Considering the influence which the principal town of a country usually exercises upon the taste of the rural population, a few remarks relating to the cultivation of music in Strassburg may find here a place. Strassburg possesses, indeed, valuable relics illustrative of the history of music as well as of the other fine arts. Unfortunately, several of these treasures were injured at the recent bombardment. The town library, which was burnt, contained some valuable musical manuscripts; for instance, the _Gesellschaftsbuch der Meisters‰nger_ from the year 1490 to 1768, and an historic treatise on the music and the _Meisters‰nger_ of Strassburg written in the year 1598, by M. Cyriacus Spangenberg. To antiquarians who deplore the loss of these relics it may afford consolation to know that the town library of Colmar, in Alsace, possesses a manuscript collection of more than 1,000 old Minne-songs and Meister-songs, which originally belonged to the guild of shoemakers of Colmar. It must be remembered that in the beginning of the fourteenth century, after the _Minnes‰nger_ of the Middle Ages, like the old chivalry with which they were associated, had become obsolete, there sprang up in Germany a corporation of poets and singers constituted of citizens, and known as the Meisters‰nger. Strassburg was one of the first among the German towns in which the Meisters‰nger flourished. An old sculpture of a Meisters‰nger, life-size, placed under the celebrated organ of the cathedral, testifies to the popular esteem enjoyed by this corporation. The town library possessed two curious oil-paintings on panel, dating from about the year 1600, which belonged to the Meisters‰nger of Strassburg, who used to place them one at each side of the entrance to their hall of assembly. A collection of antiquated musical instruments, which, probably, originally belonged to the Meisters‰nger, was formerly in a public building called Pfenningthurm, from which, in the year 1745, it was removed to the town library, where it was reduced to ashes.