towns like Hainburg or Eisenstadt it is of course more frequent still. There is no need to remind the reader that this is precisely the region occupied, since the sixteenth century, by the Slavonic immigrants. Thirdly, the home of the entire Haydn family is situated at the centre of the district in question. Caspar was born within sight of the Hainburg walls, Thomas lived and died as a burgher of that town, Mathias, after a brief period of travel, settled at Rohrau some ten miles away, and the most adventurous of his brothers wandered no further afield than Frankenmarkt or Ungarisch-Altenburg. It fits well enough with this home-keeping temper that Joseph Haydn should have spent more than threescore and ten years of his life inside a thirty mile radius from his native place. [15] Dr. Pohl gives fourteen variants, and even his list is not exhaustive. There are at least six in documents relating to the composer himself. See Appendix G. [16] See the announcement of “Alexander’s Feast” (Vienna, 1812) preserved in the Gesellschaft library. Carpani spells the name Hendl. On the father’s side, then, Haydn would seem to belong to the Slavonic race among whom he lived and worked.[17] Again, his mother was a native of Rohrau, in her day a distinctively Croatian village,[18] and her maiden name of Koller—a _vox nihili_ in German—is plausibly regarded by Dr. Kuhač as a phonetic variant of the Croatian Kolar “wheelwright.”[19] Everything that we know about his look and character favour the supposition of Slavonic descent. The lean ugly kindly face with high cheek-bones, long nose, and broad prominent under lip, the keen grey eyes softened by a twinkle of humour, the thin wiry figure, the strong nervous hands; all these and their analogues may be seen to-day in any village where Slavonic blood is still pure; and though of course they afford no argument in themselves, they add a touch of corroborative evidence which is worth noting. To the same cause may be traced that intense love of sport which has left his name as a proverb at Eisenstadt[20]; and something, too, of the conviviality which made him say that his best evenings were those spent with his comrades at the “Engel.” His talk, like his music, was full of that obvious fun which raises a laugh by a sudden touch of the unexpected; so are hundreds of Croatian ballads and aphorisms.[21] The humour is sometimes primitive, as when a Croat will tell you, “It is as true as that two and two make seven”; sometimes it reaches a more respectable level, as the gibe at the Bosnian Brethren, “who were ordered to abstain from something in Lent, and therefore took no water in their wine.” But good, bad, or indifferent, it marks a distinctive type of peasant character; and in remembering that Haydn was a genius we need not forget that he was a peasant. The same holds good, too, of his religious feeling. It is not without significance that we may turn