known to have existed in Pressburg and which bear the same meaning; while the family of Liszt, also claimed by Dr. Kuhač,[14] may have been Slavonic in origin, though by the time of the great pianist the Magyar element had predominated for about a century. At any rate there can be no reasonable doubt as to the Slavonic origin of Tartini, Dragonetti, Giornovichi, Zingarelli, and many other of Haydn’s contemporaries. There may have been in them some intermixture of race, but the parent stock was Croatian. [12] He called himself successively Abel, Ebel, Ibel, and Eibel. But his patrons always moved a stage in advance, even completing the circle by pronouncing the diphthong as it is pronounced in the word “eight.” [13] For a list of such adaptations see Appendix F. [14] Josip Haydn, p. 16. See note to Appendix E. We cannot, then, assert that there is any antecedent improbability in assigning Haydn to the Croats. They are a musical people, they formed the chief population of the district where he was born, they have a fair claim to other great musicians of his time. It follows that we should discuss the biographical evidence, and see what is to be made out of the record of Haydn’s family. And here attention should be called to three points. First, that the name Hajden or Hajdin (with its derivative Hajdenić, Hajdinović, &c.) is of common occurrence throughout Croatia, and, in days when spelling was roughly phonetic, may easily have appeared in Austrian official documents as Haiden or Hayden, forms by which its pronunciation is exactly represented. Now among all the variants assumed by the name of the composer’s family,[15] these two are the most frequent and the most authoritative. His great-grandfather—the first member of the house who can be traced—appears in the Hainburg register as Caspar Haiden; his grandfather, once by obvious error called Thomas Hayrn, is usually Hayden elsewhere, the contemporary monuments at Rohrau give Mathias Haiden as the name of his father and Josephus Hayden as his own. He himself seems to have used the dissyllabic form up to January, 1762, when he signs for salary at Eisenstadt “Giuseppe Hayden”; in the February of the same year he changes to the signature “Joseph Haydn” which he afterwards habitually adopted. Even then the majority of documents relating to him are conservative enough to retain the earlier orthography, and the monument in Count Harrach’s park, which bears the name Josephus Hayden, was erected as late as 1794. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Haiden or Hayden was the family name, shortened to suit the Viennese convention, as for the same reason Händel used to be shortened to Händl.[16] Secondly, the name, in one or other of its variants, is widely spread over the whole district from Wiener-Neustadt to Oedenburg. Dr. Pohl found it in some ten or a dozen villages, many of which are claimed by Dr. Kuhač as Croatian, and in the country