;" or, "How I should like to die, then all
would be still and at rest!"

SCHUBERT AND THE LIED.

Space forbids more than reference to the songs of May, spring and summer, or to the charming melodies composed by Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and many other great masters for the nature-songs of the people. But mention may be made here of an article on Franz Schubert which Antonin Dvorák has contributed to the Century for July, as one of the series of Great Composers Written by Themselves. According to the Bohemian master, Schubert in the Lied is not only the first in point of time, but no one has ever surpassed him. With the Lied, he created a new epoch, as Bach did with the piano, and Haydn with the orchestra. All other song-writers have followed in his footsteps, all are his pupils, and it is to his rich treasure of songs that we owe, as a heritage, the beautiful songs of such masters as Schumann, Franz, and Brahms. Schubert composed and accompanied, and Vogl, the famous tenor, interpreted and was lionized. Thus it came about that these songs were gradually made familiar in Viennese circles; but little did the Viennese think that what they heard was to create a new era in music.

THE PRUSSIAN NATIONAL HYMN.

What a strange power slumbers in the Volkslied and its music! How it can elevate the mind, touch the heart, and kindle in the soul a love for the noble! How, too, when it sings of right and freedom, king and country, it will inspire the people with courage and patriotism! And no song is more capable of this than the Prussian National Hymn, anent which the Daheim furnishes some interesting information.

On December 17th last this well-known song celebrated the centenary of its publication. It was on the return to the Prussian capital of Fieldmarshal Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, after his successful engagements with the French at Pirmasens and Kaiserslautern in Bavaria, that there appeared in the Spenersche Zeitung of December 17th, 1793, a poem entitled "Berliner Volksgesang." It was signed "Sr." and had " Heil Dir im Siegerkranz!” as the opening words. The poem had been sent to the paper by Dr. Balthasar Gerhard Schumacher, who was in the habit of signing his Latin translations "Sutor" or "Sr.," but he was not the writer.

THE QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP.

The real author was a German Protestant clergyman, Heinrich Harries (1767-1802), and the hymn appeared in its original form in the Flensburger Wochenblatt of January 27th, 1790, as a "Song for the Danish 1873, Dr. Ochmann took up the question of authorship Subjects to Sing on the Birthday of Their King." In and established Harries's claims, while Dr. Wolfram succeeded in proving that Schumacher, at any rate, was not the original writer. The last two verses of Harries's song had reference to Danish affairs, and were therefore omitted by Schumacher, but in 1801 Schumacher published another version, also adding two verses, and the song in its newer form the melody arranged for four voices by Hurka. The was published with Daheim of December 16th, 1893, gives Schumacher's two versions; and on April 21st, 1894, returns to the subject, and adds the first five verses of Harries's poem. Verses two and three are exactly identical with the corresponding verses of Schumacher, and the similarity between the two poets in the remaining

parts proves conclusively enough that Schumacher, in his altered version, was only printing the work of an earlier imitator of our "God Save the King!" Except in the melody and the rhythm, "Heil Dir im Siegerkranz!" has nothing in common with the English "God Save the King;" and we now see that originally it was not delicate 1 to the Prussian ruler, but was written in honour of a Danish sovereign.

THE MELODY.

The

More curious is the story of the melody, about which - the Daheim of June 9 has an interesting note. writer refers to a volume published at Paris, and bearing the title "Souvenirs de la Marquise de Créquy de 1710 à 1803." It contains a strange declaration made by three old ladies of the convent of Saint Cyr. The document, which was signed on September 19, 1819, is quoted in full. It sets forth that the three undersigned have been requested to write down what they know of an old motet, which is generally regarded as an English melody. The said melody, they continue, is the same as that which they had often heard in their community, where it had been preserved traditionally since the days of Louis XIV., the founder of the convent. It was composed by Baptiste Lully, and at the convent it was the custom for all the girls to sing it in unison every time Louis XIV. visited the chapel. It has also been sung on the occasion of a visit from Louis XVI. and his queen in 1779, and every one in the house was familiar with the song and the music. The ladies are quite certain that the melody is exactly the same as that which is called English. As to the words, they state that they have always been instructed that Madame de Brinon, a principal of the convent, wrote them, and that the poem dates from the time of Louis XIV. The text runs :

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TWO THURINGIAN VOLKSLIEDER.

"Der

The German wanderers' songs and travellers' songs are almost unique. Elise Polko, in a recent number of the Gartenlaube, tells a touching story in connection with Der Wanderer" and "Ach, wie ist's möglich," two Thuringian songs known all the world over. Wanderer" was composed in 1837 by Friedrich Brückner, father of Oskar Brückner, the 'cellist, and "Ach, wie ist's möglich" was the composition of Brückner's friend, Kantor Johann Ludwig Böhner, both of Erfurt.

In May, 1849, Wagner had to make his escape from Dresden, and he arrived at Erfurt on his way to Paris, to be conducted across the frontier by Brückner and Böhner. As he was being accompanied through the streets in the moonlight, he stopped suddenly to listen

to some female voices singing " Ach, wie ist's möglich," and to the horror of his friends would not budge till he had heard the last note. "I know the melody," he said. "It is sung everywhere. Let me hear every line. What a beautiful parting song! I wish I had composed it!" As he took his seat in the close vehicle that was waiting impatiently to take him further on his journey, a soft voice arted "The Wanderer":

Wenn ich den Wandrer frage:
Wo willst du hin?-

and all joined in the refrain:---
Nach Hause, nach Hause!

But at the last line:

Hab' keine Heimat mehr!

a choking voice called out " Da capo"! Then the horses started, and as the party passed out into the moonlight, and that lament "Hab' keine Heimat mehr!" (I have no home now!) became fainter and fainter, the lonely fugitive buried his face in the cushions and wept bitterly.

THE CANOPY SONG.

Very different is the inerry Kanapee-Lied, whose history Max Friedländer endeavours to trace in No. 2 of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. Few German popular songs, he says, have attained such a venerable age or enjoyed such wide popularity. Its survival is entirely due to oral transmission, for it is not included in any of the present collections of national songs, nor has it been printed in any Commers-book during the last century. Wittekind has imitated the metre in his Krambambuli-Lied (1745), and Koromandel in his Doris and Dorothee. Till the middle of our century the melody of the Kanapee-Lied was identical with that of the Krambambuli-Lied, but a few decades ago the Kanapee-Lied assumed a new form, and was set to a new melody.

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Those of England, Russia, and Austria are based upon a sentimental loyalty, long outgrown by this agrarian and practical age. The Star-Spangled Banner," while it is animated, patriotic, defiant, neither cringes nor boasts; it is as national in its spirit as it is adequate in the expression of that spirit.

Francis Scott Key, the author, was a practising lawyer in Washington who had a liking for the military profession, and who therefore became aide-de-camp to General Smith. It was during the British invasion, in 1814, that the famous song was written. Key, who had been taken prisoner by the British, watched from an enemy's ship the attack on Baltimore. The British, thinking themselves safe, avoided Fort McHenry, but in doing so fell under the guns of the Lazaretto on the opposite side of the channel. In the long night which followed, Key could learn nothing of the fortunes of the fight; but in the morning, when he was straining his eyes to see which flag floated over the ramparts, he was able to discern dimly the American flag still proudly defiant, and in that supreme moment was written "The Star-Spangled Banner."

THE Gentleman's Magazine for August has an article on "Harvest Songs," by Miss L. A. Smith.

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