to the facts, would do well to make sure at the outset that the facts have been correctly observed. The subject of the present essay is one of the most remarkable instances of such misattribution. From the time of Carpani to that of Dr. Nohl, Haydn’s biographers have been unanimous in describing him as a German, born, as everybody knows, in Lower Austria, speaking German as his native language, Teutonic in race, in character, in surroundings. Yet the more we study him the more impossible it becomes to regard his music as the work of a Teuton. It is undoubtedly affected by his education and circumstances, by the early study of Emanuel Bach, and the subsequent intercourse with Mozart, but when we penetrate to the essential spirit of the man himself we find that its inherent characteristics are no more German than they are Italian or French. Haydn’s sentiment is of a kind without analogue among German Composers—mobile, nervous, sensitive, a little shallow it may be, but as pure and transparent as a mountain stream. His humour is a quality in which he stands almost alone; it differs totally from the wit of Mozart, or the grim jesting of Beethoven; it is quaint and playful, rippling over the whole surface of the page, and equally removed from satire and epigram. Again, he has less breadth and stateliness than belong to the German temper, but he has far more versatility. He was the most daring of pioneers, the most hazardous of experimentalists, and, what is more noticeable, his experiments are rather the natural outcome of a restless and vivid imagination than the efforts of a deliberate and conscious reform. From the external side, too, the same contrast is apparent. The shapes of his melodic phrases are not those of the German folksong; his rhythms are far more numerous and varied; his metres are often strange and unfamiliar. Throughout Western Europe the four-bar line has almost uniformly been taken as the unit of measurement, carrying with it the corresponding stanza of eight or sixteen or thirty-two. In a hundred German or English folksongs it will be strange if a single exception can be found: in a hundred melodies from Haydn’s quartets it will be strange if the exceptions are not as frequent as the instances. In a word, his range of stanza is far wider than that known to the Germany of his day, and many of his most characteristic tunes belong to another language and another scheme of versification.