dinner or other festival, when this song is
sung; to note how they start to their feet,
how they join their hands in a kind of
electrical chain, as they take part in the
chorus, and to observe what fiery patriotism
flashes from their eyes as the well-
remembered notes reverberate through their hall
of meeting. The song is national in the
best sense of the word, and worth who
shall say what it is not worth in the
encouragement of kindly feeling and
harmless enjoyment? How much of the great
fame of Burns rests upon it, it is difficult to
say. Even if he did not actually write it,
he brought it into the world, and that is
renown enough for anybody.

The next and last song, of which mention
has been made, is the famous Marseillaise of
the French. The authorship both of the
poetry and the music of this stormy petrel
of song, is claimed for Rouget de Lisle, a
lieutenant in the French Revolutionary
army, in the days when the ragged and
foot-sore soldiers of the Republic were first
beginning to dream of conquering Europe.
The claim to the authorship of the poetry
seems to be well established, but not so the
claim to the noble, half pathetic, half defiant,
and wholly martial and inspiriting melody.
No history of the French Revolution is
complete without a history of this song,
which did so much to inflame and direct it.
"Luckiest musical composition ever
promulgated," says picturesque and earnest
Mr. Carlyle, "the sound of which will make
the blood tingle in men's veins. Whole
armies and assemblages will sing it, with
eyes weeping and burning, with hearts
defiant of death, despot, and devil." The less
picturesque, the less earnest, and the less
accurate Alphonse Delamartine has
inserted in his History of the Girondists an
episodical narrative of the origin of this
song, which is amusing enough, but which
is transparently apocryphal. Lieutenant
(afterwards Colonel) Rouget de Lisle, being
in garrison at Strasbourg, in 1792, resided
with, or was billeted upon, the mayor of that
city, one Dietrick. It was a time of public
scarcity, and even the family of the wealthy
mayor could not always procure enough
to eat and drink. " One day," says M.
Delamartine, " when there was only some
coarse bread and bacon upon the table,
Dietrick, looking with calm sadness at
De Lisle, said to him, ' Plenty is not to
be seen at our feasts; but what matter if
enthusiasm is not wanting at our civic fêtes,
and courage in our soldiers' hearts?  I
have still one bottle of wine left in my
cellar. Bring it,' he said, addressing one
of his daughters, 'and we will drink to
liberty and our country! ' " Out of that
one bottle, shared between M. Dietrick and
Lieutenant De Lisle—for it does not appear
that any of the young ladies partook of the
wine—grew, if we are to believe M.
Delamartine, the world-renowned song of La
Marseillaise. Indeed, in M. Delamartine's
opinion, M. Dietrick. intended that an
immortal song should be born, and that
it should be inspired by the last bottle; for
he said, when ordering the precious flask to
be brought, " Strasbourg is shortly to have
a patriotic ceremony, and De Lisle must be
inspired by these last drops to produce one
of those hymns which convey to the soul of
the people the enthusiasm which suggested
it." The wine must have been of the
strangest, as well as of the strongest, to
have produced the effects narrated. When
the bottle was exhausted, "it was
midnight," says M. Delamartine, "and very cold.
De Lisle was a dreamer; his heart was
moved, his head heated. The cold seized
him, and he went staggering to his lonely
chamber, endeavouring by degrees to find
inspiration in the palpitations of his citizen
heart." The poet, it appears, had a small
clavichord in his chamber, and composed the
tune on that instrument, at the same time
that he composed the words of his hymn.
At last, " overcome by the divine inspiration"
[not by the half bottle], "his head
fell sleeping on his instrument, and he did
not awake till daybreak. The song of the
previous day returned to his memory with
difficulty, like the recollections of a dream.
He wrote it down, and then ran to
Dietrick." He found the mayor walking in the
garden, his wife and daughters not having
yet come to breakfast, and read the verses
to him. Dietrick aroused the family, and,
his enthusiasm still growing, called in some
musical neighbours to hear the piece
performed. " At the first verse," says M.
Delamartine, quite gravely, and with a
delicious naïveté, " all countenances turned
pale; at the second, tears flowed; at the
last, enthusiasm burst forth. The hymn of
the country was found. Alas! it was
destined to be the hymn of Terror!"

This is but a silly story, though intended
to be romantic. Half bottles of French
wine do not usually produce such effects
even on poets; and men who stagger to
bed to fall asleep over their own poetry and
music on cold winter nights do not usually
produce such finished and admirable
performances as the poetry and the music